#Antonina does in fact shoot a robot with a gun in one of these things. I didn’t make that part up

[smol-blue-bird]

I wouldn’t make a YouTube channel, because I can’t stand hearing my own voice and I’m wary of showing my face on the Internet, but if I did, I’d be so good at lengthy Jenny Nicholson-style deep dives into topics nobody cares about. I would love to do a 4-hour explainer on the insane micro-tropes found in sixth-century Byzantine historical fiction. The clumsy attempts at romance between characters who barely knew each other irl, the self-insert loser eunuchs who are always lusting after Theodora, the sibling rivalry plotlines that take up a ridiculous amount of page time, the increasingly derivative sci-fi/fantasy alternate history Belisarius ‘verse that’s been living rent-free in my head since Foundation and Empire. I could talk about these deranged books for ages and never even scratch the surface of how weird they get. Half of the video would just be a static picture of Antonina shooting a robot with a gun while I rant about how we got to this point