#(this is to say in high fantasy books where racism is not a central plot point bc i recognize that it can be)

[44whispers]

i honestly think that authors who write high fantasy books and STILL keep the "real life accurate racism" in it are fucking weirdos

[ladyloveandjustice]

My favorite Manga and Graphic Novels I Read in 2022

I read 54 different manga and graphic novel series in 2022 (you can see them here, from the beginning until the print novels start with Hench. I only included one from each series for my own weird reasons but I'm up to date on everything except Adachi and Shimamura and Prince Freya, which I dropped for now). You can also see my favorite novels of 2022 here! 

Here are my favorites!

Snapdragon by Kat Leyh

A young girl gets involved with a witch who has has lots of skeletons (animal and otherwise). I’ve always loved Leyh’s work, and this is her usual super queer fantasy that has everything I adore- cute art, cool witches, animal magic, older butch lesbians with eye patches, lovable characters and lots of sweetness.

SHWD by Sono.N

It’s refreshing to see a dark sci-fi yuri about incredibly ripped adult women fighting monsters, and it really pulls off the horror of the monsters well with some gripping action. The characters were pretty charming too and there was a lot of attention paid to the trauma of the situation.

However, it does have a 'character who looks like a child', which is not my favorite trope for a lot reasons. It bothers me a bit less than other series because the art style does not do cutesy. She just looked like a short adult. The reasoning for having her there was...interesting, I'm not sure where they'll go with that, but it's original, though potentially weird?

Anyway, I like what it's doing and I'm interested to see where this goes. I hope we continue to get a variety of yuri like this published over here!

The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This by Takashi Ikeda

Two ladies- 32-year-old anime screenwriter and 22-year-old newbie anime voice actress- live together and navigate their romantic relationship. It’s mostly done in short vignettes, but the central couple has a fun dynamic and the art is nice, and some plot threads slowly develop as the books go on. It’s a cozy read, and it’s nice to see the ups and downs of an adult relationship where they share living space. I also find the 32 year old attractive, to be honest, I’d date her.

Until I Met My Husband by Ryousuke Nanasaki, art by Yoshi Tsukizuki

An autobiographical story of the first religiously recognized gay marriage in Japan. It’s not super lengthy or meaty, but it’s a sweet read.

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

You might have heard of this book based on how it was banned in a lot of places, it’s simply an autobiographical story of growing up genderqueer. It’s a breezy read with some nice evocative art, and Kobabe is pretty relatable.

Nubia: Real One by L.L. McKinney, Art by Robin Smith

I read a bunch of the DC standalone YA offerings from the library this year and found most of them to be a let-down, but this was a good one. It follows a young Nubia, a black girl who discovers she’s an Amazon related to Wonder Woman herself, and uses her abilities to confront some very real dangers and injustices, while also struggling against racism and other forms of prejudice. Satisfying, solid YA.

Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? By Matt Fraction, Art by Steve Lieber

Another library read. A fun riff on the zaniness of Silver Age Jimmy Olsen comics with a healthy does of humor, it follows the bizarre life of Superman’s BFF as he tries to avoid assassination and does some viral YouTube videos .I especially liked the weird but sweet relationship Jimmy and Clark had in this, and the gentle dunking on Batman.

Run Away With Me, Girl by Battan

Maki’s girlfriend, Midori, broke up with her during her high school graduation, saying she had to “move on” to dating guys now that she was grown up. Ten years later, Maki runs into Midori and finds she’s in an abusive relationship with a man she’s engaged to after getting pregnant. Maki asks Midori to run away with her, but will she?

This is definitely a darker yuri- the abuse Midori faces escalates, and the dude she’s with is basically an incel- but it’s handling the subject matter well so far and I’m really interested to see where it goes. There’s been a notable amount of yuri lately that’s tackled the belief that love for other women is just a childish phase, but this is the first one I’ve seen that explores what happens to a woman who believes that and forces herself into a heterosexual relationship. The abuse Midori faces is not at all framed as her ‘just desserts’ or anything, but a tragic circumstance that happened to a woman who was desperate to fit in and not be alone. The art is also fantastic and distinctive. I really hope it sticks the landing!

She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat by Sakaomi Yuzaki

A slice-of-life foodie yuri manga! Nomoto cooks more than she can eat, and she notices her next-door neighbor is a big eater and invites her over. A very slowburn romance strikes up. I got interested in this because of the authors marriage equality activism, and it’s a cute read. It’s laid back and slow paced, but there are nice moments of realism that make it very grounded- the way the women talk about being mistreated at work, Nomoto complaining that all the fashion articles she look up talk about impressing men- it was relatable! I also liked that Kasuga is large and butch and doesn’t have to look conventionally ���cute’.

Cheer Up: Love and Pom-Poms by Crystal Fraiser

A cute YA about an acerbic young lesbian joining the cheer squad and repairing her relationship with her people-pleasing trans friend. It’s for a younger audience, but it’s a sweet romance with adorable art.

I Want to Be A Wall by Honami Shirono

I’m interested to see where this one goes. An aro-ace woman and a gay man in love with his (seemingly, so far) straight best friend enter a marriage of convenience. Yuriko’s obsessive BL fandom can get annoying, but it’s always refreshing to see the ace character represented and the manga is realistic about the struggles we face. I’m rooting for this one!

Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon by Shio Usui

A slow burn office lady romance, it’s just downright cute. It might be a little slowpaced for some but I enjoyed it!

Catch These Hands! by Murata

I’m a huge sucker for delinquent girls, so the story of two former delinquent girl rivals who meet again as adults, only for one to challenge each other to a fight with the condition that she’ll date her if she loses? Sign me up! This is, unfortunately, a little uneven- the second volume was kinda eh and introduced an annoying side character with some questionable tropes-but the third volume picked things up again and included a wonderfully absurd training montage. Though it starts with one of the women wanting to change and appear less like a delinquent and more ‘normal’, the clear message of the series is she doesn’t need to. If you don’t like any kind of violence, no matter how weird and divorced from reality, this isn’t for you though, as there is the whole challenge-to-a-fight thing, but it’s tongue in cheek and wacky enough I don’t mind.

Continuing favorites:

Witch Hat Atelier- Can't believe Witch Hat punched the 'funny anime pervert' trope to dust like it deserves, while also exploring and denouncing victim blaming in a genuinely affecting way. This manga is legendary. Also I'm very worried for everyone.

Yuri is My Job!- Really escalated wonderfully with it’s tangled web of relationships, rich backstories, and commentary on how people, especially queer people, often put on a performance. What IS the true self? One character’s commentary on how she wanted her work place to ‘like romance without the romance’ (a la class S) yet can’t suppress her true romantic fantasies was especially well-done. There’s also a character saying ‘friggin’ heteros’. The accurate representation we need, clearly. I just really enjoy this cast of characters.

Spy x Family (A Yor arc! Finally! And there’s just as much murder and mayhem as that should entail!), My Love Mix Up! (continues to be adorable), Yona of the Dawn (dramatic backstory reveals!), How Do We Relationship? (it’s really interesting to read a gay romance where the central relationship is acknowledged as not good for both of them and they try to move on), Delicious in Dungeon (the dungeon adventures are ramping up!), A Man and His Cat (more kitty cuteness), The Way of the House Husband (more hijinks), Bride’s Story (another volume of the beautiful historical epic! It’s been a while.), The Adventure Zone graphic novels (continue to be a lot fun with fantastic art), I Think Our Son is Gay (continues to be a sweet look at a mom supportive of her gay son), Monthly Girls Nozaki-Kun (I’ll always love these idiots) and My Wandering Warrior Existence by Kabi Nagata (another entry in Nagata’s moving autobiographical series about the struggles of mental illness, self reflection, and queer exploration).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiracy fantasy

When we talk about conspiratorialism, we tend to focus (naturally) on the content of the conspiracy. Not only are those stories entertainingly outlandish — they’re also the point of contact between conspiracists and the world.

If your mom is shouting about “Hollywood pedos,” it’s natural that you’ll end up discussing the relationship of this belief to observable reality. But while the content of conspiratorial beliefs gets lots of attention, we tend to neglect the significance of those beliefs.

To the extent that we consider why the beliefs exist and proliferate, the discussion rarely gets further than “irrational people have irrational beliefs.” This is a mistake. The stories we tell one another are a kind of Ouija board, with all our fingertips on the planchette.

The messages it spells out don’t describe external reality but they do reveal our internal, unspoken anxieties and aspirations.This is why we should read science fiction: not because it predicts the future, but because it diagnoses the present.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/meaningful-zombies/#oracles

Sf is an ever-mutating ecosystem of fears and hopes, and readers apply selective pressure to those organisms, extinguishing the ones that don’t capture the zeitgeist and elevating the ones that do, a co-evolution of our fantasies and our narratives.

http://locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html

This is why Alternate Reality Games are so central to their players’ lives. They’re a form of narrative co-creation, with the players throwing out theories and the game-masters actually changing the story to incorporate the best of them.

ARGs are an environment where your coolest and most deliciously scary ideas become reality. It’s a powerful way to galvanize collective action.

As anthropologist Biella Coleman writes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, it’s the organizing principal behind Anonymous.

Anon Ops begin life as victory announcement videos. If the vision of success captures enough Anons, they execute the op.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine

In other words, the degree to which a shared fantasy of victory compels its audience predicts whether the audience realizes its fantasy. Long before the alt-right, Anons were memeing ideas into existence (no coincidence, as both were incubated on 4chan).

On the Conspiracy Games and Counter-Games podcast, three left academics — Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou — analyze “conspiracy fantasies” (as opposed to conspiracies, e.g. the Big Lie behind the Iraq War) for what they reveal about late capitalism’s anxieties.

As leftists, they naturally focus on the relationship between material conditions and people’s behaviors and beliefs. This is an important part of the discourse on conspiratorialism that’s often missing from liberal and right-wing analysis.

Conspiracists aren’t just “irrational” nor are they just “racist.” They may be both of those things, but unless you look at material conditions, then the surges and retreats of conspiracism are mysterious phenomena, strange tides raised by unseen forces.

A decade ago, then-PM David Cameron — the architect of a brutal, authoritarian austerity — dismissed the Hackney Riots as “criminality pure and simple,” and demanded a ban on discussion of the relationship between austerity and unrest.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-riots-criminality-video

But without that discussion, there’s no explanation. Even if you believe that “criminality” is a thing that is latent within some or all of us, what explains a rise or fall in that criminality? Is it like pollen that alights upon some of us, turning us bad? Or the full moon?

Likewise the “conspiracists are just racists” or “they’re just deranged.” Without looking at the material world, there’s no explanation for why that racism suddenly became more (or less) important to how conspiracists live their lives.

We can’t talk about conspiratorialism without talking about material considerations, and we have to talk about the form and substance of the conspiratorial belief. The ARG-like structure of Qanon is a hugely important part of its popularity:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#adrian-hon

Memeing things into existence in a game-like way is hugely compelling. You can tell when a D&D game is hopping when the players and the DM start co-creating the story, with the DM slyly altering the dungeon and the NPCs to match the players’ super-cool theories.

A recent episode of the CGACG podcast present a mind-blowing analysis of the interplay of the material conditions, mythology and structure of Qanon. It’s a two-part interview with Wu Ming 1:

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-1?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-2?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

Wu Ming 1 is part of Bologna’s Wu Ming Collective, the successor to the 1990s Luther Bissett net-art collective. Bissett did many wild, weird things,including publishing “Q,” an internationally bestselling conspiratorial novel in 1999 (!!)

https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/what-is-the-wu-ming-foundation/

The plot of “Q” involves a high-level government official, privy to top-secret info about a state conspiracy. It closely mirrors Qanon beliefs, right down to a call for a Jan 6 uprising (!!!!). The major difference is that “Q” is set during the Protestant Reformation.

In the interview, Wu Ming 1 talks about the proliferation of conspiratorial, ARG-like 4chan hoaxes that predated Qanon, and hypothesizes that the original Q posts were plagiarized from the novel.

The strange experience of seeing a novel turn into a cult prompted Ming 1 to write “La Q di Qomplotto” (“The Q in Qonspiracy”), a book that defines and analyzes “conspiracy fantasies.”

https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-q-di-qomplotto/

Ming 1’s interview digs into this in some depth, including setting out criterial for distinguishing conspiracies from fantasies (for example, a conspiracy doesn’t go on forever, while a fantasy can imagine the Knights Templar running the world for centuries).

I was taken by Ming 1’s discussion of the role that “enchantment” plays in conspiratorialism — the feeling of being in a magical and wondrous (if also anxious and terrible) place. He says this is why “debunkers” fail — they’re like people who spoil a magic trick.

Ming 1 and the hosts talk about replacing the enchantment of conspiratorialism with a counter-enchantment, grounded not in the conspiratorialist’s oversimplification and essentialism, but in the wonder of reality.

Ming 1 analogizes his “counter-enchantment” to the “double-wow” method of Penn and Teller: first they blow you away with a trick, and then they blow you away with the cleverness by which it was accomplished.

He describes how the Luther Bissett collective performed a double-wow during Italy’s Satanic Panic, creating a hoax satanic heavy metal cult and a counter-cult, promulgating stories of their pitched battles, then revealing how they’d faked the whole thing.

The action was taken in solidarity with actual Bolognese heavy metal fans who’d been framed for imaginary Satanic “crimes.” Luther Bissett wanted to demonstrate how a panic could be created from nothing, to reveal the method behind the real hoax with a fake hoax.

The double-wow method reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ manuever in “The Magic of Reality,” his excellent children’s book about the virtues of the scientific world, revealing how the numinous wonder of faith is nothing compared to the wonder of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Reality

The idea that conspiratorialism is a leading indicator of capitalism’s anxieties is a powerful one, and it ties into other compelling accounts of conspiracy, like Anna Merlan’s REPUBLIC OF LIES, which discusses the importance of trauma to conspiratorial belief.

Like Ming 1, Merlan stresses the kernel of truth underpinning conspiracy fantasies — the real aerospace coverups that make UFO conspiracies plausible, the real pharmaceutical conspiracies to cover up harms from drugs that underpin anti-vax.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

In the podcast, Ming 1 and the hosts stress the importance of identifying and addressing the kernel of truth and the trauma it produces in any counter-conspiratorial work — that is, a successful counter-enchantment must address the material conditions behind the fantasy.

I really like this approach because of its empathy — its attempt to connect with the conditions that produce behaviors and beliefs, not to be confused with sympathy, which might excuse their toxic and hateful nature.

It reminds me a lot of Oh No Ross and Carrie, whose hosts have spent years joining cults and religions and digging into fringe practices and beliefs in an effort to understand them; they laugh a lot, but never AT their subjects.

https://ohnopodcast.com/

But Ming 1 brings something new to this discussion: an analysis of the role that novels have played in conspiracy fantasy formation: not just the plagiarizing of “Q” to make Qanon, but things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion plagiarizing Dumas.

The interview also brought to mind Edward Snowden’s recent inaugural blog-post, “Conspiracy: Theory and Practice,” which seeks to separate conspiracy practice (e.g. the NSA spying on everyone) from theories (what Ming 1 calls “fantasies”).

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

Snowden connects the feeling of powerlessness to the urge to explain the world through conspiracies, relating this to his experience of revealing one of the world’s most far-reaching real conspiracies, and then becoming the subject of innumerable conspiracy fantasies.

Snowden’s perspective is one that has heretofore been missing from conspiracy discourse — the perspective of someone who has been part of a real conspiracy and then the central subject of a constellation of bizarre and widespread conspiratorial beliefs.

These different works, focusing as they do on the character of conspiratorial beliefs, the nature of conspiratorial practice, and material conditions of conspiracists, comprise a richer analysis of our screwed-up discourse than, say, theories about “online radicalization.”

As I wrote in my 2020 book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” the “online radicalization” narrative requires that you accept Big Tech’s unsupported marketing claims about its power to bypass our critical thoughts at face value.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

Claims to be able to control our minds — whether made by Rasputin, Mesmer, pick-up artists, MK-ULTRA or NLP enthusiasts — always turn out to be cons (though sometimes the con artists are also conning themselves).

But there’s a much more plausible, less controversial set of powers that Big Tech possesses. By spying on us all the time, it can help scammers target people who are ready to hear conspiratorial explanations.

By monopolizing our discourse, it allows SEO scammers to create default answers to our questions. By locking us in, it can keep us using a platform even if the discourse there makes us angry and anxious.

And by corrupting our political process, it creates “kernels of truth” for conspiratorial beliefs.

As with Scooby Doo, the monster turns out to be a familiar villain in a fright mask: a monopolist whose abuses and impunity create the anxiety that make conspiracy plausible.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

When Harry Met Buffy

by Dan H

Thursday, 14 June 2007

Dan compares portrayals of childhood in the popular media. Or something.~

(This article contains spoilers for a TV series which everybody has seen, and a set of books which everybody has read. Just so you know.)

At some point during my university career, I had to make a choice between actually getting a decent degree and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Needless to say there was no competition, and I am now the proud owner of a 2.2 in Physics and a lot of information about Sunnydale.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the rails a bit in the later seasons. It went off the rails for a number of reasons - tensions among the cast and crew, Joss Whedon being distracted by other projects, Marti Noxon - but its biggest problem, in my opinion, was that it lost sight of its core metaphor.

The strength of Buffy seasons 1-3 was that it stuck to a very clear, very simple formula. You take a stock Teen Issue (I'm going out with a guy who isn't suitable, my mother is putting me under a lot of pressure, I'm trying to live up to my elder brother) and then give it a supernatural slant (I'm going out with a vampire, my mother is literally possessing my body, I've animated the dead body of my elder brother and am trying to build him a girlfriend out of corpse parts). That was the way it worked. It kept this formula more or less throughout series four and five, but it mixed up the formula a bit: Joyce's illness in series five is wholly mundane, and it's college life that causes Buffy's biggest problems in series four, not the cybernetic killing machine. Series six and seven went even further, making "Buffy never learned to live in the real world because she spent all of her time fighting monsters" a central theme, despite the fact that the "monsters" had always been placeholders for real-world issues.

To put it another way, the great strength of Buffy is that it tackles teenage concerns from a resolutely teenage perspective. When you're sixteen, after all, everything is the end of the world. Buffy's distorted, teenaged view of reality, where a bad breakup is an unimaginable horror and high school is doing its damnedest to kill you becomes literal reality. This works brilliantly for three series, and then they start to run into problems.

The thing is, Buffy grows up. The show covers seven years, and Joss felt that it was very important that she not stay sixteen forever.

The problem is that a big part of growing up is the development of your worldview. Learning that things don't really work the way you thought they did. Or, to put it another way, a big part of being twenty-two is realising what a pillock you were when you were sixteen.

But Buffy can't really do that, because she's a fictional character, and her sixteen-year-old worldview is the literal truth of the earlier series. Angel, her high-school boyfriend, really was the love of her life, and when things went wrong he actually lost his soul and started killing people. You can't get a sense of perspective on something like that. You can't look back on your youth and say "gosh, it seems so silly now to have worried about the Master rising and plunging the world into hell." Its early-season strengths become its late-season flaws. Buffy can never truly grow up, because she is trapped, forever, in a world where her teenage angst is physical reality.

Which brings me to Harry Potter.

Like Buffy, Harry Potter has a seven-year arc, over which his creator takes great pride in telling us that He Will Grow Up. And, like the nutrimatic machine, Harry's problems are Almost But Not Quite Totally Unlike Buffy's.

The Potter books are told exclusively from Harry's point of view: so much so that Harry has to spend half of each book skulking around under his invisibility cloak so he can hear all the plot-dumps Rowling needs to pass on to the reader. However, unlike Buffy, we don't follow Harry from a world inside his own head. We follow him around looking over his shoulder, but we are only observers. Buffy/Angel is convincing because, on some level, we feel what Buffy is feeling, and we are swept away in an overwhelming rush of teenage emotion. Harry/Ginny, on the other hand, feels lacklustre, because we see it from the outside, as two awkward teens fumbling through a parody of romance.

The Potter approach is not without its advantages. It makes the seven-year arc somewhat more consistent: we know from the start that it's Voldemort and the Death Eaters and the War in The Wizarding World which is important, and Harry's journey from two-dimensional eleven-year-old to two-dimensional-eighteen-year-old is essentially one of learning facts about his world. (On a tangent, it's interesting to note that Potter has a detailed, prewritten world with a large mythology, and Buffy doesn't).

In

an earlier article

, I compared the Potter books to the works of Enid Blyton and like Blyton, Rowling writes about children from the outside. She writes about childhood in hindsight, and seems to view it with a mixture of sentimentality and contempt. Your school days, she seems to say, were the most wonderful days of your life, because you were too dumb to realise how crappy the world really was.

All of this would be fair enough, a lot of Children's books do basically work like that: the hero starts out as a picture of youth and innocence, only to have it stripped away by exposure to Real World Issues. It's the To Kill a Mockingbird school of children's fiction: the child gradually learns about the complexities of the real world, progressing from a nave worldview to a sophisticated one over the course of the story. His Dark Materials follows a similar formula. The problem with Potter is that the "real world" of the Potterverse is so utterly childish. Harry is growing up into a world where everybody is still obsessed with school, where the only person that He Who Must Not Be Named is afraid of is his old teacher, where three fifteen year old kids competing in a school sporting event is international news.

So Harry's journey is that of a child growing up and learning about the world, but what he learns is that there is no world outside of Hogwarts. Unlike Buffy, whose later-season problems are the result of legitimate creative decisions, Harry's late-series implausibility is a result of his inhabiting a world which is poorly conceived and badly realised.

Harry Potter is often praised for dealing with difficult real-world themes, like death and racism. It doesn't. It's true that people die in the books, but they do so as a result of magical, fantasy violence, which simply doesn't capture the experience of bereavement in a meaningful way. Quite a lot of children, reading Harry Potter, might well have lost a friend or family member due to illness, old age, or accident. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that none of them have had anybody they care about killed by evil wizards. The deaths in Harry Potter are part of the fantasy, they're no more real than chocolate frogs and Quiddich.

Then there's the "racism". Wizardry apparently runs in families, and those who don't come from a wizarding line get called "mudbloods". There's some half-baked talk of killing the mudbloods, but nobody ever does anything about it, and it's only ever evil people that even think like that. That isn't confronting the issue of racism, that's using a cheap metaphor for racism as another way to demonstrate how evil your villains are. It is a metaphor, furthermore, which only has any impact if your audience already recognises it - we know that it's wrong for Draco to call Hermione a mudblood, because it's "like racism". It's not using a fantasy world to explore a real world issue, it's using a real world issue to explore a fantasy world.

And this, I think, is why I think Buffy succeeds and Potter - despite sales figures - ultimately fails. Buffy has its metaphors screwed on right. Well, apart from that bit with the crackhouse in series six. Buffy takes issues that its audience will be highly familiar with (academic pressure, romantic disaster, teenage insecurity) and uses the language of the supernatural to explore them in an emotionally believable way. Harry Potter, on the other hand uses real-world issues (racism, slavery, death) as a cheap way to add colour to an otherwise unconvincing fantasy world.

In Sunnydale, Joss Whedon created a world which reflects the mind of a young girl growing up in America, and he succeeded admirably. In Hogwarts, Joanne Rowling attempted to create a dark, believable world for a young boy to grow up in, and she failed dismally.Themes:

J.K. Rowling

,

Books

,

TV & Movies

,

Young Adult / Children

,

Whedonverse

~

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Rami

at 09:00 on 2007-06-15Hmmm... that's interesting. I'm one of the few people who's neither read Harry (though I've seen one of the films) nor watched Buffy (not consistently, at least), but I'm inclined to agree that Whedon's way of presenting his world is deeper and more meaningful though perhaps less immediately obvious. Heck, I didn't appreciate Whedon at all until I saw Firefly...

[aion-rsa]

The Best TV Shows of 2020

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Some year, eh? 

We’re often poetic about TV around these parts. It’s no secret that we like to sing its praises as a powerful, restorative, and maybe sometimes therapeutic medium. But during a dangerous, confusing year, delving into the many ways that TV “kept us sane” or whatever feels reductive. 

What we can say, however, is this: TV was around this year. And that’s no small feat as not every other medium was so lucky. Concerts and other live performances were canceled. The movie-going experience was upended (perhaps permanently), and even curling up with a nice book at a coffee shop was no longer an option for much of the year. The TV production schedule may have been disrupted, but for the most part, the television machine chugged along, providing us with a diverse (and often overwhelming) number of truly excellent options to take in.

This year we want to honor the best of those TV shows – not for any particular reason other than that it’s fun to do and we’ve all earned some year-end distractions. We had our staff vote on their favorite series, polled you the reader as well, then crunched all the numbers in an intensely complicated propriety equation (not really) to determine our winners. 

Please enjoy our choices for the 25 Best TV Shows of 2020. 

25. How To with John Wilson

How To with John Wilson is the heir to Nathan For You’s throne, which seems obvious considering the series boasts Nathan Fielder as an executive producer, but the new HBO series shares much of the fiercely beloved former Comedy Central series’ DNA. While Nathan For You used helping businesses as a jumping off point to explore social interactions and the funny, insane things that people may say or do if you point a camera in their face, How To with John Wilson purports to explain how to perform simple tasks like making small talk or splitting a check, but mostly showcases how beautiful, ugly, life-affirming, and odd life in New York City can be. It’s a difficult show to explain, but it uses dry narration and quick documentary-style footage to create laugh out loud set-ups and punchlines, and digresses into some of the most poignant, and “WTF” moments found in a comedy series. You may not learn much, but you’ll laugh a lot. 

– Nick Harley

24. The Plot Against America

TV writing geniuses David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire, The Deuce) are masters of subtlety. Their many shows, several of which are among the best in TV history, know how to conquer small moments en route to a bigger, oft devastating picture. During these very unsubtle times then, how could they possibly adapt Philip Roth’s equally unsubtle book about creeping fascism in America, The Plot Against America? The answer, as it turns out, is with the same gentle touch and keen understanding of the human condition as they always employ.

Like Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America picks up in an alternate version of the American 1940s, where real life aviation hero and Nazi-sympathizing populist Charles Lindbergh is elected president. The show then follows the working class Jewish Levin family as they deal with the fallout. Simon and Burns’ subtle touch works uncommonly well here. The Plot Against America’s six episodes are in many ways about how gradually and imperceptibly things can get worse until one’s home is no longer recognizable. For obvious reasons, the series resonated this year but its ability to summon creeping dread would have played well just about any time. 

– Alec Bojalad

23. Lovecraft Country

A sprawling anthology with an overarching fable set in the depths of Jim Crow America in the 1950s, Lovecraft Country was an epic, political, sometimes gory, always ambitious sci-fi horror unlike anything else in 2020. Following the journey of Atticus (Jonathan Majors), Leti (Jurnee Smollett), and Atticus’s uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) on a mission to find Atticus’s missing father, the story combines real life racist horror with supernatural creatures inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.

Each episode is both a standalone story and part of the whole, playing with different subgenres. Ep 3 “Holy Ghost” is a classic haunted house tale with a historical twist against a backdrop of neighborhood racism, ep 5 “A Strange Case” is an extraordinary body horror which explores the female experience, 6 “Meet Me in Daegu” introduces a character from Korean folklore, while ep 8 “I Am” is a sprawling afrofuturist sci-fi. Created by Misha Green, exec produced by Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams, this is glossy cinematic stuff with a terrific ensemble cast. Talk about bang for your buck.

– Rosie Fletcher

22. His Dark Materials

If season one of this fantasy adaptation was carefully laying the tracks, then season two is hurtling along them, whooping out of the window as it goes. The new episodes started from the high-point of the season one finale and kept climbing. The difference is in tone – this time it’s warmer, keying more successfully into its characters’ emotional lives. It’s bolder too, demonstrating confidence by stepping away from the books to add scenes, humor and modern updates as required.

Season two, adapted from the second book in Philip Pullman’s original trilogy, sees Lyra and Will cross worlds and forge a bond. Will undertakes his own hero’s journey, one involving Spectres, a magical knife and the father he’d long thought dead. The real star though, is Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter, a devilishly complex character into whose head this show is satisfyingly determined to get. 

Season two is an episode short, thanks to COVID-19, but we should be grateful it made it here on time at all. The real delight is all the talent and effort that’s gone into telling such a weird story, one that only gets weirder from hereon in…

– Louisa Mellor

21. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Season 5 of She-Ra was the show at its absolute best. Every restriction seemed to be lifted and it just let loose with all the joy, deepness, and big queer energy it had ever wanted to display. Bless it for that because it allowed the show to go out on the highest of notes. We’d be here all day if we listed all the fantastic plots this season and how everyone got a chance to shine but no moment stands out more than Catra and Adora kissing. 

It’s a moment queer fans had hoped for and were shocked it actually happened. Seeing two leads in a legacy property get to be not only confirmed queer but also kiss is still a rare sight and we can only hope it signals great change in animation going forward.  We’re sad to see She-Ra go but glad it got to end so perfectly. 

– Shamus Kelley

20. Pen15 

During the 2011 “Middle School” episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass interviews producer Alex Blumberg, who presents a radical new approach to education in America: get rid of middle school. Children’s bodies and brains are just simply too volatile in their preteen years to meaningfully learn anything in the years between elementary school and high school. Give them a break, then pick up and try again in a couple years.

It’s hard not to think of that interview when watching Hulu’s wonderful middle school comedy Pen15. Lead characters Maya (Maya Erskine) and Anna (Anna Konkle) are very rarely seen learning something in class or poring over their homework. And why would they be? There are boys to obsess over, school plays to audition for, and moments that will scar them forever to experience. 

Rarely has there ever been a more frank, honest, and hilarious exploration of the middle school years than Pen15. Much was made during the show’s first season about the adult Konkle and Erskine’s ability to portray their younger selves. And in season 2, they blend in so seamlessly that the novelty of the casting choice might never even occur to the viewer. 

– Alec Bojalad

19. I Hate Suzie

The last time playwright Lucy Prebble wrote a TV series for Billie Piper, it was 2007’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl. London-set, glamorous, sexy and funny, that was a distinctly twentysomething story. Over a decade later, Prebble and Piper reunited to do something different in I Hate Suzie; still funny, but rawer, more experimental, and probing all the ways that a thirtysomething woman’s identity – wife, mother, and in this case, celebrity – can be defined by everything except herself. 

Piper plays popstar-turned actor Suzie, whose life explodes when hacked photos of her cheating on her husband leak online. Suzie goes through the stages of grief in eight riotous half-hour episodes that experiment with form and genre. There’s drama. There’s satire. There’s singing and dancing. There’s Dexter Fletcher doing coke off a bare arse, and a whole-episode wank that explores the societal construction of female desire. It is, in modern parlance, a lot, in the most exhilarating and enriching way. These two had better not leave it another 10 years until their next collaboration. We demand more. 

– Louisa Mellor 

18. Rick and Morty

Did you hear? This guy turns himself into a pickle…a PICKLE! It’s wild. Every subsequent year that Rick and Morty airs, it gets harder to separate the “meme” of Rick and Morty from the show itself. Suppose that’s just what happens when a fanbase proves itself to be…uh, energetic, and the Merchandising Industrial Complex kicks itself into overdrive to produce some truly offensively bad Big Dog-style shirts. 

Removed from the meta of it all, Rick and Morty still churned out some great episodes of television in 2020. The back half of the series’ two-part season 4 all aired this year and there were real gems included among them. Though it proved to be divisive, “Never Ricking Morty” was certainly among the most structurally ambitious installments the show has ever attempted. Then there was just the sublimely hilarious “The Vat of Acid Episode,” which was enough to earn the show a Best Animated Series Emmy. 

– Alec Bojalad

17. Dark

Dark is already notable for reaching levels of popularity in the United States not often enjoyed by subtitled fare, but it also was afforded the rare opportunity to end on its own terms with its third season in 2020. Audiences fell in love with the generational stories of the families living around the nuclear power plant in Winden, Germany, marveling at casting choices for characters in their older or younger forms whose resemblances were spot on.

The time travel plot tied viewers’ brains into knots, but the desire to see an end to the apocalypse was made even deeper by the strong chemistry between Dark’s own Adam and Eve: Jonas and Martha. As the true source of the alternate timelines and causal loops became known, everything about the show’s reality was called into question, but the ending left a lingering question mark to entice fans to speculate long after the show had ended. 

– Michael Ahr

16. The Untamed

While The Untamed technically premiered in 2019, the Chinese xianxia drama was one of the escapist stories that most defined a year we all wanted to get as far away from as possible. Bursting onto the transformative fandom scene to come in ninth on Tumblr’s list of the most-discussed live action TV shows of 2020, the foreign-language fantasy series tells the story of supernatural flautist Wei Wuixan (Xiao Zhan) from his humble beginnings as a teen cultivator-in-training to his controversial role as a demonic cultivator war hero to his time as a masked detective after he is mysteriously brought back to life in a stranger’s body 13 years after his gruesome death. 

But, like any good melodrama, The Untamed is really all about the relationships. This is a complex emotional story about siblings and sects, honor and morality. At the heart of the interpersonal narrative is the epic romance between Wei Wuixan and his stoic swordsman boyfriend Lan Wangji (Wang Yibo). The Untamed is adapted from an explicitly queer web novel, but China’s anti-LGBTQ censorship laws require the series tell its love story via lingering gazes, clasped wrists, and declarations of undying devotion. The result is no less queer, as these canonical soulmates sacrifice everything but their fervid commitment to protect the innocent for one another. 

– Kayti Burt

15. The Haunting of Bly Manor

In 2018, Netflix shrieked its way into the spooky season game with the breakout hit The Haunting of Hill House. The streamer then afforded creator Mike Flanagan the opportunity to American Horror Story-ize his work into an anthology of his own, thus The Haunting series was born. In typical second child fashion, The Haunting of Bly Manor had a world of expectations to live up to, which included its often-adapted source material, primarily the novella Turn of The Screw by Henry James (or Hank Jim as we like to call him) among two other works. Flanagan, who’s a heavyweight in the horror genre at this point, again eschewed a direct remake for a loose adaptation with Bly Manor, a slow burn, but ultimately a deeply personal and satisfying tale of ghosts, both of the faced and faceless variety, intertwined with Gothic romance.

The returning players from the previous season, Victoria Pedretti (Dani), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Peter Quint), Henry Thomas (Henry Wingrave), Carla Gugino (The Storyteller), and Kate Siegel (a surprise character in an excellent episode 8), bring back some of the winning chemistry from Hill House. However it’s the newcomers to the series, T’Nia Miller as Hannah Grose the housekeeper, Amelia Eve as Jamie the gardener, and Rahul Kohli as Owen the cook, whose standout performances ground Flanagan’s headier concepts, like the series’ mesmerizing fifth episode. It’s through these characters that Bly Manor poignantly articulates how love can be as much of a burden as it is a blessing. Not long after your Bly Manor binge is complete, Flora’s line, “You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t. It’s a love story,” will crystallize the throughline Flanagan was gunning for. And if that line isn’t a lasting memory of the limited series, perhaps it’s Owen’s lucious mustache, the best on TV in 2020, that will live on. 

– Chris Longo

14. Ted Lasso

In a relentlessly dark year, Ted Lasso was one of the few rays of sunshine that warmed our hearts. Its title character is so pleasant and optimistic, he makes Leslie Knope look like a curmudgeon by comparison. Folksy, thoughtful, and almost aggressively friendly, Jason Sudeikis’s Lasso is hired to lead a struggling English Premier League team in a move of sabotage, but ends up charming the pants off of the squad and proving the power of positivity. 

The character is practically impossible not to like, and in a time of so much anxiety and frustration, it’s refreshing to spend time with someone like Ted. The title coach isn’t the only reason to watch; the show features well-crafted characters with satisfying individual arcs, comforting, yet well-executed sports movie tropes, and funny fish out of water culture clash moments. Ted Lasso is a breezy, low-effort experience that makes you feel good. What more could you ask for in 2020? 

– Nick Harley

13. The Umbrella Academy

The first season of The Umbrella Academy was already a stellar achievement in adapting the gloriously weird Gerard Way/Gabriel Bá graphic novels, but season 2 took the show to another level in 2020. The varied reactions of the superpowered family to being stranded in 1960s Dallas were extremely enlightening and made the characters even more enjoyable with all of their quirks, flaws, and emotional depth.

Of particular interest was the manner in which Allison strove to lead a normal life with a husband that loved her despite the difficulties of being Black in the segregated South and her determination not to use her powers. Fan favorite character Ben also received a noble and inspiring arc that led to a completely new role for him in season 3. Although there are plenty of mysteries remaining, the unfolding backstory leaves us always wanting more of The Umbrella Academy. 

– Michael Ahr

12. The Great

“Russia must be saved, and I with it.” An occasionally true story from The Favourite co-screenwriter Tony McNamara, The Great is a satirical look at the rise of Russian monarch Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning, getting a chance to show off her comedic chops), from her arrival from Prussia as a naive teen bride to her time plotting the death of her husband, Emperor Peter III (Nicholas Hoult, seemingly having the time of his career). The Great is cutting, clever, and hilarious, but, like The Favourite before it, its true secret weapon lies in its moments of earnest emotion. 

The Hulu series revels in the often absurd nature of its subject matter, but not at the cost of ignoring the trauma and joys of its often gruesome world. The unpredictability of which kind of scene you will get next—absurd, deeply emotional, or both—creates a fantastic dramatic tension that sustains throughout the entire 10-episode first season, perhaps necessary in a story that, should it follow the broadest of historical strokes, the viewer knows will end in Catherine’s triumph. Huzzah! 

– Kayti Burt

11. Harley Quinn

This year, we found out the answer to a question that no one was really asking – “who would win: a big budget Birds of Prey DC spinoff movie starring Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, or one small Harley Quinn-focused animated series that was seemingly about to be left for dead on the ailing DC Universe streaming service?” Harley Quinn won, for everyone who cared to investigate, as the show leveled up in season 2 by having the balls to let Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel fall in love with her sardonic roommate Poison Ivy on screen and ditch any lingering feelings she had for the Joker, but for those not invested in the romance (they should go have a soup and rethink their priorities) there was so much else going on beyond deconstructing its central character.

Animated shows are typically seen as an immature, lesser form of entertainment than live-action series, but just imagining the creativity you’d need to come up with this many running jokes, in-jokes and meta jokes for the larger-than-life characters of Gotham is exhausting. There’s so much writing talent behind Harley Quinn that a third season wasn’t just expected, but demanded. And indeed, Harley Quinn will live on at HBO Max, but if it hadn’t happened, we’d do what the Doctor ordered and RIOT. 

– Kirsten Howard

10. BoJack Horseman

Through its superb six-season run, BoJack Horseman’s tonal brilliance came to be an expected fact of life. Early on, it was tempting to pull non-viewers aside, shake their shoulders, and yell in their face “No, you don’t get it! It’s an animated comedy about a horse that was a ‘90s sitcom, yes, but it’s also a searing exploration of depression, dysfunction, and the dismal nature of the human condition!” It’s to the show’s eternal credit that that stellar comedic/dramatic tightrope act became all but a given a few seasons in and the world adjusted to it thusly. But even with that level of familiarity and comfort, it’s jarring just how well the show pulls off that delicate formula in its final, and perhaps best season. 

BoJack Horseman season 6 premiered eight of its final 16 episodes in 2020’s first month and their dramatic resonance carried through the rest of the year. The story ends here as we always expected it might. BoJack’s past finally catches up to him, and when he becomes a pop culture pariah, he slowly begins to undo whatever progress he made throughout the series, culminating in a stunning penultimate episode where BoJack faces the infinite and meets up with all the figures in his life who died along the way. But it’s not until the show’s very end where the message comes into clear focus. BoJack has to start all over again, just like we all must from time to time. The difference this time is that the other people in his life are finally prepared to move on…possibly without him. “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if this night was the last time we ever talked to each other?” BoJack says to Diane as they look up at the Hollywood night sky. Wouldn’t it be funny indeed. 

– Alec Bojalad

9. Legends of Tomorrow

There is no superhero TV show that has strayed as far from its superheroic roots than Legends of Tomorrow. Despite the fact that its full official title is quick to point out that this is indeed DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, you’d be hard pressed to find a DC show less overtly concerned about its comic book roots, or even with any synergistic responsibilities it may have to the other DC shows in its orbit. Sure, Supergirl, Black Lightning, The Flash, and Stargirl are great, and they’re note perfect representations of what makes those characters special, but Legends does everything those other shows do, but with far less recognizable characters, with far more laughs, and an effortlessly perfect ensemble cast boasting chemistry for days.   

No matter how high the reality-altering stakes, it all seems less important than watching the friendships between this crew of superheroic time traveling misfits. Legends of Tomorrow is everything good and hopeful and pure (ok, well…maybe not pure, especially where Matt Ryan’s John Constantine is concerned) about superhero shows without any of the baggage, and often without the superheroics. Always hilarious and often surprisingly touching, there’s not a single superhero team on the big or small screen that you’d rather actually hang out with. You don’t have to love superhero TV to love Legends, you just have to love TV. 

– Mike Cecchini

8. Schitt’s Creek

People who love Schitt’s Creek LOVE Schitt’s Creek. It’s almost become cult-like in its following, so the arrival of the sixth and final season felt like an event and the end of a journey not just for fans of the show but the stars themselves. Season six isn’t the best season of Schitt’s – it leans into the schmaltz and sentiment heavily and throws realism to the wind in favor of the absurd but if you’ve come this far with the displaced Rose family and the sometimes odd but overall endearing residents of Schitt’s Creek, you won’t be disappointed. 

All the major players get their arc. Alexis and Ted’s separation is heartbreaking, Moira’s Crows movie premiere is a hilarious mess, some of the Jazzagals almost join a cult… the season is packed with ridiculous scenarios in between many more moments of genuine sweetness as it gently guides its characters to an end. The finale comes together with David’s wedding to Patrick – a perfectly idiosyncratic affair in the Schitt’s Creek town hall. It’s a moving send off to which we’re all invited. 

This is a show about family and community, created by a real family – father and son Eugene and Daniel Levy (sister Sarah plays Twyla) – that spawned a community of fans. This might be the end of Schitt’s Creek but we can always re-visit. 

– Rosie Fletcher

7. Devs

Alex Garland’s unsettling, yet visually gorgeous science-fiction parables are always thought-provoking, but FX’s Devs asks bigger questions than any of the writer/directors previous projects. Do we determine our own fates? Does the multiverse exist? Can computers predict our future? Devs isn’t just heady techno-philosophical musings, it spends its runtime being a pretty satisfying corporate thriller, with our protagonist Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) investigating the mysterious disappearance of her boyfriend.

This is a somewhat scathing indictment on Silicon Valley culture, with a Google-esque tech company operating with unmatched power in the shadows. Featuring a moving dramatic performance from Nick Offerman and a star-making turn from Sonoya Mizuno, Devs is just as pretty, existentially threatening, and hard sci-fi as Garland’s beloved films Ex Machina and Annihilation. If you love thrillers, but are also interested in Quantum Theory, this was the limited series you’d been waiting for in 2020.

 – Nick Harley

6. The Mandalorian (READERS’ CHOICE)

Starting with its first season and extending into its improved second, The Mandalorian just works. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni’s creation about the galaxy’s most beloved bounty hunter dad is the kind of forward-thinking Star Wars project that works perfectly on a streaming platform. 

If you’re a massive Star Wars nerd, The Mandalorian continues to provide plenty of Easter eggs and callbacks for you, but the show excels at being both a fun reentry point for fans fatigued with the sequels and prequels, and a standalone adventure series for viewers who don’t have much knowledge of Star Wars at all, deftly creating a string of sidequests in a galaxy far, far away that put you firmly in the beautiful Lone Wolf and Cub-like tale of Mando and Grogu as they fly toward an unknown future.

As we recently learned, there will come a time in the next few years when we will be simply drowning in Star Wars TV series, as ten(!) of them are in development, but for now, we get to really savor the intricate worldbuilding going on in The Mandalorian.

This is the way. 

– Kirsten Howard

5. The Boys

The Boys was a breakout hit when it first landed on Amazon’s streaming service, but when the series returned, there was a bit of a backlash from fans of the show who were enraged that some of its new episodes would arrive weekly, unlike the binge-ready first season. Luckily, Season 2 had so many “what the fuck” moments in store that the griping soon quietened down, and the show eventually found its stride again after a slow start. Our diabolical, supe-fighting team led by a rather distracted Billy Butcher dealt with one bonkers revelation about Vought International after another this season, while the Supes themselves battled with their own humanity, and both groups often found common ground where they least expected it. 

It’s really hard to pick a favorite moment from Season 2, but if you’ve forgotten how out there it was, let us present a wild bouquet that includes “Homelander angrily wanking over the city in the form of his own demented Bat-Signal”, “The Seven filming a very (very) thinly-veiled Zack Snyder-esque superhero movie that had undergone a Joss Whedon rewrite”, “a massive-dicked supe-in-captivity called Love Sausage”, and “a timid child getting confidently pushed off the roof of a house by his own beaming father”. And that’s without bringing up the whole “immortal Nazi” stuff that occasionally propelled the narrative into Verhoeven-level satirical territory.

There were things that didnt work about Season 2, and we can argue about them forever, but there’s one thing that everyone can agree on: if Antony Starr doesn’t get two armfuls of awards for his performance as Homelander, a fucking travesty has occurred. 

– Kirsten Howard

4. I May Destroy You

On a night out while writing the second series of her acclaimed sitcom Chewing Gum, Michaela Coel was drugged and sexually assaulted by strangers. What she did with that experience – alchemizing it into a wise and fearless TV drama about trauma and survival – was extraordinary. 

I May Destroy You is an extraordinary series. In it, Coel plays Arabella, a young writer also drugged and raped on a night out, while under pressure from publishers to follow up her hit book debut. With long-ranging flashbacks, the story moves through the next year in Bella’s life. We see her draw power from her new identity as a survivor and (often clumsily) navigate close friendships and new sexual relationships. She strays from likeability, changing in response to what happened, and in a transcendent, experimental finale, teaches herself how to live.

Coel is a bewitching lead with excellent support from Weruche Opia and Paapa Essiedu as Bella’s friends Terry and Kwame. This is no dreary misery memoir. It’s surprising, confrontational, often funny and always buzzing with life – a frank and much needed course correction for telling this kind of story on screen.

 – Louisa Mellor

3. What We Do in the Shadows

Over the past decade of television, we’ve come to expect a lot out of our TV comedies. Since the Emmy Awards now categorize just about anything that’s 30 minutes long as comedy, the genre is now home to things like shockingly dramatic coming of age tales, intensely personal narratives, and experimental structures. This evolving of the half hour format is a welcome one. At the same time, however, sometimes you just want to laugh.

Enter What We Do in the Shadows. In its remarkable 10-episode second season, this FX adaptation of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s movie of the same name made a serious case for itself as the funniest show on television. And it did so in shockingly simple fashion. In season 2, the character list remains short: just Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Guillermo (Harvey Guillen), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) make up the show’s cast of characters for the most part (give or take a Mark Hamill or Nick Kroll). And that’s all they need. 

This year, the writers and performers all operate at the top of their game to make every possible plotline work and every character pairing sing. The comedic energy is top notch from the season’s opening “Resurrection” episode through midseason classics “Colin’s Promotion” and “On The Run” and all the way to the finale “Nouveau Théâtre des Vampires.”

– Alec Bojalad

2. Better Call Saul

The penultimate season of Better Call Saul was an absolutely brilliant run of episodes that perfectly set the stage for a climactic conclusion that looks to be every bit as heart-wrenching and explosive as the final season of parent series Breaking Bad. The show successfully introduced Lalo, perhaps the most charismatic and terrifying villain in Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque, and merged the series’ seemingly disparate storylines by bringing fan-favorite Kim Wexler closer to the dangerous dealings of the cartel.  

It turns out that Jimmy becoming Saul wasn’t the tragedy that we should have been anticipating, it was Kim embracing the Saul way that we should have been worried about. The show’s strengths have always been its meticulous attention to details, fascination with processes, and humanistic view of exactly why someone like Jimmy McGill might break bad and become a dishonorable huckster like Saul Goodman. Those strengths only became more apparent in the thrilling, low-key heartbreaking fifth season.

 – Nick Harley

1. The Queen’s Gambit

Oftentimes when assessing the quality of TV shows, we talk about how “timely” they are. In fact, if you scroll back through this list, you will find at least a few instances of just such language. The appeal to Netflix’s stylish, thrilling limited series The Queen’s Gambit, however, is just how timeless it is. And in a year with plenty of timely TV shows, that distinction was enough to launch the show to the very top of our best-of list. 

Though we on the television side of Den of Geek are loath to call any rightful TV show an “x-hour movie,” there’s no denying that The Queen’s Gambit fits that mold. But this is not just any kind of filmic experience. It’s a throwback to a ‘70s and ‘80s style of simple, elemental storytelling that simply knows how to win over an audience. The beats of The Queen’s Gambit are predictable, but elegant and perfectly executed. Beth Harmon (the ethereal Anya Taylor-Joy) is a quiet, wide-eyed hero armed with one skill that can make the world care about her and in turn make her care about herself. 

So she uses that skill and assembles her tools – her King, Queen, Bishops, Knights, Rooks, and Pawns, to embark on a classical bildungsroman journey of self-discovery and chess dominance. Like a deftly executed chess game itself, each of The Queen’s Gambit’s seven episodes acts like a move on a chess board. Some moments are triumphs, some are defeats, and some are sacrifices. But they all lead into one definitive, enormously satisfying checkmate. 

– Alec Bojalad

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Other shows receiving votes: Animaniacs, Ozark, High Fidelity, Star Trek: Picard, The Last Dance, Mrs. America, Solar Opposites, The Hollow, Killing Eve, Noughts + Crosses, Outlander, Star Trek: Discovery, Vida, Saved by the Bell, Lucifer, Gangs of London, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, World on Fire, Crash Landing on You, Infinity Train, Locke & Key, McDonalds & Dobbs, Into the Night, The Good Lord Bird, The Last Kingdom, DuckTales, Little Fires Everywhere, Normal People, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Pharmacist, Doctor Who, Away, Dublin Murders, Great Pretender, The Babysitters Club, Tiger King, The Crown, Ramy, The Shivering Truth, Perry Mason, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, The Undoing, Westworld, Doom Patrol, Stargirl, The Clone Wars, P-Valley, Bridgerton, Homeland, Stumptown, The Magicians, Bob’s Burgers, Primal, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Search Party, Roadkill, Raised by Wolves, The Flight Attendant, The Eric Andre Show, Defending Jacob, The Outsider, Julie and the Phantoms, Brave New World, Utopia, Carmen Sandiego, Brockmire, Somebody Feed Phil, Adventure Time: Distant Lands, Dead to Me, The Gift, Ghosts, YOLO: Crystal Fantasy, The 100, The Spanish Princess, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Adult Material, Fargo, Deadwater Fell, The Flash, Archer, Weird But True, Evil, Motherland: Fort Salem, Baghdad Central

The post The Best TV Shows of 2020 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[thekitschies]

Adam Roberts Phantom Kitschies 2016

  Adam Roberts, in typical overachieving fashion, managed to read enough books to populate a full and complete shortlist. 

Adam Roberts

No Kitschies were awarded last year. 2016 was a Kitschless year—for one year only it was Nitch on the Kitsch. Which was a shame, since 2016 saw a wealth of (to quote the Kitschies’ remit) ‘progressive, intelligent and entertaining works containing elements of the speculative or fantastic’. So, [*clears throat*] in my capacity a former judge, I thought I’d post some speculative short-lists for the year the prize didn’t happen.

A disclaimer is needful: I didn’t do last year, what I did in my judging year—that is, read a metric tonne of hard-copy and e-books, the better to be able to narrow down our shortlists. But I read a fair few and some of the books I read were really excellent. So here, for the sake of argument (and please: argue with what I list here) are my Phantom Kitschies shortlists for 2016.

Red Tentacle for the best novel

Naomi Alderman’s The Power is a brilliant jolt of a read, a book happy to inhabit blockbuster conventions in order to suborn them to some powerfully subversive ends. Teenage girls across the world suddenly discover they have the ability electrically to shock others—to burn them, cause them intense pain, even to kill them. The narrative rattles through the immediate implications of this: girls taking revenge on violent or raping men, girls simply being mean, girls collectively coming to a sense of their new power. But the strength of the novel is the way it follows-through its premise, into a world in which men are segregated for their own protection and women, for good and ill and with quite an emphasis on the latter, take control. I particularly liked the way this new society retcons its sense of the world—it becomes seen as ‘natural’ and a product of ‘evolutionary psychology’ for women to be aggressive and violent, since they have babies to protect; if men ever ruled the world their patriarchy would be nurturing and gentle. It’s a raw novel, more than a little jagged—though that also suits its theme—but sparky and engaging throughout. A lightning bolt of a read.

Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Winter is the third of his ‘fractured Europe’ novels, set in bivalve European set-up—one a tessellation of myriad tiny statelets and ruritaniae, the other, ‘The Community’ a calm but stifling version of 1950s Britain rolled out across the whole continent. The two versions of European reality are linked via a complex of strange portals. Each of the Europe books has a subtly different emphasis and tone, although all provide the pleasures of alt-spy adventures, a cosmopolitan richness of interlocking storylines and slowly unfurling mystery; but arguably this is the best of the three, from its bang-bang opening act of intercontinental railway terrorism through to its big finale. A modern classic.

Lavie Tidhar’s sprawling masterpiece Central Station, set in a future spaceport Tel Aviv, is easily his best book yet (and that’s saying something). What I particularly loved about this is the way it manages to be both gloriously old-fashioned in its SF—an actual fix-up novel set in a space-port in which a colourful variety of humans robots and aliens intermingle—and a distinctively twenty-first century novel about the complex but sustaining inter-relationship between culture and place and memory and technology and change. Most of all it’s about the centrality of stories to who we are, and about the way those stories are always collective and heterogeneous. It’s a marvel.

Christopher Priest’s The Gradual works a simple-enough sciencefictional version of time-zone differences into a haunting exploration of travel, aging and loss. Set like many of Priest’s best novels in his ‘Dream Archipelago’ of endless islands, it is the first-person narrative of composer Sandro Sussken, a citizen of the Glaund Republic on the Northern mainland (a downbeat, authoritarian society locked in an Orwellian permanent war with the Faianland Alliance). The success of his music means that, unlike most Glaundians, Sussken gets to travel from island to island, but in doing so he discovers the titular ‘gradual’, a kind of complex time-slip, or time-stall, that dislocates him from his origins, his family and in the end from the world as a whole. Priest uses his speculative conceit brilliantly to explore what it means to age. It makes me think how rarely the old figure, and how much more they ought to, in progressive narratives of equality and diversity.

Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories is a remarkable epic Fantasy, the follow-up to her debut A Stranger in Olondria (2013) and an even stronger novel. It gives us many of the satisfactions of this over-populated mode, as four women—an aristocrat, a military officer, a priestess and a nomadic poet—are caught up in the events leading to an empire-shaking war. But Samatar has the confidence, and the skill, to downplay the conventional satisfactions of narrative. The result is a gorgeous labyrinth of a text that circles through the permutations of its characters, plot, and the history of her world, richly written and formally involuted.

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad deploys its fantastical conceit—the literalisation of the celebrated 19th-century US ‘railroad’ along which slaves would try to pass to freedom as a network of actual excavated tunnels, railways and stations—with commendable restraint. He is not interested in the worldbuilding mechanics of his idea so much as in the imaginative freedom it gives him to send his heroine, Cora, on a journey encompassing the different violences slavery has manifested over the centuries. It is a novel that renders slave society as vividly and memorably brutal without, at any point, reverting to the pieties of hindsight or historical cliché. An unforgettable piece of fiction.

Golden Tentacle for best debut novel

Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit recasts Korean legend in a densely rendered high-tech future universe governed by ‘calendars’, sort-of computer programmes that determine the nature of reality itself. It’s a book that boldly drops its reader into its properly futuristic and alien cosmos—an interstellar empire called the Hexarchate in which six factions each with unique skills are competing for power. Though it might put some readers off, the advantage of this approach is that when the book clicks fully into focus it does so with kaleidoscopic brilliance and coherence. The game theory and maths, all the politics and military tactics, neatly offset some nicely written central relationships.

David Means’s Hystopia is a brilliant, baffling and expertly fractured novel set in an alt-1970s America in which Kennedy wasn’t assassinated, and Vietnam veterans are being treated for PTSD with psychedelics. It is steeped in the flavour of its era, and manages to be simultaneously weirdly familiar and intensely strange—quite the combo, that. I have to concede it’s a little distorting describing this as a ‘first novel’ (even though that’s what it is) because Means has been honing his craft writing short stories for decades. The technical skill shows: Means’s multi-viewpoint and deracinated approach could easily have slid into mere messiness; but though the novel is often violent it is also potent and, in its way, coherent.

Wyl Menmuir’s superbly eerie The Many is, though short, a tricky book to summarise. Suffice to say that as an exercise in unnerving the reader, this cryptic, powerful novella is remarkable. Its seemingly simple plot, about a young man coming to a Cornish seaside village to live in an abandoned cottage whose previous owner had drowned, invokes a sort-of ghost story, or perhaps hallucination, or perhaps dreamtime, to render its poisoned near-future world more obliquely vivid that any straightforward account ever could.

Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear wonderfully resuscitates a form—magic realism—I had thought dead and buried. A famous Brazilian writer, Beatriz Yagoda, up to her neck in gambling debt, goes missing; her American translator Emma flies down to South America to try and make sense of things. The characters she meets are colourful and varied (indeed, perhaps, their colourful variety is a little by rote), and the tone is lightly comic, but as the story goes on it becomes stranger and more beautiful, and Novey’s background as a lyric poet increasingly comes to dominate the telling. A short novel that leaves rich and strange residue in the imagination.

Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning boldly mashes together eighteenth-century manners and 25th-century adventure in a post-scarcity utopia where which gender-distinctions are taboo and large-scale affinity-groups are carefully manipulated and managed by behind-the-scenes forces to maintain broader social balance. Readers are liable to find the richly mannered idiom in which Palmer tells her story either beguiling—as I did—or, perhaps, archly offputting. But it is worth persevering with the narrative: there’s a piercing political intelligence at work here, of the sort that would surely have delighted the Enlightenment philosophes that inspired it. Intricately worked, and, I’m pleased to say, the first of a very promising series.

Nick Wood’s Azanian Bridges is set in a modern day South Africa still under the sway of Apartheid, and expertly uses this alt-historical premise to estrange and refresh the way racism violates social and human contexts, without abandoning the possibility of bridging this chasm. Sibusiso Mchunu, traumatised by seeing his friend killed at a demonstration, is admitted to a psychiatric hospital where White doctor Martin test him on his new invented, an ‘empathy machine’. The potential of this device, and its dangers, power a compact but very effective thriller. A thought-provoking and promising debut.

  from http://ift.tt/2rueAmg

[mastcomm]

The Man Behind the New Front Row

In the fashion world, there are a bunch of rules. Most people are scared to break them, sometimes for good reasons, other times not.

About a year and a half ago, Kerby Jean-Raymond, the creative director of the fashion line Pyer Moss, led subway-challenged fashion editors to Crown Heights in Brooklyn for a show called “American, Also.” A fantasy of black life free from the threat of racism and police brutality, it featured a 40-person gospel choir, artwork by Derrick Adams and references to “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a pre-civil rights era travel guide.

For reasons that extended beyond wokeness, Mr. Jean-Raymond’s show was one of the most acclaimed of the season. Then he followed it up with a decision to toss out the fashion calendar, in favor of showing just once a year.

A select group of established designers had begun this move a few seasons before, but Mr. Jean-Raymond was arguably the first who made that decision just when he was poised for stardom.

Was he nuts? Some thought so.

Fashion insiders have a tendency to forget that the biggest designers usually rise by upending convention rather than upholding it. In that way, the naysayers are a little like veteran political pundits whose pontifications about electability don’t mention that our two most recent presidents made it to the White House by positioning themselves as disrupters of Washington tradition.

Nate Hinton, the founder of the Hinton Group, a two-year-old fashion P.R. firm, understood the logic behind Mr. Jean-Raymond’s move. Mr. Hinton is his publicist and, therefore, a chief enabler, a guy whose job undoubtedly includes a certain amount of implementing the client’s wishes.

Still, sucking up wasn’t principally what was going on when he helped Mr. Jean-Raymond arrive at the conclusion that the fashion calendar was a relic.

First, said Mr. Hinton, who is 39 and looks closer to 26, there was the cost of staging a show twice a year (usually $150,000 each time, at minimum). That made sense a decade ago, when having a fashion week slot was the only accepted way for a designer to build heat around a collection.

Back then, sites like Style.com ran pictures within a day or two — but hardly anyone saw them so the clothes weren’t old news when they hit store shelves, and fashion magazines, several months later.

Instagram changed that. Yet designers, egged on partly by the publicists who made money publicizing those shows, kept going broke trying to keep up.

“It makes no sense,” Mr. Hinton said during one of several interviews over the last week. “It cripples young designers.”

That is particularly true for his clients, many of whom are people of color in an industry that just five years ago had barely any brand-name black designers.

But now, Mr. Jean-Raymond’s approach to fashion week is spreading throughout the industry, along with an obvious question: What if Mr. Hinton, as one of fashion’s most promising young image makers, reaches the top tier of the fashion heap by helping to kill fashion week?

WHEN PEOPLE DISCUSS publicists — an admittedly small group — conversation usually centers on whether they lied on behalf of a client or said yes or no to a journalist’s request for an interview.

Fashion publicists operate differently.

At KCD, the industry’s most august firm — which was started in the early 1980s — the founders Paul Cavaco and Kezia Keeble used their previous work as fashion stylists as the building block for their company.

Its principals today are certainly capable of doing media strategy for designers clawing their way out of catastrophe (see: John Galliano), but they also produce scores of fashion shows (Marc Jacobs, Versace), manage brands’ social media (Balmain) and broker partnerships between mass retailers and luxury designers (see: Target and Missoni).

That makes them something like a fashion hybrid of a P.R. firm and a Hollywood agency. (Their all-black suits even match the ones favored by agents at CAA and William Morris.)

For many years, KCD’s chief competitor has been PR Consulting, whose founder, Pierre Rougier, is largely inseparable from Nicolas Ghesquière and Raf Simons, two erstwhile fashion darlings. Where friendliness was KCD’s corporate mandate, PR Consulting helped create an air of exclusivity for Mr. Ghesquière and Mr. Simons by dismissing those perceived as wannabes (or worse, middle market.)

Mr. Hinton worked for both firms, and his solo career seems like an attempt to meld the friendly demeanor of Ed Filipowski (his boss at KCD, who died in January) with the clubby synergy that exists between Mr. Rougier and the curated circle of designers he represents.

“That’s how Kerby and I relate to each other,” Mr. Hinton said. “It’s part of why I understand his vision and what he wants. We know the same people, we share friends, we hang out.”

BACK WHEN MR. HINTON entered the industry, there wasn’t just a dearth of black designers. There were few black behind-the-scenes people in positions of authority. “I don’t even know if I can think of one,” said Mr. Hinton, who has a level of candor, even chattiness, that for better and perhaps for worse, is uncharacteristic of publicists.

Mr. Hinton grew up in Norfolk, Va. His mother was an anesthesia technician, and his father wasn’t around, he said.

“There was never enough money,” Mr. Hinton said. “That’s part of what motivated me.”

At Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk, he staged fashion shows in which students modeled borrowed street wear from Iceberg and Girbaud.

At Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, N.C., he studied physics, but protons didn’t capture his attention quite like Tom Ford did.

In 2003, Mr. Hinton graduated with a degree in business administration. He moved to Washington, D.C., for a job at Federated, the department store conglomerate.

A year later, he moved into an apartment in Paterson, N.J., and commuted to New York City, where he was hired as the sample supervisor at Prada (that’s fashion-speak for running the company closet). From there, he moved into the brand’s public relations department.

In 2011, he was hired by Mr. Rougier at PR Consulting.

In 2012 he was fired by him after a dust-up whose central elements — operatics and pettiness — sit atop fashion’s periodic table.

The end came after the actress Emma Watson picked a dress for the MTV Movie & TV Awards. It was made by a little-known brand called Brood, whose account representative at PR Consulting was Mr. Hinton. “It was like my first V.I.P. moment,” he said.

On the day of the show, Mr. Hinton got what he described as a violent flu and failed to get the news release out before his trip to the emergency room. People magazine was among several outlets that published pictures of Ms. Watson without naming his client.

“I’m, like, slightly incapacitated,” Mr. Hinton said. “I can’t really respond to emails and texts. And so Pierre calls me, and he’s going off on me.”

Looking back, Mr. Hinton realizes it would have been smart to text Mr. Rougier and say he was in the hospital; that not informing him had a flaky millennial quality.

Still, Mr. Hinton said the final straw was the apology he didn’t deliver. “I was fired for my reaction to that call, which was just as saucy as his,” he said. (Mr. Rougier, asked about this, called Mr. Hinton “a great guy.”)

Soon after, Mr. Hinton was hired by KCD.

Two of the firm’s clients were Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow, who, as the creative directors of Public School, were among a tiny group of well-known minority designers.

“Nate really got close to them and became part of their team and their circle, and I think that opened his mind to what he really wanted to do,” said Rachna Shah, a partner at KCD who served as his immediate supervisor.

In 2016, Mr. Hinton received a phone call from one of Mr. Rougier’s top aides. She informed him that Raf Simons was taking over Calvin Klein. Might Mr. Hinton come to work on the account?

Mr. Hinton said he would, seeing it as an opportunity “to sort of clear my record with Pierre, if you will.”

“Also,” he said, “it was Raf, and being able to order his clothes at a discount was great for me.” (Mr. Hinton was kidding. But also not.)

IN 2018, RUMORS began to spread that Mr. Simons’s days at Calvin Klein were numbered. When it became clear the prophecy was true, Mr. Hinton started plotting his next move.

Through Antoine Phillips (a vice president of brand and culture engagement at Gucci) and Laron Howard (a marketing manager at Burberry), Mr. Hinton met Mr. Jean-Raymond, who had recently held his much discussed Crown Heights show and was looking for a publicist.

“I went to all the big firms,” Mr. Jean-Raymond said in an interview at his Chelsea offices.

One told him they already had “one black designer” and didn’t need another, he said. Others proposed exorbitant monthly fees.

Having a person who was affordable, black and understood his message was the logical step, so he called Mr. Hinton.

For a few weeks, Mr. Hinton fretted about whether to start his own agency. Then Mr. Osborne and Mr. Chow of Public School called to say they were leaving KCD and wanted him to do their P.R. under the table. He replied that there was no need to work surreptitiously since he was about to start his agency.

Mr. Jean-Raymond gave Mr. Hinton and his five-person team desks in the Pyer Moss offices in Chelsea. According to Mr. Jean-Raymond, Mr. Hinton will also be getting equity in the company, though when and how much isn’t totally clear. “It’s in process,” Mr. Hinton said.

A number of clients Mr. Hinton later signed up failed to pay their bills; fees usually run about $7,000 a month. They parted ways with Mr. Hinton, and others joined up.

One is Sergio Hudson, a Gianni Versace-obsessed African-American designer who made the pantsuit Demi Lovato wore to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Another is Claudia Li, a New Zealander of Chinese descent whose clothes have a Comme des Garçons on the Q Train to Fort Greene vibe.Last week, she and Mr. Hinton stood in a conference room at her sunny garment district office preparing the seating chart for her Feb. 8 show.

Ms. Li, 31, wore a white hooded sweatshirt and a pleated yellow and blue skirt she designed. Mr. Hinton had on a black Aliétte hoodie, Acne Jeans (“my faves”) and Rick Owens sneakers that look like Converse All Stars and sell for about 30 times the price.

While Mr. Hinton moved around color-coded Post-its, Ms. Li talked about how lucky she was to work with him.

For one, she said, her previous P.R. personcost too much. For another, Mr. Hinton “recognized the establishment without being enslaved by it.”

Mr. Hinton chimed in about the importance of speaking directly to consumers and building community around brands. “But we’re not trying to say, ‘Screw everyone,’” he said. “We’d love to have Anna Wintour at her show.”

“I’d literally faint,” Ms. Li said.

I asked Mr. Hinton if he was in a position to call Ms. Wintour and plead Ms. Li’s case.

“I can call her,” he said. “Would she answer the phone? Hell, no!”

Of course, Mr. Hinton encountered Ms. Wintour when he worked the red carpet at the Met Gala for KCD. And he sort of knew her before that.

“At Prada, I was responsible for delivering her clothing orders,” he said.

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[cover2covermom]

  Goodbye November & hello December!

I cannot believe we are already in our final month of 2018!  How the heck did this happen?!

October 2018 Reading Wrap-Up + Book Haul

November 2018 TBR

#ThanksgivingReadathon 2018 TBR

#ThanksgivingReadathon 2018 Wrap-Up + I Met Jackie B @DeathbyTsundoku (the Host) IRL!

» The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier

Feelings in a few thoughts:

This book is definitely going on my favorite middle grade Halloween books list!

The Night Gardener is a very complex middle grade book.  I think it can appeal to a wide audience from middle grade all the way up to adult readers.

Someone put this book in Tim Burton‘s hands so he can do a film adaptation!

» Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton

*4.5 Stars*

Feelings in a few thoughts:

I really enjoyed learning more about Cuba & its political turmoil throughout history.  I am really embarrassed to admit that my knowledge of Cuba before this book was minimal.

After reading this, I have more of an appreciation of all the freedoms I enjoy by living in the United States.

I’m not typically big on books where the romance is central to the plot. While there is a lot of romance in Next Year in Havana, it was balanced well with the rest of the plot.

The big plot twist was predictable, but didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the book.

» The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan

*3.5 stars*

Feelings in a few thoughts:

Trigger/Content warning: suicide & depression

I read this book in print form, but I bet it would translate well to audiobook.

This is a heartbreaking read, it is one of those books where you need to be in the right mindset/mood for.

I definitely think this is a wonderful YA book that tackles a very heavy topic.   The magic realism elements & beautiful prose offset the overall heaviness of the book.

For some reason I did not connect fully with this one.  I do not think this was the book’s fault though, it was me.

» Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan

Feelings in a few thoughts:

This book was a mixed bag for me.  I really enjoyed some aspects, but others… not so much.

I hate to say it, but the audiobook is NOT well narrated.  The narrator was far too monotoned throughout the book.  I can’t say if this impacted my rating or not, but I’m sure it played a factor.

I really enjoyed learning more about Joy Davidman, wife of C.S. Lewis, especially since she is a bit of a controversial figure.

I’m not a huge fan of books that are overly religious… they tend to start feeling “preachy.”  I’d say this book was borderline overly religious, but not too hateful.

I felt that the book was dragging in many areas.  Not sure if this because of the audiobook narration or not…

I also had issues with Joy’s character.  I can’t really go into much detail because of spoilers, but I felt like she was a stage 5 clinger for the majority of the book.

» The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle

Feelings in a few thoughts:

This book was not what I was expecting, but not in a bad way.  When people talk about The Last Unicorn, many refer to is as a fantasy classic.  I was expecting more of an epic high fantasy like Lord of the Rings, but that is not what this book is.

This book reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, not in the plot, but the overall adult fairytale feeling.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Gaiman drew inspiration for Stardust from TLU.

Themes = identity, unlikely heroes, hope, live life to the fullest, etc.

I loved the unlikely cast of characters: Schmendrick – the subpar magician, Molly Grue – the rough around the edges middle aged woman beat down by life, Prince Lir – the prince with a hero complex, and the last unicorn in the world – a unicorn going through an identity crisis.  You all know I’m a sucker for quirky characters.

» Prince Caspian (Chronicles of Narnia #2 – Publication Order) by C.S. Lewis

Feelings in a few thoughts:

NOT as good as the first book, BUT nothing will ever beat The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Not sure if it is just me, but I didn’t actually feel like a lot happened in this book?  At least in comparison to the first book…

Loved the addition of new characters: Reepicheep, Trumpkin, Wimbleweather, etc.  Side note – C.S. Lewis really knows how to name characters.

I liked Edmund’s development from the first book.

» And the Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness

Feelings in  few thoughts:

I know there are mixed reviews for this one, but I really enjoyed it.

And the Ocean Was Our Sky is a retelling of Moby-Dick told from the perspective of a whale.  While I’ve never actually read Moby-Dick, I do know the basic plot.  I don’t think you have to have read Moby-Dick in order to fully “get” this retelling.

I adore how Patrick chose to come at this retelling.  I am here for unique and inventive!  It does take a bit to fully grasp what’s going on, but it does become clear.

Themes: legends (rumors), what makes a monster?, prejudices, etc.  I really enjoyed the morals behind the story the most.

If you need books with well fleshed out characters or in-depth plotlines, this isn’t going to be the book for you.  This is a very simple plotline without much character development.  Remember, this is a short story, but it does have a deep moral.

If I am being completely honest, I was a tad disappointed in the illustrations.  They were far too simple.  Had there been more depth to them, I feel it would have enhanced the story.  BUT the cover almost makes up for this *heart eyes*

» The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Feelings in  few thoughts:

I knew this book was going to destroy me.  From reading the synopsis, I obviously THOUGHT I knew what was coming, but Boyne managed to still surprise me.

I’ve read MANY a WWII historical fiction, but never from the perspective of a child of a Nazi commandant.  I’d never really thought about this perspective much, but think it was an important perspective to tell.

This is my second John Boyne book, and he has knocked it out of the park both times.  Can’t wait to read more!

»  The Secret of Nightingale Wood by Lucy Strange

Feelings in  few thoughts:

This book was beautifully written!

This book is tagged as a middle grade book, but I would almost classify it as a YA book.  Despite the fact the narrator is 12 (turns 13 in the book), the content & writing is above a MG level in my opinion.

This is definitely a darker, gothic style book with overall themes of grief & depression.

The audiobook was brilliantly narrated by the author herself!  She actually sounds a lot like Keira Knightly.  The narration was simply lovely.

» The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Feelings in  few thoughts:

I am actually not going to rate this one because I do not think print form is the way to go with this book.   I am going to re-read this one via audiobook, especially since it’s narrated by Stephen Fry.

» The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Feelings in a few thoughts:

So I actually didn’t know about Sherman Alexie’s 2018 sexual harassment scandal before picking this book up… I only found out about it after looking him up after reading his book.  Had I known this, I would not have purchased this book, but the damage was already done.

I’ll give Alexie this, he definitely wrote a book that will appeal to teen boys, which is not easy to do.  This book is a tad on the crude side, but it definitely felt like a teen boy POV.  I also think the illustrations were a nice touch as graphic novels appeal to the YA demographic.

I’d never read an #OwnVoices book featuring a Native American main character.  This is definitely a gap in my reading that I need to make an effort to rectify.  After doing some research on Alexie, Arnold is definitely based on the author’s own experiences.  Many things that happen to Arnold in the book happened to Alexie in real life.

There was too much tragedy for a 230 page book.  While I know the issues in the book are all issues that Native Americans living on reservations in the United States face, it made the book feel underdeveloped and rushed including so much in so few pages.  The book either needed to be longer, or aspects of the story needed cut out.  I feel like Alexie wanted to address issues like alcoholism, violence, racism, etc but was too over-the-top with it & didn’t get into any of the reasons behind these issues. I just wanted more exploration of the issues.

My favorite aspect of this book was the friendship between Arnold & Rowdy.

While Arnold’s medical issues are a big part of the beginning, we really don’t hear anything about them for the rest of the book?

» The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia #3 – Publication Order) by C.S. Lewis

Feelings in a few thoughts:

Enjoyed this one more than the second book!

I love a good adventure story and that’s just what this was!

Eustace was a welcome addition to the cast – loved his character development over the course of the book.

I hit my 100 book goal for my Goodreads challenge!  Technically I hit this on the second of December as I finished Vengeful by V.E. Schwab, BUT I started the book in November so I’ll share it in my November wrap-up.

  I *MAY* have gone a tad overboard with my book buying this month… I blame discounted books

*Book titles link to Goodreads

Book Outlet Haul

» Wolf by Wolf (Wolf by Wolf #1) by Ryan Graudin

» American Gods by Neil Gaiman

» Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë *Paper Mill Classics Edition*

» Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë *Paper Mill Classics Edition*

» Frankenstein by Mary Shelley *Paper Mill Classics Edition*

» Ender’s Game (Ender’s Saga #1) by Orson Schott Card

» The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

» The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge #1) by Ken Follett

Book Loft Haul

» Mosquitoland by David Arnold

» The Wizard of Oz (Oz #1) by L. Frank Baum *Puffin Chalk Edition*

» Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll *Puffin Chalk Edition*

» Lord of the Flies by William Golding *Casebook Edition*

» Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables #1) by L.M. Montgomery *Puffin Classics Edition*

What books did you read in November?

Have you read any of the books I read in the month of November?  If so, what did you think?

Have a wonderful week & happy reading

See which #books I read & my #bookhaul in my November #WrapUp #BookBlogger #Bookworm #Reading Goodbye November & hello December! I cannot believe we are already in our final month of 2018! 

[aion-rsa]

Author Tochi Onyebuchi Brings Anime-Inspired Giant Robots to Nigeria in War Girls

https://ift.tt/324kkoQ

We talked to speculative fiction author Tochi Onyebuchi about novellas War Girls and Riot Baby.

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Tochi Onyebuchi brings a keen eye for world-building and momentum-filled action scenes to his young adult novels. From the Pokémon-like Beasts Made of Night duology to the upcoming fantasy novella Riot Baby, he’s making waves. At NYCC 2019, we sat down to talk to him about pop culture influences, the process of building a novel, and how he wants to push back against Western perceptions of African countries. 

Riot Baby will be available from Tor.com in January 2020. War Girls comes out on Oct. 15 from Penguin Random House.

Den of Geek: Your latest book, War Girls, is a post-apocalyptic story involving both catastrophic change and nuclear war. What draws you to writing apocalypse while the real world feels so apocalyptic? 

Tochi Onyebuchi: Part of it is coping! Part of it is trying to imagine my way through crisis. Because the thing about climate change, or at least the discussion as it is happening now, has been very much dominated by Western voices. It has been very much focused on climate change in parts of the U.S., for instance. Or efforts to combat climate change in Western Europe. Whereas a lot of the really averse effects of climate change will most viscerally be felt on the African continent. 

We’re already seeing it. You see the desertification of the Sahara. And that is pushing people on the lower end, particularly nomadic tribes, further down into densely populated countries. And so you see all this unrest that’s happening right now in northern Nigeria, because you have pastoral Fulani tribes that are being pushed down into farmland that is already populated by people. So all of a sudden there are these new clashes over land rights that would not necessarily have happened were it not for climate change. 

There are islands in the Pacific that are sinking. That won’t be here in 12 years or 20 years. So I was very interested in what people in those places would consider with regards to climate change. So that was why it was particularly interesting to think about issues of climate change and post-nuclear disaster in Nigeria. 

Tell us about the two sisters at the heart of the book. What made their story compelling? 

They both carry aspects of my mother. War Girls very much has its genesis in stories that I would hear from her of her time as an internally displaced person in the Biafran war, the Nigerian civil war, that waged in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. She was either just finishing or just getting ready to start kindergarten at the outbreak of the war. She was a child living through this! That in many ways was the genesis of the book.

I wanted to also write in a way about a lot of the other civil conflicts that raged throughout African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s and mid 2000s, and that’s where the issue of child soldiers comes in. Child soldiers weren’t necessarily prevalent in the Nigerian civil war in the 60s and 1970, but in a lot of the later conflicts in the 90s and the 2000s you saw prevalence of the instances in which adolescents and teenagers would be drawn into the conflict and faced to fight, forced to kill. I think particularly of the story of Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, which was made into an extraordinary movie starring Idris Elba. It’s that sort of thing. 

How do you deal with that afterwards, too? As a society, but also as the person who did those things. Because there is an after. There will be an after. What does that look like? Those are very fascinating questions to me. 

War Girls is set in an alternate Nigeria. What kind of research or experiences lead to the way you portrayed it? 

While I did a lot of research on Nigeria, particularly the Biafran war, I also wanted to do a lot of research on other African countries. But one thing I wanted to make sure of was I wanted to write a specifically Nigerian story. And part of that entailed researching both conflicts and histories of other African countries.

One thing that I wanted to do also was make sure this wasn’t a doom-and-gloom, ‘everything is horrible in Africa’ story. Because a lot of the popular perception of Africa is it’s this entire uniform place that’s universally afflicted by starvation and civil war. It’s the picture of the kid with flies on their face and the bloated stomach from malnutrition. But there are 50-plus countries in Africa, many of whom have exponentially more ethnic identities in them. There are over 200 tribes in Nigeria alone. So that speaks to the diversity on every scale, whether it’s economic, social, tribal, what have you. It speaks to the overwhelming diversity of the continent. And that was something I wanted to get at.

So, in researching other countries and other traditions, it became easier for me to pick bits from other cultures but use them specifically, and not just have them be this background of ‘African traditions’ and what not thrown into the story. It was very important to me that the story was specific, the references were specific, the geography was specific. That is a lot of what drove the research that I did. 

War Girls is marketed as Black Panther inspired. Tell me more about this connection and about what pop culture influences you.  

One of the reasons Black Panther was so important, particularly to War Girls, is that it provided a reference point for a lot of people that might not have been familiar with a lot of the things that are going on in that book. War Girls is very much more inspired by Gundam Wing. I’m a huge, huge Gundam fan, so this book is very much a love letter to Gundam. When I pitched it to my agent, it was ‘Gundam in Nigeria.’ 

But at the same time I recognize that there’s a maybe somewhat limited fandom for Gundam. I feel like in the United States more people would recognize Black Panther. One of the beautiful things about it was that people could see Black Panther and have a reference point for this depiction of Africa as technological advanced. That, I think, was new to a lot of people. To see an Africa that maintains fidelity to certain traditions, and had high speed rail. That had hover cars. That had spaceships and what not. But also had specific music and dance traditions and fashion sense. 

So, in crafting a society that had all those things, it’s easier for people to understand. 

What is the idea at the core of Riot Baby, your upcoming novella? 

Riot Baby is the story of Ella and Kev, two siblings that grow up in the shadow of the L.A. Uprising in the 90s. Their story takes them from South Central, to Harlem, to Riker’s, and back to the Watts, and they have to deal with institutional racism and police violence and issues surrounding mass incarceration, while slowly discovering superpowers. 

What have you learned about writing in the course of publishing four novels? 

I’ve gotten much better at my act threes! [Note: Some of the audio in this section was disrupted. The author goes on to discuss gaining sensitivity to the quality of his own writing.]

You can write something and you can feel that it’s right, even though you may not necessarily be able to articulate all the ways in which you feel it’s right, or why this particular choice is the correct one. You can direct the plot a certain way and feel you’ve made absolutely the right choice without necessarily knowing why. Developing that intuition after having internalized so much of the craft is very important. That’s an aspect of writing I’ve grown in. 

What is your process like? Do you outline? 

It often differs by book, and also by the relationship with whichever editor I’m working with at the time. Riot Baby came together in part out of disparate pieces of existing work, and then when it coalesced it grew more of itself. There wasn’t necessarily an outline involved in that. It started with writing pieces of it and the spine of the narrative came together. Then, the rest was a result of growing it out.

Whereas with War Girls it was very schematic. I had the idea, I had a bucket of particular images in my head I wanted to figure out how to dramatize. Out of that came the outline, which of course changed shape over the course of the drafting. So I had the initial outline and then a revised outline. Then I started drafting, and events changed as I was writing. 

Would you say to an aspiring writing that process matters? Do you need to write a certain way, or do different ways work for different people?

Whatever works, works. I think that’s the way to go. There is the temptation to fall prey to a lot of the dogma early on, particularly when you’re trying to figure yourself out with regards to voice, process, how to make this writing thing work. 

We hear people say write every day. But that’s not feasible for a lot of people. Whether it’s their school schedule, whether it’s child care, whether they have a particular job that doesn’t allow for that. People are dealing with different realities, so writing every day isn’t necessarily universally applicable. 

The only thing I feel confident in terms of advice to aspiring writers is to love writing. Whether it’s the act of putting sentences together, playing with that, or whether it’s the larger discipline of storytelling, certain aspects of that—if that gets your heart racing, if that gives you the same feeling as when you see your crush from across the room, that’ll get you so far in this. Because there’s so much nonsense you have to deal with in this, and so much conflicting advice. If at the end of the day you love doing this thing, hold on to that. That’s why you do this.

You can find out more about Tochi Onyebuchi here.

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Interview Megan Crouse

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Oct 10, 2019

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