#but there's a lot of deconstruction happening. what happens to the minor characters after the winchesters roll out of town?

[thegeminisage]

By Liz and Cally. What began as a single fic for the 2011 Supernatural Big Bang has become a canon-divergent universe about the hunter Ben Braeden, the ex-angelic vessel Claire Novak, and the cambion Jesse Turner. Ever since Lucifer rose from his Cage, the very reluctant Antichrist has been saddled with enough power to decimate Hell and Heaven alike—which Jesse chooses to ignore, having spent most of his adolescence in self-imposed exile. Meanwhile, Sam and Dean Winchester have disappeared, leaving hunter-in-training Ben desperate to find them. Along the way, he teams up with Claire, who's tracking Castiel for her own purposes. After three years of searching, the two of them meet Jesse in the burnt remains of his childhood home, trying to find out who murdered his parents. As the three of them get tangled up in the apocalyptic schemes of the Queen of Hell, they'll have to decide where their trust—and loyalties—truly lie. This verse follows SPN canon until partway through episode 6.21 Let It Bleed, but the end of that episode and everything after that—including the Season 6 finale—changes when Castiel makes a very different decision about how to defeat Raphael. With a few minor exceptions, we don't include characters or plots introduced in Season 7 or later; this series also pre-dates the reintroduction of Claire in season 10. There are absolutely no vampire juggalos.

[herefortheships]

I feel like a lot of modern ships are missing the "zest" that ships used to have years ago like around the mid 2000s to around 2017-ish. Especially the gay ships.

And I KNOW I shouldn't complain at ALL. Because, after all, we finally have couples that are openly gay (or bisexual, too) from the start, and we get to see them develop without the wondering of "but COULD this happen? Are they REALLY? ARE they going to go there?"

... And, I think I just figured it out in this silly little post. That's what's missing. The wondering, the passion. The question of "will they? Won't they?" We are given couples that we know are going to end up together because, either the show itself is ABOUT these couple falling in love, OR the two are just the gay characters in the show so they simply end up together with minor complications.

To some extent, you could say that gay ships are being treated as straight ships in TV shows nowadays, but truly I don't think so? They might be treated as straight ships within the romance genre (I guess you could say, Good Omens, to give an example, is romance genre despite the fantasy elements: it's a fantasy-romance).

I think that's why ships like Destiel were (and continue to be) so popular: There was chemistry and passion that spawned between them naturally, without the show being a romance or being about them falling in love. They weren't put there with the intention to show the audience a gay romance; it just happened. The show wasn't a romance show, but there was romance in it, like there usually is in any TV show, and it just so happens that this time, the chemistry and "will they? Won't they?" question happened between to male characters (or male presenting, in Cas's case).

One of the selling points of the romance genre is its predictability: the characters must end up together. Maybe the issue then is all on me and the romance genre just isn't for me. But I don't think there are gay ships happening naturally in shows within other genres, and if they do, you know something will happen because it's the only gay characters in the room.

The unpredictability; the question of "will they? Won't they?" is the zest that is missing. It's something we've only gotten as an accident in shows and between characters where it was never intended.

Get what I'm saying? I don't know if I'm expressing myself properly. I think this topic needs a proper essay 😅.

To summarize, I just feel like ships today are kind of "too easy"? And even bland to some extent. I don't know. Maybe I just need to get used to this, coming from the hyper-analytic Destiel fandom, where it was commonplace for us to deconstruct scenes and look at all the little details to find the subtext and point at all the evidence that Destiel was indeed intentional, because, that's kind of what slash shipping used to be. It all existed only in the subtext, and it was all entirely valid as well. (I believe that subtext is still a very important part of the story and it's just as canon as the irrefutable text we can see and hear on the surface of the story.

I would like to see gay ships that develop naturally, within shows that are about anything else, where we get to speculate if it could happen or not, "will they, won't they?" and all that, as it's so commonplace to do with hetero ships.

[biblioflyer]

Five Episodes Later: Reevaluating Picard

I started this rewatch to refresh my memory so that I could tackle the question of whether the fandom had judged Picard too harshly and if it was as dark and dystopian as was commonly accused.

Through that process I have discovered much that is praiseworthy, some implications that bother me, and more than a few questions that pivot on one’s own subjective response to particular cues about whether and when the protagonists are objectively correct or if there is far more room for them to be messy.

For more like this check out my other essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

The Dystopia Question

Ultimately what I’ve found is that Season One is less of a deconstruction of core ideas about Star Trek, than a richer exploration of the premises of Voyager and Enterprise: what happens when decent people are caught in ambiguous situations and without the resources of an entire Federation behind them? 

The backdrop of the failure of the Romulan resettlement effort after the destruction of Utopia Planitia also has resulted in a schism of sorts in the fandom wherein most people are horrified and immediately saw fit to draw analogies to Brexit or the Trump administration, while a disturbing minority shrugged off the catastrophe as the Romulans getting what they had coming to them and have argued the Federation had no moral obligation to help the Romulans.

My own examination of the evidence has led me to feel that there is a strong case for a murky middleground. We could presume for instance that Admiral Clancy is a reactionary who is overstating the case for Starfleet minding its knitting and having too many domestic obligations.

On the other hand we could steelman her case with a very large body of evidence consisting of a vast number of instances where it falls to Starfleet to provide timely disaster relief and protection to the Federation’s vast and underserved frontiers. We need look no further than perhaps dozens of TNG plots to support the idea that an overextended Starfleet would come with a bodycount.

This certainly pushes back on the metanarrative of the Federation and the implication of limitless resources. Although that has always been exaggerated. There’s material abundance enough to provide everyone who doesn’t intentionally seek to rough it on a colony with a comfortable life, even if you’re a disgraced former attache to an embittered former hero turned recluse. What there isn’t enough of is whatever handwavium and skilled personnel are needed to snap one’s fingers and produce a new rescue fleet without depriving others of humanitarian relief and protection.

Again, that assumes we steelman Clancy. There is a lot of narrative weight pushing us to trust Picard’s assessment of the situation post-Mars: he is the hero after all. The hostile interview of the first episode was loaded with a lot of not so subtle triggers for humanitarian minded viewers that seem very intentionally designed to place them in the emotional space of that creeping dread that empathy is dead, having been replaced by an unapologetically narrower conception of who is deserving of respect, comfort, and even life.

However, I think that given Picard the character will spend the first five episodes questioning his own place in the narrative of his life and the lives of others, I think the Federation as a character is owed a serious examination of whether we should simply throw out everything else we have ever known about the society the first time someone is rude to a father figure to many of us. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean the Federation was actually in the right to leave the Romulans twisting in the wind. It wouldn’t be the first time a judgment on which many, which few, and what needs results in painful and potentially unvirtuous choices: just ask the Maquis. 

Radical Kindness in a Dark World

If I could sum up the theme of Picard the series, this would be it. In the very first episode Picard the character is moved from despair to man of action by the opportunity to help a troubled soul. 

This message is something I think that really got lost. The part of the audience that was offended by the callousness of the Interviewer and Clancy and the implication that to be risk averse and reluctant to risk being the frog in the story of the scorpion and the frog was already primed to be irked by this theme. 

I suspect that the element of the audience that felt itself keenly under threat by forces outside the Star Trek setting that the series was gesturing at may also have missed this theme in their annoyance at sci fi Paladin, Jean luc Picard, being portrayed as defeated, depressed, and content to marinade in luxurious misery.

Quite a few people seem to react poorly to being told that a minimum level of mercy extended to a known villain might be virtuous and a long term investment that might create conditions of real peace.

Nor does anyone like being accused of sequestering themselves in comfort and nursing their grief when direct and easy solutions to vast and pernicious problems don’t miraculously appear.

So in this way, Picard called out a lot of its potential audience practically in the first episode.

These are hard questions to grapple with and I don’t want to trivialize them. When do we risk our safety to take advantage of an opportunity to end a conflict, make an ally, or even to simply show mercy with no expectation of benefit? 

We can't know with certainty when we're playing the part of the frog in the parable of the scorpion and the frog after all. Read that again with different emphasis.

How harshly should we judge others or ourselves for not being able to imagine a better world or being unable to find the steps we could take to make it happen when the easy steps like voting, protesting, signing a petition, or threatening to resign fail?

If TNG primed us to expect simple answers, those aren’t found in Season One. There is a mostly self consistent moral clarity that mercy and kindness are praiseworthy but the show’s world building doesn’t support the idea that these are always going to lead to just outcomes. 

The people who adhere to these ideals are generally, in my opinion, the more fun hang but whether they’re always right or not according to the narrative is troublingly ambiguous at times.

I have a suspicion that part of what appeals to people about Season Three, aside from the fact it brought back beloved and relatively uncomplicated legacy characters and largely benched the characters invented for the show, is that the morality of the show is just generally way less ambiguous. Unless you’re taking Shaw seriously that is.

Notably, the show by the end of episode five does step on this message just a bit. The midpoint of the season leaves us weighing whether or not Seven executing a gangster notorious for chopping up liberated Borg is harm reduction or a reduction of her humanity. The implications of this I found rather uncomfortable for the way the bleaker side of the scale seemed to have a lot more narrative weight.

Character Housekeeping

I have largely not really discussed Jurati, Rios, Elnor, Soji, and Narek up to this point. The reasons for this are relatively straightforward. None of them have really done anything that I feel the need to explore more deeply. This is not necessarily a dismissal of the characters, if you adore them we are not enemies, I’m simply just less interested in them than other topics at this point in the season.

Rios is a fun character and I love his holograms….and that’s about it. Up to this point he is interesting in terms of his relationship to Picard and what it says about Picard that he can clock a troubled ex-Starfleet officer within a minute of meeting them and, like Raffi, Picard seems to be inexorably drawn to people he can try to remold in his image.

Elnor is himself not very interesting to me, I don’t dislike the character, but he seems to function mostly as a narrative device to illustrate Picard’s failings after Mars and his tendency to struggle with expressing authentic emotions rather than praising people in the modality of a performance evaluation. He is also, if I recall, rather underutilized and developed as his own person going forward. He is almost entirely muscle and comic relief in episode five instead of making any meaningful connections to any other characters.

Soji was originally interesting the first time I watched the series largely because of the mystery she represented but I know the ending already. The character herself doesn’t provoke any response from me. That doesn’t invalidate someone else’s experience and if someone wants to write up a comprehensive analysis of Soji’s identity crisis as a metaphor for dysphoria or whatever, have at it. That’s not really my wheelhouse though and I’m content to let the people for whom that is a passion project do it infinitely better than I ever could. 

I may revisit Soji later because I am still troubled by her and Dahj’s story due to being somewhat unconvinced that it was necessary to conceal their memories and identities from themselves. It's unclear to me if there was a plan in place to recover them and then permit their true selves to reemerge in a gentler, more compassionate way after their mission was complete.

I’m far more sympathetic to Jurati this time around because I think her performance of being deeply disturbed by the Admonition is well done, but like Soji, at this point in the narrative I just don’t see anything I really care to talk about in any greater depth aside from observing that Jurati is a good surrogate for a particular kind of fan. Her performance of being unmoored by Oh’s psychic shenanigans was strong, but on a meta level if you feel like Maddox’s death was largely for shock value and unnecessary “edge” then I’m moderately sympathetic to you.

Screw Narek and his affected mental distress and gaslighting and double dumbass on his weird sister. I still don’t know who thought the implied incest stuff was a good idea or if there’s just something I’m missing, but its incredibly distracting.

Unanswered Questions

What is Seven’s arc like for the rest of the season? I don’t actually remember. Oh I remember what she does, I just don’t remember how it feels and to what degree it moves her closer to the less rampagey version who seems to be clinging harder to her humanity in Season Three.

What was the Synth plan? As Agnes notes, Maddox got a little “secret planny” so does this mean that no one else was in the loop for the plan to send Soji and Dahj out to uncover the truth behind the attack on Mars and the subsequent Synth ban and thus Maddox’s death screwed everything up? Was there a plan to recover them and restore their identities without the need for the traumatic rediscovery of their true selves through crisis and stress?

After Seven decided to solve her own personal trolley problem through summary vaporization, where does that leave the default moral assumptions for Star Trek Picard? Is this still a show where what is good is what is just or is virtue a luxury and justice is liquidating a mass murderer who can’t be practically brought to justice?

Is everyone, both the characters and the fandom, right about the Federation? Has it been irredeemably debased? Or is Picard, the character right, and what’s needed is to find the right sort of appeal to conscience?

For more like this check out my other essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

[kitkatopinions]

How would you rewrite cardin?

(I know from past post he is not your favorite but I didn’t want this question to be negative)

He did stop bullying and was protecting the kingdom.

I mean if emerald can be redeemed so can Cardin right?

There is a subtle difference between Emerald and Cardin, and it's that Cardin is an in-universe racist white man. Imo he's more comparable to Roman than to Emerald (Roman makes several anti-Faunus comments iirc directed at White Fang members as well as calling Blake 'kitty.') But with that being said, there are very few characters even villains that I think can't be redeemed (and I like redeeming Roman,) and Cardin definitely could be with the right writer who is making sure to be sensitive.

In the show, there's no reason to believe he's actually changed in my opinion, just that 'Jaune earned his respect' (a mentality cloaked in misogyny) and so he backed off of Jaune's team. Although we don't see him much after that, we also therefore don't see if he is actually no longer bullying people, we just know that he's no longer bullying Jaune. And we don't know that he hasn't been anti-faunus after taht, especially because no one stood up for Velvet before. Although other people see it differently, I personally think that Cardin fighting for Beacon while it indicates that he's brave, doesn't automatically mean anything good outside of that. He's essentially a racist giving strong misogyny vibes who has already proven he's willing to blackmail people he thinks are weak and target minorities, he just also wants to be a good badge carrying law enforcement officer. I personally wouldn't give him a redemption arc because although I think that everyone can be redeemed, there are characters who can also instead be used to acknowledge horrible people who want to be in positions of power who never take the chance to get better. For me, Cardin would fit into that category along with Jacques, Salem, and probably Watts, Tyrian, Hazel, Lionheart, Raven, and Cinder (with a different backstory,) and Junior if I was using him. In my own works, I would have Cardin possibly be kicked out of Beacon actually to demonstrate that they don't accept people like him in their profession (because I want to distance Hunters from the irl police comparisons,) and I might have Cardin turn to a life of crime instead (maybe under Junior since I can't see him respecting women enough to join Salem or Raven tbh.) I would redeem a lot of other people from less fortunate circumstances than him, and he would be a contrasting example of how entitled privileged cruel children can grow into being the evil violent villains when they don't check themselves.

However, just because that's what I would do doesn't mean that's what everyone should do, and Cardin is a fair character to want to redeem. So trying to imagine how I would do it if I did decide to give Cardin an actual redemption, here's what I personally would do.

Have his position at Beacon threatened or legit taken away from him, maybe even have him be put on probation for a crime or something. That puts him in a position where he has to act better even if he isn't actually better yet because he's being watched and what he wants is being threatened. An Eleanor Shellstrop style redemption where he starts out 'being good' because he has to in order to save himself and he can still be very selfish, but in the process of trying to save himself he's forced to challenge his ideals and realize some of his mistakes. Then he can start slowly trying to be a better person, realizing just how wrong he was, working to deconstruct his horrible ideals and being ashamed of his past behaviors but never making excuses or making that about him. I'd have the Fall of Beacon happen while he's still very terrible but already starting his growth, having him move to Vacuo or Atlas with other Vale students and now dealing with trauma and losing teammates, he'd try to 'start new' in the new school. But still being kind of terrible, he'd get reality checks, he'd realize that his behavior makes him alone and start making an effort to be better. And then when Team RWBY eventually arrives wherever he is, he'd still be snarky and insensitive and have the occasional cruel moment, but they'd be surprised to see the change, but Blake would still be like "yeah I have no interest in talking to Cardin" and they'd be like "absolutely, that is so valid." He could then start making some friends now that he was getting a lot better and not being a jerk, and help in the fight against Salem as a side character.

That's how I'd do it, anyway. Also I would switch out his ugly looking stupid garbage armor and bad haircut after he starts getting better. Cardin is.... On the list of Rwby characters I truly hate, but he could be done better, it just would take some work, and it isn't really what I personally would go with or enjoy.

[ladyhindsight]

i feel rude for sending so many asks (and still wanting to send maaaaaany more) even after you said you don't have much time, and i had a holiday + weekend free that i used to stuff your inbox...

i too hope you have been well during the last year!!! the effort you put into this blog is amazing and admirable, and i hope you know how much it's appreciated. not only your work of going through so much material, but also how you are open to discuss different point of views and respectful to new opinions

i was very interested to see you've finished chain of gold, i have also just finished my chog reread and there are specific stuff i would love to talk to you about. there's also another post of yours that i was very invested in and hope to talk to you about later

and maybe you have noticed but i also have been spending a lot of time on cc's tumblr reading every one of her posts, because i want to understand the timeline of her perspective on the tsc world and catch stuff that didn't make the books. i'm doing all this bc i have plans to write fanfiction about robert. he has been my favorite character since i was fifteen (several years ago) and now that i can't enjoy the books anymore i want to do my own stuff to indulge my love for him (also bc he's a minor character anyway so, not much to go for). that's why you see me going after timeline and worldbuilding inconsistencies/holes, it's stuff i want to figure out a way to fix

all of this discussion will happen in your time tho, i hope you are taking care of yourself and getting your rest ❤️

Nooo, never feel rude! I'm happy we're so in this together. 😂❤️ No worries, I'm trying to catch up with the blog whenever I have appropriate time, and I'll try to get to your other messages as soon as I can (I'm about to sleep for a bit, lol). I'm elated that there is still so many things to discuss and get really down on the timeline and worldbuilding stuff because that is what I really like the best, the deconstruction of it.

Also happy writing! I'll be waiting for your thoughts on Chain of Gold and whatever you have in mind. 😊

[i-did]

Do you know when the racism and ableism accusations against Nora started? Because back when I was active in 2016/2017 and don't think they were a thing, or were very low-key. Was it something she said or are people just basing it off the things she wrote in the books?

From what I remember, the first time I heard the blanket statement of “Nora is racist/fetishizes gay men” blanket statement was early fall 2019 (which is so ironic for the fandom to say on so many levels lmao). There wasn’t a catalyst or anything, just she went offline 2016 and no new content was coming out and the aftg fandom is such an echo chamber that… an accidental smear campaign happened.

 Before then, I would see occasional “Nora used ableist slur” which… is funny (not that ableism isn’t serious) to me people care more about that than Seth saying the f-slur. IMO this is because with Seth, it clearly shows the character thinking it and not the author who is writing about what will be an end game mlm relationship. 

But anyways! Long story short, it's the fact that she’s an ace/aro woman who wrote a mlm book, and based off of the events in canon. There is no “Nora called me/someone else a slur” it’s “Nora wrote a book where slur(s) are used” and “the Moriyama’s are Japanese.”

Below I put my own opinion on these claims and go into more detail:

CW for discussions of: racism, ableism, mlm fetishization

Fetishization: (and mentions of sexism at the end)

To one question in the EC about her inspo for aftg she jokingly responded how she wanted to write about gay athletes. On other parts of your blog you could see she was a hockey fan and an overall sports fan (anime or otherwise) but I've seen this statement taken out of context and framed as “she's one of those BOYXBOY” shippers. Considering how… well-developed both Andrew and Neil’s relationship is, and it takes them until like the 3rd book and there is a whole complex ass plot going on around, you can see how that's just. Not really true. And considering the fandom is like… 85% women (queer women but still women) and I've gotten into a discussion with someone who is a woman and called Nora a fetishizer and was ignoring my opinions as a mlm, and I really just wanted to say “well what does that make you?” it's a very ironic high horse. She didn’t write 3 all 3 books to put Neil in lingerie pwp or crop-top fem-fatal fashion show, fandom did. 

Also, I talked to an ace/aro friend about this, and she talked to me about how AFTG spoke to her very much so as an ace/aro story. Neil is demisexual, Nora didn’t know of the word at the time of reading it, but she did get an anon asking if Neil was demi after, and she said “had to look it up, and yep, but he doesn't really think about it” (paraphrased). Obviously it would have been cool if andreil were canonly written as wlw by Nora instead, (which would have increased the amount of wlw rep and demi rep) but tbh I don’t think tumblr would have cared about it nearly as much and everyone would just call Neil a cold bitch–like people do with Nora’s other published book with a main character who's a woman. Plus they're her OC’s, not mine. 

The fact is that 50% of all LGBT+ rep in literature is mlm, mostly white mlm, and not written by mlm. I’m not going to hold her to a higher standard than everyone else, she already broke a shit ton of barriers in topics she discusses that otherwise get ignored. I’m grateful to these books for existing even if it's a mlm story written by a woman. I still will prioritize reading mlm written by mlm–and vice versa with wlw– in the way I prioritize reading stories about POC written by POC. But credit where credit is due, this is a very good story, and a very good demi story. 

Ableism:

To me, AFTG is a story about ableism and how we perceive some trauma survivors more worthy than others. Neil and the foxes using ableist language shows how people actually talk. Neil thinks shitty things about Andrew, like the others do too, and thinks he's “psycho”. The story ultimately deconstructs this idea and these perceptions of people. Wymack, someone who says the r-slur (which is still not known by the general population as a slur even in 2021 much less the early 2000s when the book was beginning to be written and what the timeline is based off of) is a character who understands Andrew better than most of the others do, and gives him the most sympathy and understanding despite using words like the m-slur and r-slur. Using these words isn't good, but it is how people talk, and this character talks. Wymack is a playful “name caller” especially when he’s mad, the foxes think Andrew is “crazy” and incapable of humanity and love because of it. They call his meds “antipsychotics” as an assumption and insult in a derogatory way, when really antipsychotics are a very helpful drug for some people who need them. Even Neil thinks these things about Andrew until he learns to care about him. All the foxes are hypocritical to am extent, as people in real life tend to be. Nora herself doesn’t use these or tweet them or something, her characters do to show aspects of their personality and opinions and how they change over time.

Racism:

As for the racism, I've seen people talk about how racial minorities being antagonists is inherently bad, which I think lacks nuance but overall isn't a harmful statement or belief. However, Nora herself said she wrote in the yakuza instead of another gang or mob because she was inspired for AFTG by sports anime, (which often queer-bait for a variety of reasons). I haven’t seen a textual analysis acknowledging the racist undertones surrounding the Moriyama’s as the few characters of color who are also major antagonists, but instead just “Nora is racist”. Wymack having shitty flame tribal tattoo’s is just… a huge 90’s thing and a part of his character design. Her having a character with bad taste in tattoo trends doesn’t mean she's racist. There is the whole how Nicky is handled thing, but that's a whole thing on it’s own. The fandom… really will write Nicky being all “ai ai muy spicy, jaja imma hit on my white–not annoying like me–boyfriend in Spanish. With my booty hole out and open for him ofc.” and as a Mexican mlm I’m like … damn alright. 

I think there is merit to the fact that she writes white as the default* and unless otherwise stated a POC a character was written with the intent to be white is another valid criticism, as well as the fact that the cast is largely white, but everything Nora is accused of I've seen the fandom do worse. That goes to the debate of, is actively writing stereotypes for POC more harmful than no representation at all? And personally I prefer the lack of established race line that lets me ignore Nora’s canon intent of characters to be white and come up with my own HC’s over the fandoms depictions of “zen monk Renee with dark past” “black best friend Matt who got over drugs but is a puppy dog” “ex stripper black Dan who dates Matt” vague tokenism. I HC many of the upperclassmen as POC and do my best to actively give thought behind it and have their own arcs that also avoids the fandom colorism spectrum of “darkest characters we HC go to the back and fandom favorites are in the front and are the lightest.” 

*I however won't criticize her harsher or more than… everyone else who still largely does this in fanfiction regarding AFTG as well as literature in general. This isn't a Nora thing, it's a societal thing, and considering the books came out in like 2014 I'm not gonna hold her to a higher standard than the rest of the world. She's just someone who wrote her personal OC’s and self-published expecting no following. I don’t know her race and I’m not gonna hold her to a higher standard than everyone else just because. 

The criticisms I've seen have always been… ironic IMO, and clearly I have a lot of thoughts on it. I think most people say those things about Nora because they heard them, and it's the woke thing to say and do and don’t critically analyze their actions or anything, but just accept them. 

[enbylesbianism]

ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS: Simon Snow trilogy wrapped! (review)

Hi, there! It took me a while to finish this post, as I could talk about it for... a long time (not necessarily a good thing), but I got it! I like praise, so if anyone wants to tell me I did a good job... Also, I might edit this post later on. I don’t remember anything else I’d like to add, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I did after posting. My brain does not obey me. Anyways, off to it! By the way, I won’t give this book a real rating.

While this is a review on Any Way the Wind Blows, I intend on analysing some points of the overall series too. The book starts where Wayward Son left off, the end of the road trip, Simon and Baz having problems in their relationship, Penelope helping Shepard with his curse... and the whole situation of the NowNext vampires. Rainbow Rowell only seems to remember the first part. That leaves us with the second book of the series ignored almost completely, with the exception of Simon and Baz’s feelings as well as Shepard’s existence.

Don’t get me wrong, aspects of the book are mentioned, but never in a truly important way. Lamb, the Vampire King, is mentioned by Simon, but only focusing on his and Baz’s relationship, never about the fact that there are a bunch of vampires (supposedly ‘evil’) in the U.S. but I guess what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? I could count on one hand the times the NowNext vampires were mentioned (like, literally, this isn’t an exaggeration, I looked up ‘NowNext’ on the e-book and only got five results), all of them either being one of them considering telling someone else about it, then not following through with it, or dismissing it as a concern for Lamb. Which makes the plot of Wayward Son completely useless for the trilogy. Now, that wouldn’t matter as much if everything else had been properly developed, but we definitely can’t say that.

We are introduced to a brand new, poorly developed villain, Smith-Smith Richards, whose character arc is as ridiculous as his name. He’s one of the fake Chosen Ones that started appearing after the events of Carry On (and the only one to be mentioned and/or defeated, for that matter). It becomes clear that presenting as Simon Snow-ish is part of his brand, especially when Baz describes him as looking like the Netflix adaptation version of Simon, and that he was raised and guided by his uncle, who’s just... there. I don’t think it would’ve been hard to make him manipulating Smith-Smith into believing he’s the prophetic savior of the Magickal World, which would not only make both of their characters more interesting, but it could also serve as a parallel of Simon’s relationship with the Mage. Richards also has some special powers such as increasing a mage’s magic for a limited amount of time, but taking it away afterwards, as well as making someone immune from spells. It’s worth saying those aren’t skills that are usual in the Magickal World, or else there wouldn’t be so much confusion and shock from people (specially Baz and Penny, who would definitely have heard of something like this before), but we get no explanation on why or how Richard has them.

Then, we have the Salisbury’s. We, as readers, already know Lucy and Davy are Simon’s parents, making Ruth his grandmother. It’s noticeable that Rowell builds up to that discovery, by making Simon get along with Ruth instantly, him thinking about Lucy a lot etc. It makes us excited to read the part where they actually figure it out, to know how Simon would deal with that, him dealing with the fact that he’s the Mage’s son and the fact that, technically, he killed his father. I suppose that’s the point, but actually getting to that part was incredibly underwhelming. The way they discovered about Simon—being able to lift a family sword—hadn’t been mentioned or hinted at before. One would’ve expected Simon, who’s particularly interested in swords as it’s mentioned many times throughout the series, to notice a freaking Excalibur at the Salisbury’s place before. 

And speaking of noticing things: when it’s finally revealed that Simon is Lucy’s son and the Mage’s heir, Baz pointed out the uncanny similarities between his boyfriend and the deceased Watford principal. “Those narrow eyes. That tilt of his head. I thought... I thought he’d learned it. Was imitating it.” + “Merlin, Simon, you even look like him.”  (Any Way the Wind Blows, chapter 86) Simon was the Mage’s protégé for years and I assume the Magickal authorities knew that he was the one to inherit all of his money and personal belongings, but no one, in the whole British Magickal community, thought about them being related? I refuse to believe there were no conspiracy theorist teachers at Watford or that Mitali or even the Pitch’s alongside everyone who was against the Mage didn’t at least check to know if there was something behind those characteristics. Baz literally said (chapter 88), “I think it’s undeniable. I’d cast ‘Flesh and blood’ on them, but it would bounce right off of Snow (...)”, so there is a spell for that. Plus, we didn’t even have one whole chapter of Simon dealing with this information! The chapters (no more than five, out of ninety-one) were divided between Simon, Baz and Lady Ruth’s POVs. He’s the main character, so one would think he’d get more development.

Another point that felt rushed was the romance. While Simon and Baz’s relationship wasn’t, as it’s been a topic Rowell has explored for three books (we’re not counting Fangirl here, as their ‘participation’ on it was minor and their personalities weren’t as consistent as in the trilogy. Not that it is that consistent there), the others just felt like she wanted everyone to finish the trilogy with a pair. I’ll start with Shepard and Penny. There were fans who liked them together before Any Way the Wind Blows, but it wasn’t hinted at—it was more like a fandom thing. I personally like them as a couple, but it could have had development and, maybe, foreshadowing in Wayward Son. I mean, they did fight monsters during a huge part of a road trip together.

The next one I’ll talk about is Agatha and Niamh. I love them, don’t get me wrong. Actually, it’s precisely because I love them that I wish they’d gotten a better treatment. Niamh wasn’t introduced before Any Way the Wind Blows. I get why she wasn’t introduced in Carry On—it was interesting to see a character who wasn’t caught up in Simon and Baz’s drama during the school years—but a hint of her existence could’ve been left in Wayward Son. Agatha is an important character on it, and a mention of her father training an aspiring veterinary could’ve fit somewhere, as a hint, maybe. (Also, Lucy, the dog, being absolutely forgotten during this book when a lot of Agatha’s time is spent in a veterinary clinic...) Besides, we could get the vibes from them, but after they kissed, there was barely any content. We didn’t get them calling each other ‘girlfriend’ (or if they even like that label at this point), or the aftermath of the kiss, or a POV from Niamh. Or Niamh appearing the epilogue? If Agatha was taking care of the goats, I’m sure Niamh would have a part in that too. Still on Agatha’s character, but not on Niamh’s, it felt like Rainbow Rowell was setting up for aromantic and asexual Agatha, specially because of this quote: “It was like she'd pulled the feeling right out of my heart. I could have kissed her. (I still wish sometimes that I wanted to.) (That would feel like an answer to... the question of me. Then I could say, 'Oh, thats who I am. That's why I've been so confused.')” (Wayward Son, chapter 4).

And I was leaving the best (I need to be sure everyone knows I mean this sarcastically) of the romance topic for the end: Fiona and Nicodemus. It’s just... so forced and undeveloped. Not even because, to me, they’re both gay as hell. There was just... such a lack of development! I don’t think we had any interaction between the both of them before Any Way the Wind Blows. There was no foreshadowing or why would Fiona, a vampire hunter from a family of vampire hunters, would marry... a vampire! I’d already find it weird to see fanfiction of them as a crackship, but it’s canon?! Like, canon as in they’re going to get married and use Fiona and Natasha’s mother’s ring? Seriously, nothing will take from me that this is a lavender marriage (as I’ve already discussed with my best friend, which inspired this post of theirs.)

I’d also like to speak about a topic that’d been hinted throughout the series, especially post-Carry On, which is the criticism towards the Magickal Community in the U.K.. That criticism is very much embodied in Shepard’s character. It’s explicitly said that the British mages have some kind of supremacy towards other supernatural beings, such as vampires for example, gatekeeping literal magic. Up until relatively recently, mages with weak links with magic couldn’t attend Watford (and that’s a major plot point in the final book) and there’s a denial towards any other kind of magic except the ones that are part of their craft. Even within the Magickal community itself, there are more important families that are more likely to succeed, like Natasha receiving criticism for marrying Malcolm, as a Pitch. It felt pointless not to tackle the issues you’ve set up yourself in your own universe. Penelope has very strict morals related to magickal law and beliefs, something that she could’ve deconstructed, especially considering Shepard, her love interest, symbolises that. Another point related to that is, the trilogy is very clearly heavily inspired by Harry Potter, where many of those points are very clear (e.g. wizard supremacy in relation to other species, such as werewolves and domestic elves and the status quo that makes some traditionally magical families more influential than others, like the Malfoy’s vs. the Weasley’s), so it’s not an easily forgettable concept.

The series also had a lot of inconsistencies. The one I’ve seen talked about more often is Simon and Agatha’s... intimacy status, let’s call it that. Simon’s whole thing in the first book was that he struggled controlling his magic when experiencing intense emotions, which makes it hard to believe that he managed to have sex withount an... accident. Besides that, though, there’s this quote, “She (...) presses a kiss into my temple. No one has ever kissed me there. No one has ever kissed me anywhere but on my mouth” (Carry On, Chapter 27), but in Any Way the Wind Blows, when Simon’s about to have his wings cut, Agatha says, “It’s a strange feeling to look at someone’s chest and know it’s nothing to do with you anymore, but still to remember kissing every inch.” (Chapter 14)

So, we have established that Rainbow Rowell’s work, both character and plot driven, is flawed. “But we got the characters interacting for the closure of the series, at least!” Well... we got interactions between the canon romantic relationships, yeah. But besides that, we didn’t get much. There were no interactions between Agatha and Penny, or Shepard with Simon and Baz. Or Penny and her mother figuring stuff out. Or literally anyone with a therapist. And not gonna lie, the interaction we got between Baz and Dev was underwhelming, to say the least. Niall is nowhere to be seen, too.

Rainbow Rowell’s writing is beautiful: she writes poetic lines that make the book seem perfect at first glance, if you don’t think about it for too long. Her words are very shiny, but once you get use to that light and see what’s behind them, what’s between one shiny quote and another, it has so many flaws and plot holes that it reads like a first draft. There are many concepts in there that are genuinely good: the rest of the trilogy focused on the protagonist dealing with the trauma of being a child soldier instead of being entirely an adventure, Simon being unlabelled, a fake Chosen One that gives mages fake hope... Those are all good ideas, but so poorly explored that, despite being an entire book/trilogy, it still feels like a writing pitch or something among those lines.

I felt iffy about other things during my reading of the series, but they aren’t exactly plot points, so I’ll just list them below:

Mitali, Penny’s mom, including ‘discovering your bisexuality’ as a mid-life crisis thing 

As I’ve seen people talking about biphobia/bi erasure in the books, I’ll be including this post that features both unlabelled and bisexual individuals talking about the topic (it isn’t my place, as a lesbian, to talk about this, that’s why I decided not to do so.)

Romanticising of Baz’s suicide (a.k.a. chapter 61) in the first book. If you’re not in a good place mentally, like I was when I first read Carry On, I hope you know that a kiss or romance doesn’t help any mental illness you or others might have. Don’t let anyone use your guilt to manipulate you. Paraphrasing Alice Oseman in their graphic novel Heartstopper, love can’t cure a mental illness.

Any Way the Wind Blows was... very horny. I can’t point out how this makes the book bad exactly, but it wasn’t something I enjoyed. One of Rainbow Rowell’s strongest skills is that her quotes, when loose, are good. They tend to be poetic and just beautiful, overall. But in the... explicit scenes, these skills were barely used, and I felt like I was reading NSFW tweets off of someone’s private account on Twitter. Besides, the first two books of the series weren’t written like that, so the change was very sudden.

The older people could’ve been more explored. Penelope and Mitali’s relationship and how similar the both of them are compared to each other, Daphne and Professor Bunce’s insecurities and why they believed in Smith-Smith, Fiona, Nico, and Ebb... Also, the Mage and Lucy. We could’ve had more on them, y’know. 

The pop culture references. They made the book read even more like Twitter’s feed. Honestly, if I wanted to read prompts and nice ship content alongside memes from Twitter with some horny thoughts sprinkled all around, I would’ve opened the Twitter app. Or Tumblr, Instagram, whatever.

The POV switching felt lazy to me at times. It’s nice to know how different characters are experiencing that situation, yes, but sometimes, like during the discovery that Simon is a Salisbury, it read as if Rowell wanted to create tension, but couldn’t think of any other way to do it except the switching around.

Narrative wise, I think Simon and Baz should’ve spent more time broken up. 

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[itsclydebitches]

The thing that feels disingenuous about Miles answer about Ironwood is that he was part of the writing staff that framed the general as a cool character to start with. I do think that the signs about Ironwood's evil were clear since V2 and in V7 he was an outright dictator from episode 1. Nonetheless, he was still consistently framed as a cool character, someone you can trust and rely. You don't get to blame the fans for liking a genocide if you was the one framed him as cool in the first place.

I actually don’t think being cool is the problem. If we’re satirizing and/or making a  statement about the toxic masculinity that leads to something like a dictatorship, then being “cool” is a crucial part of that. People don’t leverage the power they have by looking lame, they do so by appearing desirable, enviable, awesome. Being in the military is supposedly “cool.” Being a white guy with a giant gun is supposedly “cool.” Having power over an entire nation is supposedly “cool,” etc. If you only make such characters look revolting  — even when they are  — then you miss one of the main recruitment tools for this kind of rhetoric. Any version of Ironwood that’s meant to make a point about the dangers of following someone like him needs to make him look “cool” and then deconstruct that, pointing out the ways in which this cool veneer is a lie meant to pull you in. To do otherwise is to claim that evil people are always easy to spot. Making your villains “uncool” implies that the people who do appear cool in real life must be fine then. That good looking, charismatic leader is great. Why would I look critically at his actions? He’s too cool to be evil. 

My personal problem is not that “They made the dictator look cool and we can’t possibly expect the audience to tell the difference between someone who is truly good and someone who is just using various Cool Points to skate by” because that would be the point of such a character  — the work the show needs to do. My problem is that RWBY didn’t do that work. At least, not to the extent they needed to. Rather than making Ironwood a truly heinous character (prior to Volume 7 ‘s shooting, I mean) and allowing the audience to learn how appearing cool can’t hide that, they just made him good person. Straight up. Flawed, absolutely, but no worse than any of the other character on screen, particularly post Volume 6 when our heroes are frequently putting people in danger, seizing power, telling lies, keeping secrets, and generally acting in the ways we’re supposedly meant to condemn Ironwood for. Since talk of Miles’ vid last night I’ve seen three separate “Ironwood was always bad, idk how people can miss the signs” posts and those people are half right. There 100% were signs we were meant to pick up on. The problem is RWBY then went and deconstructed those signs. Ironwood didn’t just bring an army to a peace festival, he brought an army to an event he had good reason to believe wasn’t peaceful  — and he was right. Ironwood didn’t wrest control from Ozpin (using a series of checks and balances that exist for this very purpose...) because he has an obsession with being in control, he did so because he honestly believed Ozpin was putting people in danger  — and he was right. Ironwood didn’t step up post-Fall because he arrogantly believes he’s the only one capable of saving Remnant, he did so because he’s actually the most qualified: a fully trained huntsmen leading an Academy (like Ozpin) with an army and knowledge of this secret war. What, was Ironwood supposed to read the script and wait for the group of dropout teenagers to arrive and save the world instead? To say nothing of how his power and responsibility are framed as sacrifices, not something he sought out. Ironwood doesn’t want to be the sole ruler here. His desperate relief at having allies again proves it. Good setup for the rise of a dictator would have been Ironwood being cagey with his information and exerting control over the group... not telling them everything, not giving them more power, not letting them keep the Lamp, not taking arrest off the table so as to keep them in line, and generally doing the opposite of everything he did do to share that responsibility and power. RWBY got very good at giving us the first half of these red flags  — he has an army, he’s stubborn, he’s hurting Mantle, etc.  — but then time and time again introduced a context that changed that flag dramatically: they are fighting literal monsters, he’s no more stubborn than our title character, hurting Mantle is a consequence of a plan he thinks will help the whole world and our heroes back this. Those who insist that Ironwood was 100% a villain in the making (or a villain already) prior to shooting Oscar are working from their assumption of what his archetype represents, not what RT actually put on screen. Because RT is just really bad at writing a dictator character. They didn’t have the skill to manage someone who only appeared good on the surface, let alone a character with the complex nuance of wielding “coolness” to their advantage, which is why in Volume 8 they had to resort to cartoon villainy with literal, evil spotlights. It’s not that the audience is too dumb to pick up on those red flags, it’s that RT couldn’t manage to plant them without continually introducing valid justifications. You can’t say, “Bringing an army is a bad thing. Look at this dictator coding!” without me going, “Yeah, except in the fictional world you created an army does not represent the problems it does in our real life societies. This isn’t a guy amassing soldiers to go after oil, he’s trying to protect people from monsters. Not even metaphoric monsters acting as stand-ins for a minority group. Literal, evil monsters!” RWBY ignores its own context and a good chunk of the fandom ignored it too. 

The problem with that (besides the general frustration of someone ignoring parts of canon to forward a particular reading) is that the fandom’s go-to claim is that everything is meaningful  — and it’s a reading the writers very much support. Fans do not, as the above attests, push for a simple reading of, “Don’t think too hard about it. Just take the surface reading and run with it” which, while still frustrating, would have at least been a valid stance. Rather, they insist very strongly that nuance and depth are what drive the show. From the song lyrics to a tiny detail in the opening, everything is important and if you don’t accept that then you can’t appreciate RWBY’s complexity. 

“Okay,” I said. “Then in that case Ironwood coming around to Ozpin’s position is meaningful too? Glynda  — one of our best and most faultless characters  — supporting him is meaningful? Flipping his gun, defending Weiss, Qrow writing to him, the group working with him for months on end... all of it is meaningful to his characterization? You said so yourself.” 

“No, no, no,” comes the reply. “He’s just bad. But he’s also nuanced. He’s tricked you into thinking he’s a good person by acting kind sometimes, by getting support sometimes, but none of that is true. His actions are what matter and his actions are simplistically bad.” 

“Ohhhh. So then does that mean this story is really about the creation of a villain?” 

“Huh?” 

“Well, Ruby. She’s ‘nuanced’ in the same way. She acts kind sometimes and gets support, but her actions are terrible. She endangered an entire city because she couldn’t wait to see if Ironwood got his letter. She condemned Ozpin for keeping secrets about Salem and then kept those same secrets just two days later. When the kingdom was under attack she sat around drinking tea, crying on a staircase, just hoping someone would come fix things for her  — all while actively sabotaging the one person who was trying to save people, even if that action seems silly to us (let’s fly really high). So if we’re looking at the impact of someone’s actions outside of their intent, as we just did with Ironwood, then she’s a bad guy too, yeah?” 

“No! She’s the hero!” 

“... these characters don’t know she’s the hero from a meta perspective. If we’re supposed to judge the meaning of RWBY based on these details — ” 

“But it’s not just the details. It’s also the allusions. Everyone in RWBY is based on another person or character. It’s very complex and that inspiration drives their story, so if you don’t have that information it’s no surprise you’re confused. For example, this is why Penny had to get a human body. That’s what happened to Pinocchio!” 

“Oh! So then Ironwood is destined to be a good guy!” 

“What?” 

“Well, you just said the allusions drive their stories, right? The whole point of the Tin Man is that he always had a heart and just needed to realize that. So clearly — “ 

“No! He’s supposed to be a classic dictator, he’s only bad!” 

And ‘round and ‘round we go. RWBY’s writing is atrocious yet the fandom pushes this narrative that it’s all a complex, multi-layered story that requires taking every part into account to understand the “real” message... but when you try to do that with certain characters like Ozpin and Ironwood it’s, “No, actually, they’re just simple archetypes of Bad Men.” Nuance exists for the bees, but not other ships. It exists for the characters fans like, but not the ones they don’t. And RWBY’s inspirations have to predict the ending for this character... but not that other character. It’s a nonsense grab bag! 

Fans are right that Ironwood had a lot of red flags to set up this downfall. Fans are also right that those red flags were severely undercut, thus reversing their impact. Fans are right that Ironwood becomes a 100% bad guy who kills because he can and threatens to bomb a city. Fans are also right that this characterization feels absurd for Ironwood, both in terms of his morality and his intelligence (how does bombing Mantle help you now??) Ironwood is badly written. He was badly written in 7 and 8, if he was always meant to be a dictator in the making then he was badly written in 2-6, and he’s conclusively badly written when it comes to lacking a backstory and a canonical semblance  — two things are are supposedly driving all of this characterization. That’s the answer: not that he’s good, or bad, but that RWBY can’t write a consistent character, let alone a nuanced one, so it’s no surprise the fandom can’t decide on anything. What’s there to decide on? It’s that nonsense grab bag. In a different show I think making the dictator appear cool would be a crucial bit of commentary, but RWBY doesn’t have the skill to pull that off. 

[imhaitusncarnate]

I have very mixed feelings on that aot ending

Ok so the politics of Attack on Titan have been discussed by a lot of people, some of whom have a very surface- level understanding of the story. I would like to start by giving my disclaimer that Attack on Tiatan ABSOLUTELY isn’t fascist, its anti racism, anti bigotry and anti discrimination themes are extremely apparent in it’s examination of the Eldians inside Marley, and fascist views held by characters such as Gabi are explicitly condemned in the text and made clear to be misguided and false. 

I would now like to draw everyone’s attention to the openings of seasons 1 and 2. 

Images like these combined with lyrics like these:

You pigs who sneer at our will to step over corpses and march onwards Enjoy the peace of livestock false prosperity "freedom" of the dying wolves that hunger

We dedicate and sacrifice our hearts

And also the use of german lyrics:

Sie sind das Essen und Wir sind die Jaeger! (they are the food and we are the hunters)

O, mein Freund! Jetzt hier ist ein Sieg. Dies ist der erste Glorie. O, mein Freund! Feiern wir diesen Sieg, für den nächsten Kampf!

(O, my friend! Now, here is a victory. This is the first glory. O, my friend! Let us celebrate this victory for the next battle!)

This is the stuff that lead me to believe that this is a deliberate use of fascist imagery. If the show just wanted to go for a militaristic vibe for the aesthetic of it, references this explicit to fascist propaganda and the use of German lyrics was not necessary. Also, lines like this:

And plenty of evidence that things were not what they seemed it the world of aot and that the overly simplistic view of good vs evil (humans vs the titans) was incorrect led me to believe that Attack on Titan was a deliberate deconstruction. That it was putting the audience into the mindset of the fascists to pull the rug from under their feet later. And I was right. Sort of.

As the story progresses, the world becomes a more and more complex political landscape and we are led to believe that this black and white mentality is wrong. We are also informed that the people who can transform into titans, the Eldians, are an opressed minority, explicitly paralleled to the Jews during nazi Germany, from their living in internment camps, to them being called devils, to their armbands, to a large number of them (our heroes) being confined in an island with walls circling them, which is revealed by Isayama to be Madagascar. The island that the nazis originally meant to confine the Jewish population in before arriving at the conclusion that that would be too costly, and that genocide was preferable. 

This is the first of the story’s mixed metaphors. While the show’s heart is in the right place, being sympathetic to the Eldians and showing their plight under marleyan opression and persecution, there is one problem. The reason for the opression of the Eldians is because the world is afraid of their power, as they are a race with the ability to transform into titans. There is, therefore, a tangible, justification for their internment. The Jews were not in any conceivable way a danger to anyone, they were simply scapegoated for the complex socioeconomic problems of Germany in the time period. Also, if we take a look at those openings again, we observe that the Eldians (our main characters) who wish to free themselves from their shackles are framed as fascists. So... what is that saying?

 The idea, as I see it, is that the story is condemning fanaticism in general, as a biproduct of a militaristic black and white worldview. The monstrous titans that our (framed as fascist) heroes fight against are revealed to be human, just like them.

The same is the case for the Eldian “devils” that the Marleyans fight against. Gabi, the character who is most fanatically against Eldians (despite being an Eldian herself) is comfronted with the humanity of the people she hates once she gets to know them.

Again, Isayama’s heart is on the right place here, trying to condemn bigotry, however the explicit referencing of history is the imagery is kind of misplaced, for the reasons I previously mentioned. Now let’s have a look at Eren Yeager.

Eren starts the story as a kind of messed up kid. He kills the human traffickers who kidnapped Mikasa while screaming:

I mean, in this case he is certainly justified, but his rage and anger are definitely not normal for a child his age.

This is Eren. He can’t stand injustice when he sees it. And injustice is what happens to him when the titans attack. His already fiery attitude and mindset is what leads him to this declaration of revenge:

That side of Eren is visible throughout the story and it’s foreshadowing for what he will later become

Eren, however, is a natural product of his environment. Ravaged by socioconomic inequality, with the rich living in the centre of the walls and the poor living in the outskirts, constantly under the threat of the titans and unable to obtain any kind of freedom, Eren’s philosophy of the need to be strong to overcome one’s enemies makes sense. The mantra “the strong prey on the weak”, that he ends up teaching Mikasa (another allusion to fascist ideology) is a biproduct of the world he lives in. He does not know of the political intricasies outside the walls. All he knows is he must kill the titans.

Eren’s titan is described as the “manifestation of humanity’s rage. It is huge and monstrous, and could be seen as a metaphor for vengeful hatred in general. Keep that in mind, it’s relevant for the ending.

This manufactured and false black and white worldview shapes him as a character, and it’s what eventually, after the arrival at the much desired ocean, leads him to this:

“Will we finally be free?”

In the continuation of the story, Eren falls toward the dark side more and more, to the point of committing atrocities and war crimes that are explicitly framed as being similar to what he suffered as a child (see his actions in Liberio). He even acknowledges that, telling Reiner, the person who committed said war crimes against him, that he essentially has no hard feelings and understands that the two of them are similar, doing what “needs to be done”. The character of Gabi, who, after what happens in Liberio, becomes obsessed with revenge against the Eldian “devils” is meant to be a foil for Eren, and his obsession with killing the titans after what happened to him. 

Extremely interesting is the way in which certain ideas and images are flipped in the later seasons. Namely, in season 4, we see a character who idolizes Mikasa and supports Eren’s plans in a scene where she spouts the same mantra of “the strong prey on the weak” and says that Mikasa saving her is what showed her that only with strength she can defeat her enemies. Mikasa tells her to shut up, and she proceeds to do the salute, that has been so glamorized by the show’s openings thus far. Now, it is done by a person from a military faction with a fanatic worldview. The direction doesn’t glamorize it at all. It is a nuanced, almost masterful deconstruction. 

Levi, who has always looked for reasons for why his comrades had t die, justifying their heroism and convincing himself that their deaths were not pointless, ends up here:

At this point, I was in love with Attack on Titan. From here, it only figures that Eren ends up attempting a genocide of the people outside the walls. He has essentally become what he hated the most, and he’s a natural result of the world that created him. Despite his noble intentions, he has turned into a monster. Mikasa, the prerson who loved him the most, completes her character arc by killing him, thus rejecting her blind devotion to him and being free, while at the same time continuing to love the person he once was. It’s a sad and tragic ending, painting Eren as a tragic character and making a pretty strong political point, despite having a few mixed metaphors.

And then, chapter 139 came out...

And Eren apparently pulled a Lelouch. This is a “I purposfully turned myself into a monster to save the world and make my friends into heroes for killing me” kind of thing. It is important to state that the manga makes it clear that Eren would have trampled the world even if they didn’t stop him, because of his urge to be free. However, that urge, that fighting spirit, end up being a good thing. The death of our heroes in battle apparently wasn’t pointless after all. They say goodbye with a salute

The Yeagerists, who were previously framed as fanatics, end up in charge of the government

It is important to state that the real event, the catalyst of the ending, is that killing Eren, who has turned himself literally into the manifestation of humanity’s rage (which has now, through the intricacies of the story, taken the political meaning of hatred and intergenerational trauma), eliminates the power of the titans. The titans are no more. This, in of itself, is good, and in keeping with the spirit of the political commentary thus far. However, the war, is still not over, and Eren’s mantra ends up being correct

So the only way for the war to end is one of the races to be wiped out? 

Also, despite Eren’s genocide being wrong, it is, in the end, justified, as a necessary evil by the story. An Ozymandias kind of moment in which the ends justify the means, but Eren himself has to die, because his crime was too great for him not to suffer punishment. Essentially, this chapter undoes all of the insightful commentary the story had made so far, by proving the ideology of its main character right. Story- wise this isn’t a bad ending, but if we take into account the political references the series has made, and its desire to explicitly tie itself with such imagery makes the ending leave a really bad taste in my mouth. What it essentally says, is that, yes, bigotry and racism are bad, yes, blind hatred is bad, but the general idea of might makes right and the impossibility of reconciliation are true. Armin, who has, throughuout the story, been Eren’s opposite, in terms of looking for peaceful solutions to conflict is rendered meaningless in the end, because him alongside with the other characters were all playing into Eren’s plans. The hearts of our main characters as recruits were in the right place, their fighting spirit admirable, and the overall worldview we are presented with in the beginning of the story remains more or less unchallenged. 

So where does that leave this imagery?

The conclusion is that one must think very carefully before including allegory in their work. I am not accusing Isayama for fascism, and I appreciate the efforts at deconstructing it throughout the story. However, in the end he did an oops I accidentally justified the mentality I was trying to condemn. I still like Attack on Titan, I believe it has artistic value and is overall a pretty good anime, I even agree with its politics to an extent. However, it is very important to critically examine the things we like, and see where they may have gone south. And this ending is that for me.

[thanksjro]

All Hail Megatron #15: Dang Bro, That Sure is a Redeemable Dude Right There

So, before we get into Season 2 of MTMTE, I thought it would be prudent to take a gander at all the stuff Megatron’s gotten done in the IDW publications. Y’know, for plot reasons. And also because of this little nugget of info I found forever ago:

Of course, just jumping straight into the 15th issue of a run isn’t going to give me a proper understanding of what happens narratively, so here is a very brief rundown of the events of AHM #1-14.

First thing I see- cover with Megatron holding the American flag in one hand and Optimus Prime’s head on a fucking pike in the other.

Shane McCarthy wrote several issues of this run. So expect some Empire of Stone vibes.

2009 Josh Burcham appears to not know how to color black people’s skin. I have no idea if he’s improved on this deficiency in his skills, but a person can hope.

Megatron kills a literal skyscraper’s worth of people. (was that allowed in 2009? I thought we were still being weird about that sort of thing back then, with 9/11 and all.)

A fighter pilot looks at a photograph of his significant other. This is how you know he’s going to die.

Megatron slaps a plane so hard it explodes, and then laughs about it. While all this is happening, Optimus is fucking dying on Cybertron. This makes Jazz very upset.

What seems like the entire goddamn US military is called in to deal with this intergalactic terrorist attack.

The Decepticons destroy all the bridges and tunnels connected to NYC.

Los Angeles and San Diego are also under attack.

Estimated 200K people dead. This is issue #3.

Megatron holds all of NYC hostage.

The Decepticons annihilate a destroyer-class warship.

San Francisco and Washington D.C. are overtaken.

Air Force One has been destroyed.

Megatron acts like an asshole to Starscream.

The Decepticons attack all of the United States.

The President of the United States is dead.

Megatron ripped the Matrix out of Optimus’ chest.

The shit that’s happening to America is also happening at all the other Autobot outposts.

This is also about the time that Overlord starts his terrorizing of Garrus 9.

Megatron says that the destruction of those weaker than himself is a “reward”.

Megatron doesn’t believe in the sanctity of life.

Beijing and Israel are destroyed by the Decepticons.

Megatron commissioned the Insecticons as beings of pure torment, for reasons.

Megatron commissions Bombshell to do some really fucked up shit to Hunter O’Nion.

Megatron waits around for Starscream to Starscream it up, then beats the everloving shit out of his employees.

Megatron doesn’t believe in an academic approach to warfare, for some reason.

Megatron’s totally cool with NYC getting nuked.

Megatron was planning on reprogramming his troops into being nice fellas once he beat the Autobots.

Megatron believes in ownership in those beneath him. He’s completely convinced that anyone in the Decepticon forces is essentially his property.

Megatron knees Optimus below the belt. That’s just poor sportsmanship.

The only reason Megatron survives a gunshot to the face is that he messed with Starscream’s head earlier in the day.

Thundercracker caught a nuclear bomb, tossed it into the stratosphere, and shot it. I don’t think he realizes that the fallout is still going to spread across the globe.

The Matrix is still in Decepticon hands.

Starscream’s head is in a friggin’ dark-ass place.

Then there’s some stuff setting up Galvatron and Cyclonus’ whole deal, but who cares about that? On to issue #15!

Motherfucker, that’s a Radiohead song-

The proper story of AHM ended with issue #12, and the issues after were split into two separate stories, written by two separate teams, which detailed events taking place after the main story was resolved. A series of epilogue scenes, if you will. We’ll only be looking at the first story, because it’s the only one that’s relevant to what I’m doing here.

Our official writer for “Everything in it’s Right Place” is Nick Roche, who we’ve run into several times over our journey through IDW. A majority of the story beats will be attributed to him, of course, seeing as Roberts was, at the time, only mentioned as assisting, and also not employed by the publishing company.

Our story opens with Prowl getting socked in the face by Springer, because he’s upset that his grandpa has gone AWOL. Perceptor’s also missing, but this isn’t about him. Prowl, whose shins are looking especially shiny today, lets Springer know that they’ve “got Kup back.”

See, once upon a time, Kup was stuck on a little planet called Tsiehshi, where Shockwave was growing one of his ores. Kup became addicted to the… thrall, I guess, of the crystals, and it drove him mad, making him hallucinate that he was being attacked by ghosts. What was actually happening was he was violently murdering his rescuers with his bare hands. When the Autobots finally managed to get him off the planet, he got shipped to Kimia, where the smartest boy in all the galaxy, Brainstorm, could work his science on him.

Guess they don’t call him Brainstorm for noth-

I’m so sorry.

Springer very much dislikes the fact that some dweebs in a lab are poking around in his Pap-pap thinking meat. He’s even less thrilled when he finds out how exactly they fixed said thinking meat.

Kup’s now a Pretender. The Stormbringer miniseries covered this process, and let’s just say, Springer’s got every right to be concerned, considering that the last time someone tried something like this, Cybertron was made completely uninhabitable. They’ve made breakthroughs, however, as Prowl keeps saying. He says it a lot, actually.

This is because Prowl is a bastard, and is also using the Pretender tech to make Kup into something for his own agenda. Which, I hopefully shouldn’t have to tell you, is kind of a shitty thing to do.

Springer is shown footage of Kup kicking some ass, and notices that he’s got something in his mouth. This is his vape rig, full of medicinal marijuana.

Dammit, Prowl, let me make a weed joke! This is because you’re a cop, isn’t it?

Prowl continues to be a complete and utter fucker in his internal monologue until Springer asks to see Grandpa. They head to the lab to find Kup in pieces, though it’s completely medically sound in this case. Kup has a minor absolutely-horrific hallucination, but he’s okay once he gets his cy-gar back.

We get a flashback to Prowl making sure Perceptor put the nasty, nasty bad-time programming into Kup’s head, because he’s sick of losing the war, and a single old man will surely turn the tides. Or, at least, it will when he’s damn charismatic and folks listen to him way more than they do Prowl.

Back in the present, Springer asks that Kup not be told what happened on Tsiehshi, because it’s kind of a major bummer. Prowl reflects on how only the cool kids get paid attention to, and assumes that the Decepticons are a much more organized machine. Clearly he hasn’t heard about how Overlord lives his life.

Anyway, so Kup is now a mouthpiece for Prowl, and he doesn’t even know it. That’s pretty fucked.

So, what have we learned from this experience? Well, even though Roberts didn’t personally assist on the actual Megatron-related portions of AHM, we can see where the character was, and I think that’s far more important than deconstructing Prowl’s whole deal at the moment.

God, I don’t know that redeeming this bastard’s going to be possible, James, but somehow I think you already knew that, given how you’ve written the guy in the past.

Yeah, you fuckin’ thought I forgot about Literally Hitler Megatron, didn’t you?

Well I didn’t.

[krystalgazer]

With the influx of new let’s plays of Doki Doki Literature Club, I’m reminded of how I liked it quite a bit when I first played it, but as time went on I became more and more ambivalent about it (spoilers ahead + spoiler for Hatoful Boyfriend).

What I most appreciated about the game was the first part of it, before all the glitchy edgy stuff happened. I do think the writing of the three main girls was pretty good initially. They felt like honest deconstructions of the different tropes that can be found in most dating sim games; how the cheery girl could have a deeper reason for forcing her outer personality into that mold, how the ‘tsundere’ could be using her aggression as a coping mechanism/is just reflecting the aggression she’s exposed to at home, how the ‘obsessive’ girl just has a surfeit of emotion about any number of things and tries to find coping mechanisms. I could find parallels of myself in each of them, especially Sayori considering how clinically depressed I’ve been for a good chunk of my life. This first part felt, while maybe a bit ham-fisted, a least a bit compassionate.

Then all the horror started happening, with a lot of it coming from Yuri’s ‘yandere’ actions and Sayori’s suicide, and all that compassion seems to be flushed down the drain. Yeah, the whole meta is about ‘oh, it’s just a game! The characters aren’t real!’ but I mean...you go to the trouble of realistically portraying mental illness and neurodivergence, then decide to portray it as not only scary, but actively revolting?

I think by centering Monika and her struggle with becoming self-aware, the game painted itself into a corner with the other characters; it wanted to deconstruct dating sims AND portray mental illness realistically AND be a horror game AND be a meta commentary on gaming, AI etc., but you can’t do it all without falling back into some unsavoury tropes. Horror and its exploitation of mentally ill and neurodivergent people have a long history, and while this game seemed to have its heart in the right place initially, it just fell back into well-worn damaging tropes at the end. It needed to do this to still garner sympathy for Monika, who canonically exacerbated the suffering of the other characters on purpose. The characters needed to be unlikeable, revolting, scary, otherwise Monika can’t be sympathetic. The real kicker was the second ending where, after deleting Monika, Sayori proves herself to be ‘just as bad’ by wanting to trap the mc in the same way Monika did when she gains self-awareness.

Monika is the face of the game, the ‘best girl’, while a lot of the fandom does actually see the other characters as the tropes that the game was apparently deconstructing; Sayori is a clingy annoying girl, Yuri is a scary Yandere, Natsuki is a tsundere. The game does, whether it intended to or not, centre and favour the ‘most normal’ girl. Any nuance actually exacerbates the tropes rather than makes it better; having a character going through realistic depression reduced back to the clingy annoying girl is far worse than just having a ‘one-dimensional’ character as found in other dating sims.

I feel like all the meta stuff, especially in Plus, seems to be excuse over excuse for falling back into awful tropes in regards to mentally ill and neurodivergent people. Oh, the characters aren’t real, feel sorry for the one who gained self-awareness. Oh, this is because of some shadowy organisation that is doing human experimentation. The actual fact is that Team Salvato made a horror game and used tired and damaging tropes.

I feel that my thoughts are a bit muddled here, but I also feel that the game itself is quite muddled in what it wanted to achieve, and for me at least, it ultimately failed. It has really good characterisation which ended up not meaning much as a best case scenario, and if it wanted to be a deconstruction and love letter to meta horror and dating sims in particular, it doesn’t do it nearly as well as other games, in particular Hatoful Boyfriend.

I am aware that I’m in the vast minority in regards to how I’m reading the game, and it’s not like there aren’t parts of it I didn’t like; I adored the poems and the characters to be honest. I could see the potential in the story which is why it was disappointing when the sensitivity needed when dealing with the themes the game chose to deal with was thrown away for the sake of jump scares. If there is a new game for the team, I do hope it’s better it that respect.

[haniawritesfiction]

Recent Reads-July/August 2021

The Psychology of Time Travel By Kate Mascarenhas

In a world where time travel was invented in the 1960s, two women become caught up in a murder that hasn't yet happened. For a book about time travel, The Psychology of Time Travel feels closer to realistic fiction than a sci-fi novel, honestly, if we ever invent time travel I could see this easily happening. For all that it technically a mystery, this book is more interested in the relationships, dysfunctions, and institutions that create these circumstances than the actual mystery. Don't go into this book expecting a murder mystery and you won't be disappointed. Mascarenhas masterfully uses pov's of minor characters to make this world feel truly immersive while never losing sight of her main characters, both of whom are flawed, fascinating, and very human. A great take on the time travel genre. -9/10

Devil's Ballast By Meg Caddy

A swashbuckling adventure focusing on the famed female pirate Anne Bonny. Devil's Ballast was.... a weird one. For a book that's meant to be a pirate adventure the pace is way too slow at times and then when it finally reaches the action, it rushes through it. The book also had a completely unnecessary pov of a pirate hunter that added absolutely nothing to the plot. I feel like I would've enjoyed the whole book way more if Anne herself had been more memorable, I'd just finished watching Black Sails, so Devil's Ballast's Anne Bonny and Jack Rackham are pretty boring in comparison to their Black Sails counterparts. But the part of the book that irked me the most was the romance. Anne spends the whole book seeming not that interested in Jack until the last second when he's her great love again. The strongest relationship in this book is the friendship between her and Mark Read, which was pretty cute and my favorite part of the whole book. -4/10

The Strangers Child By Alan Hollinghurst

In Edwardian England, while staying at a friend's house, a man writes a love poem that becomes famous. In the decades following, his family and friends are forced to live with his, and the poem's legacy. The Stranger's Child is an incredibly atmospheric book, with beautiful prose, but it felt like a bit of a letdown. Instead of an exploration of what if a famous love poem is actually gay, it's more of a meandering look at various moments in English history and the people living through it. There were chapters that just felt entirely pointless and there were only three sections that actually felt thematically linked. This book had so much potential, but it felt like the author's vision and the supposed premise were constantly at odds.-6/10

Crooked Kingdom By Leigh Bardugo

The sequel to Six Of Crows; political intrigue, gang wars, and magic all meet in the seedy underworld of Ketterdam. I read Six Of Crows about four months ago and mostly enjoyed it, though to be honest, I didn't quite get the hype. With this book, I get it. Crooked Kingdom weaves a complex and engaging plot to match it's superb worldbuilding and characters and I read it in one sitting. The fantasy elements were never too overwhelming nor predictable and the ending was the perfect amount of bittersweet. If you struggled through Six Of Crows, give this one a try, you'll find it hard to put down.-8/10

Circe By Madeline Miller

A re-imagining of an often maligned figure in ancient Greek mythology: the sorceress Circe. I had a massive greek mythology phase as a kid and so reading this was a blast. Miller's writing has an appropriately mythical feel, weaving multiple myths together to explore Circe's psyche. Circe herself manages to be incredibly likable despite her flaws and Miller expands her beyond her common depiction as a vindictive, promiscuous woman. Because of the nature of the plot, I feel like having basic knowledge of greek mythology enhances the reading experience, especially knowledge of the odyssey. To understand this Circe, it's important to understand the Circe of the odyssey and the way the common tropes of greek mythology are being deconstructed.-10/10

Honey Girl By Morgan Rogers

A young woman feels lost after getting her doctorate and runs off to spend the summer with a woman she got married to while drunk in Vegas. Honey Girl is not a romance novel or really your traditional romcom, instead, it is an exploration of family and coming of age in your twenties with a well-written love story at its center. From the prose and general atmosphere, this book has an almost magical feel, yet manages to feel incredibly raw and real. If you're burnt out on romcoms and want something that isn't too saccharine yet leaves you with that warm fuzzy feeling, this book is for you.-10/10

Bolla By Pajtim Statovci

In 1990s Kosovo, two men, a Serbian and an Albanian fall in love. Years later, the two men both struggle with the after-effects of the war and their circumstances. Bolla is not the sort of book that you can say you like, though I certainly didn't dislike it. The writing is fantastic and has a very unique quality (possibly due to the novel having been translated from Finish) yet Bolla is incredibly bleak. The romance presumably at the center of the novel is less of the focus and instead what anchors the two men's stories. Their relationship is over by chapter three and at first, I was honestly a little peeved that it got that little attention or description, however by the end of the book I honestly felt it worked. A haunting story of war and the human condition.-7/10

The Kingdoms By Natasha Pulley

When a man gets off a train in London, he can remember barely anything about himself or his life, except the sense that the reality he is faced with is wrong; Britain has been under occupation by the French since they won the Napoleonic wars 85 years ago. Determined to find out who he really is, he follows a century-old letter to an abandoned Scottish lighthouse and finds himself the key to winning a war that could change everything. The Kingdoms is a book that keeps on giving, just the premise of a Britain occupied by France is fascinating, but Pulley goes a step further weaving a complex plot that kept me on the edge of my seat. Her writing is fantastic and like the premise, it felt like entire books could be written about every single setting. The characters are also engaging, from Joe, our main character, who is just so immediately likeable, to Kit, a character who is the definition of morally grey. My only quibble is the female characters, who feel fairly underdeveloped and only really there to flesh out the male ones. -9/10

Cinderella is Dead By Kalynn Bayron

300 years after Cinderella found her happy ending her legacy has been twisted to create a dystopian life for the girls living in her kingdom. Four to five years ago, I think I would've really liked Cinderella is Dead; I mean it's a sapphic fairytale retelling! But my taste in books has changed a lot and this book just felt far too YA for me. The writing felt young, the characters underdeveloped and the plot cliched.-2/10

[linkspooky]

Black White Getou Gojou

The past twelve chapters, a flashback arc to when Gojou and Getou were both in Jujutsu High together has gone into length about why the strongest duo broke up, and why Getou in particular defected from Jujutsu sorcerers to the side of curses. 

This is one of the most interesting arcs so far, as it provides a lot of foiling for two of the strongest jujutsu sorcerers in the series on opposite sides of the conflict, and it also elaborates what likely the central thematic conflict of the series is. And it all ties to Getou’s motivations which are a lot less black and white then they appear to be at first. Let’s elaborate on that under the cut. 

1. Gojou and Getou

Getou and Gojou are introduced to us in the flackback as polar opposites. Gojou is impolite, sardonic, and basically uses his overpowering strength to push around and bully others. He is just as pushy and rude as his older self is.

Whereas, Getou is much more calm and collected. Unlike Gojou who uses his overwhelming strength to pick on a girl, Getou goes out of his way to save her and then lectures Gojou to keep him in line. Gojou jokes around, Getou is serious. 

The two of them are quite different, but they also are indtroduced to the scene in the same way, by showing off a massive feat of Jujutsu. The one thing they have in common is their strength. 

Gojou starts out questioning the system, while Getou himself is a defender of it. However, their reasons for questioning and defending are both central to their character. Getou thinks the current system is the righteous one, it’s the one that helps the most amount of people. Whereas Gojou himself is not questioning the system because it’s unjust, but because he personally does not want to be responsible for other people.

Getou himself feels an incredible amount of responsibility. That is how he believes his strength should be used, for others. Gojou does not feel any responsibility at all, and mainly uses his strength for himself. While Getou and Gojou switch sides, Gojou staying with Jujutsu society and Getou siding with curses, their viewpoints and natures however do not change in this arc at all. Gojou is still irresponsbile and thinks the current system is wrong only because it limits him and believes strong people should not have to bow down to a system and should be able to change it, and Getou still feels a tremendous responsibility for everything around him. 

If you were to reduce them to the extreme points of their views. Gojou sees Getou as a child just repeating what has been told to him by others because he is too weak to come up with his own ideals. Whereas Getous sees Gojou as a child who wants to detach himself from any kind of responsibility and solve everything with strength. Once again that’s only putting them in the extremes of what their ideals represent, but they are so opposite that they constantly provoke each other. 

The manga references again and again how they funadmentally see the world in an opposite way. Gojou treats it all like it’s one big game (that’s a digimon reference) whereas Getou’s perception of it is very textbook. He believes the world is structured in ideas like right and wrong, whereas for Gojou the structure of the world is the same of that as a game. There are rules to get stronger, and rules to win. Gojou’s is a lot more impersonal, treating the world like a game tends to be that way. Whereas Getou’s is a lot more righteous. 

Getou is obsessed with what’s proper and right, and what he thinks the way things should be. He’s trying to find the right path for the world and he’s very aware of the people around him. Whereas, Gojou is very obsessed with his own personal strength and solves almost everything by strength.

He also tends to be way more mindful of others, as opposed to Gojou who thinks of himself and is in his own little world. Getou is shown sympathizing with the girl they have to escort, whereas Gojouo himself finds being soft on her to be an inconvenience. This isn’t to amke Gojou sound like a bad person (though he is kind of a jerk) just to point out that Gojou thinks of himself first fundamentally, and Getou fundamentally thinks of others before his own well being. These traits do not make Gojou good and Getou bad, because Getou thinking of others first is what drives him to tragedy. 

It’s also important to notice that Gojou is not someone lacking in compassion either. It’s just he can only ever show it in his own way. Put in another way, Gojou is very internal, and Getou is very external. Gojou is focused on his own little internal world, whereas Getou always considers the environment around him and that leads him to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. 

As different as they are Getou and Gojou are able to work together so closely, because they both perceive that ther’es something off about the Jujutsu system around them. When they both realize that the girl they were going to sacrifice as a vessel has her own wishes and needs, they no longer want to sacrifice her for the greater good and instead want her to live her own life. 

They also believed, naively so,  before this mission that their strength alone would be great enough to change things. What makes Getou start to crack is when he’s rendered utterly powerless to help an innocent girl right in front of his eyes. 

Getou fights with everything he has, and is completely helpless before someone who cannot even use Jujutsu. In the same situation where Getou cannot do a thing for the person in front of him, the person he wanted to protect, Gojou steps up and becomes the strongest. 

Which once again, while Gojou is someone who is capable of sympathizing with others, and reaches out to them in his own way, he’s also someone so perfectly suited to be a jujutsu sorcerer that he doesn’t really connect with the humans around him. He’s so strong he doesn’t really need to. He’s always been able to exist with strength alone. If Getou is far too connected to the physical world, to the worries of people, to the innocents who dies, than Gojou takes the exact opposite path he’s far too connected to the spiritual world. When together the two of them balanced each other out, but when their partnership breaks apart they both spiral in opposite directions. 

It’s even Gojou himself who suggests that they just murder all the cultists in revenge for the girl. That they just settle this now with strength in order to resolve their feelings of loss. Once again, Gojou isn’t unfeeling he mourns the girl just as much but in an entirely different way. He suggests the highly individualistic method of taking revenge. 

When Getou says that they should spare these people, he says so because he believes the system will take care of them. The system will take care of them and dismantle them so there’s no need to act on their own feelings. 

Gojou’s world is defined by his own personal meaning. Getou believes the system has meaning for shamans like them, and therefore they should strive to do the right thing. But this is only because of his belief that the system helps people because his desire really in the most basic sense of the word is to help others. Which is something that he comes into question when he is traumatized by watching a girl die right in front of him, a girl that was going to be a sacrifice to the system in the first place and a girl he could not save. 

However, both of the boys start to take unhealthy paths after this mission. Gojou decides to do everything alone, and because he was Getou’s anchor, Getou starts becoming lost as well. 

2. Getou’s Motivation

Getou’s fatal flaw that causes him to become disillusioned is not that he cares too little, but rather he cares far too much. A year later he cannot get over the death of an innocent before his eyes. 

The entire point of this sequence is to establish how someone good natured  like Getou who believed in the system, could slowly slip and start to radicalize once he not only sees the flaws in the system, but also how powerless he himself is to do anything about it. It’s not that one tragic thing happened, but rather he watches tragic things happen again, again, again, all for the same reasons. 

Getou is deeply invested in people, but he’s also invested in indivudals not the masses as a whole. The site of the cult is a traumatizing thing to him, because it’s a metaphor for the Jujutsu system at large. One little girl dies in front of their eyes, and they could care less, it’s like their suffering is entirely invisible. 

The majority is kept safe, due to sacrificing the minority over and over again. It’s that which Getou becomes fed up with, because he believed in this system, believed that it was his responsbility to help others following this path and yet he constantly sees others die around him and does not feel like he’s helping a single person. 

Jujutsu Kaisen is an interesting deconstruction from the ‘secret hidden world of magic’ concept because, keeping the world hidden is shown to actively make people suffer and even cause high school age students to constantly die in battle. Which is why I doubt Getou’s motivation is something as simple as “Kill all non-shamans” 

But rather become an enemy that forces the system to evolve, rather than being a piece upholding a system that’s fundamentally not working and relying on the sacrifices of a minority to protect a majority that has no idea at all about the existence of curses. 

What breaks him is the idea that all of his work, all of the sacrifices he’s watching is not protecting people at all He wants their sacrifices to have meaning at least. Look at the face he made when he realized that after everything they went through with that girl and the innocent he let die, just another innocent girl is going to be raised to be a vessel and sacrificed. 

He loses his trust in the system, because he believes that the system is just getting Shamans killed over and over again rather than trying to affect a true change. 

Getou did not want to change the system so he could end his own burden. While yes, his main flaw is he feels too much responsibility for others, what breaks him is watching the suffering of other people around him. The incident which causes him to defect is when he sees ignorant people hurting two innocent children once again. 

He does not hate them because their weak. He hates that their ignorance forces suffering on others. Getou is, in all essence, a deconstruction of a messianic figure. The way his fingers are posed in this cover art is a reference to christ.  THe fingers spell out “IC XC” a widely used for letter abbreaviation of the of the Greek for Jesus (IHCOYC) Christ (XPICTOC). The hand gesture is specifically a blessing, by the name of Jesus people of faith are saved and received blessings. 

His wish to save everybody, to martyr himself for the sake of a better world is what leads him to the side of curses and to defect from Shamanism. His flaw is that he feels the pain of others far too much, and because of that cannot make sense of his own feelings. He’s driven by the system around him to reform it. 

And finally we hit the central theme of the series. The Jujutsu System creates it’s own curses. That is to say, the current system is flawed and only treats symptoms rather than the cause. Not only does the system create Getou, but an antagonist of this arc, Megumi’s father only was radicalized in the first place because he was worthless to the Zen’in family due to being born without any cursed energy at all. 

He is just another one of the sacrifices, not only that but his son was stolen away from him at a young age, to the point where he almost forgot his name until the last moments. 

In action the system is creating it’s own greatest enemies, and simply fighting against curses only keeps a broken system in power. While Getou is lost currently and has fallen to extremism, that does not mean he is wrong and the central conflict of the manga will most likely be about reforming this system that is manufacturing it’s own greatest enemies. 

The enemy in this series is not just the curses, but the humans who make them. 

[annalyticall]

Anime Newbie in her Twenties Ranks her First 10 Anime

With the recommendations of my sister @ging-ler​ and friends, I started watching anime just over a year ago and within that time I’ve watched a total of 10 - some clocking in at almost 200 episodes and some with only 12. I told myself a while ago that once I had finished 10 anime shows I would rank them like some Anime Newbie WatchMojo list, so, here we are. Really this is just an excuse to force more of my unwarranted opinions onto unwilling followers.

I should also preface this by saying I don’t think any of the anime I watched this year was bad, and I enjoyed a lot about every show even if I ranked some low. However, the top three anime on my list are the ones I would recommend to anyone following me even if they don’t watch anime.

10. Death Note

Despite absolutely loathing the “protagonist” since episode one, I really enjoyed the first half of Death Note! The story was intriguing with all of its wild twist and turns and I found myself immediately invested in what was going to happen next. Unfortunately, after the death of who I thought was by far the best character, the show seems to go off the rails as it introduces new characters and contrived plot devices in the second half that were frankly hard for me to care about at that point. The ending was satisfying but I forced myself to sit through a lot of painful meandering to get there.

9. Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop was the first anime I watched as suggested to me by @mcsherrybr​. The smooth and jazzy art, atmosphere, animation, action, and music were all a lot of fun, as were the lovable ragtag group of misfits that made up the main cast. I enjoyed myself a lot while watching this western/sci-fi melding pot of a show, and I only ranked it so low because the last few episodes were a huge disappointment to my found-family-trope-loving heart.

8. Violet Evergarden

Violet Evergarden, following the story of a child soldier learning to love, is absolutely beautiful to look at and listen to. The music in this anime is, for me, THE best music from any show on this list. This is also the only anime that made me sob several times while watching it. The collection of short episodic stories that explore the deep facets of human love and connection are incredibly resonant and will stay with me for a long time. However, the strength of the small story arcs made the rushed overarching war story and finale weaker in comparison. Similarly, the memorable characters introduced in the one-off side plots were more interesting to me than the cast of rather bland reoccurring supporting characters. While I will remember a lot of great individual moments, I can’t seem to remember a single character’s name besides Violet’s, but that might also be due to being one of the shorter entries at only 12 episodes.

7. Hunter x Hunter (2011)

Going from one of the shortest anime on this list to the longest, Hunter x Hunter was an great and engrossing story during the entirety of its 160+ episodes. It’s colorful and playful, but can also be very dark and at times even heart-wrenching. Because it contains so many distinct arcs, there is a wide variety characters and stories to get attached to, and some, like the Chimera Ant Arc, I even cried over. But this also left me with issues regarding the pacing. The show has great action and introspective moments but will often drag with long drawn-out pauses between fights to explain simple concepts (though I understand that’s a common trope in old shonen anime in general). The world-building is rich but also caught me off guard with some strange ideas, and admittedly not all of them I liked. Some eccentric characters and concepts rubbed me the wrong way and ended up hindering my enjoyment of the show. Overall though, it was a lot of fun and I left with a few more endearing favorite characters, like Leorio and Killua.

6. Erased

Also a 12 episode anime, Erased was amazingly impactful for how short it was. Even as I followed the unfolding murder mystery, I was also touched by the meaningful themes and kind-hearted characters I met along the way. The already-strong story is accentuated with great symbolism, art, and music. The only problem I had was with the mystery itself; I was able to tell who the true killer was within the first 4 episodes, which didn’t lend itself well to suspense and I spent the remaining episodes frustrated that the main characters couldn’t see some obvious clues.This is a minor problem, though, since the finale has less to do with mystery and more about the morals and resolution of themes that I felt was satisfying.

5. Demon Slayer

Demon Slayer is gorgeous. The stunning art style, fluid animation, and breath-taking music are all valid reasons to watch it, but the main character Tanjiro and his unwavering devotion to find a cure for his sister-turned-demon Nezuko are the reasons to stay. Tanjiro is unbelievably gentle as he shows even the evil demons he has to slay a hard-fought kindness, and it’s those tender moments between all of the amazing action sequences that really elevate this show for me. The issues I have lie with the rest of the cast. While I love some supporting characters, like the pig-headed Inosuke and the stoic Giyuu, others have very niche personalities that can get annoying if they’re on screen for too long, which they definitely tend to be. Still, the bond between Tanjiro and Nezuko is so strong that it gets me through even those dragging scenes.

And it’s written by a woman!

4. My Hero Academia

Hey so this might come as a shock for anyone who’s followed me for a while: My Hero Academia is not my favorite anime! I do love it a lot - it’s the only anime on this list that has inspired me to read the manga, write fic, and buy merch. There are so many lovable characters and exciting arcs in this show that there is bound to be something for everyone to enjoy, both inside and outside of canon. It’s a wonderfully paced and animated deconstruction of the superhero genre and besides its deeper themes and commentary, there’s also just a lot of endearing teenage goofin’ to be had, and the show balances the tone of these two almost-equally engaging aspects of the story fairly well.

The downside, for me, is the show’s sexualization of female characters, especially the teenagers. With the likes of pervy fellow classmate Mineta, it’s a flaw that’s hard to avoid and takes up an unfortunate amount of screen time. There are in-universe characters that protest against this behavior, and the female characters are still well-written for the most part, but that doesn’t make up for the canon material including it at all. It’s not a huge part of the show but it’s present enough that it really knocks the ranking down for me.

3. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Out of my top 5, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is the only one that is complete. Because of that, I can tentatively say that so far, it is the best completed story on this list. From beginning to end, the pacing was perfect - the action never dragged, the characters were never unnecessary, and the plot twists were never unearned. I found myself more invested than I thought I would ever be for the large cast of characters, and everything, including its ending, was satisfying to watch. The animation is fluid and lent itself well to the most impactful scenes, especially involving the flame alchemist Roy Mustang. It’s also written by a woman! Really, the only nitpicks I have were with tonal problems - serious moments would sometimes be ruined by too much slapstick or visual gags.

As I mentioned before, my Top 3 are shows I would recommend to anyone who’s unfamiliar with anime simply because they’re good solid stories with almost no distracting anime tropes. This is a good place to start.

2. The Promised Neverland

The Promised Neverland is deceiving; on the surface it looks like a sweet show about a bunch of adorable kids playing together in the spacious green backyard of their quaint orphanage. Once you finish the first episode, however, you will quickly discover that there is definitely something more sinister lurking under the surface. This show is an expertly executed dark horror/thriller that always had me on the edge of my seat. The cute aesthetic never distracts from the suspense, in fact, it adds to the discomfort when the horrific visuals and expressions are contrasted against the character designs. I loved all of the characters, including the antagonist, who manages to be just as sympathetic as she is menacing. The sound design and music are also beautiful and adds so much to the rich atmosphere. I am definitely excited to see where this series will go!

1. Mob Psycho 100

ONE, the creator of Mob Psycho 100, said the single word he used for the concept for the series was “kindness”. Kindness shines through so much of this story following the life of Mob, a super-psychic kid that just wants to fit in, and I adore every second of it. While many shonen anime stories force the child protagonist to get stronger, become more powerful, and fight in battles against hostile adults, Mob Psycho 100 says “that’s stupid. Kids shouldn’t have to be traumatized by immature power-hungry adults. The only strength that anyone should pursue is strength of character, motivated by self-love and love for others.” And it says it with the most beautiful animation I have EVER seen in a show. The simplistic character designs mean the animators can have as much creative freedom as they like with expressions and movement, and they absolutely use that freedom. Humor is a large part of this mostly-comedy anime, but it makes the serious and introspective scenes so much more important when they do happen. The shifts between these two tones never feel awkward or imbalanced.

Mob Psycho 100 has inspired me to become more experimental and joy-seeking with my art, as well as just become a better person in my own life, which I can’t say for many other anime or many other pieces of media period. Even though a Season 3 hasn’t been officially announced yet, I can still safely say Mob Psycho 100 will forever hold a special place in my heart.

[all-the-heart-you-cannot-see]

Things i loved about season 4

- The Nun scene. Honestly the sheer level of galaxy brain Ludo Besse has when writting these seasons lol. It was a very clever pararell to have the nun mistake Sana for another Sister, in a country as catholic as Italy, its al simple way of putting the hijab into perspective, no one sees a nun and thinks the same things they do when they see a muslim girl wearing a veil, even when they are essentially pretty similar: an expression of their religion. I really liked it (and the conversation under the candlelight just felt a whole other level of intimate so thats a plus)

- The Luai storyline. Man i loved this bit of the season, can we talk about the scene where Nico and Luai see each other at the club? The song choice? The shots? GOLDEN. I like that there are no real villains in this story (except for Luai's parents) what happened between them wasnt the result of someone in the baloon squad being homophobic, they were both victims of the circumstances and i love that Luai currently has a boyfriend, i've never been happier for a side character in my life.

- Sana. I enjoyed Sana a lot, she is sweet, she is akward, is a different take on her character and i liked it very much. What i loved the most was that the side plots from the og are still mostly there but this time they are constructed so they still revolve around Sana and her struggles. After the fight with Marti and the Rose Squad when she stays there alone with blood on her hand and both of her worlds (the contrabandieri and the Rose Squad) just walk away from her and she is just crying...that hit me hard (kudos to Bea, her acting was also very good), it made the scene more about her and what it meant for her than about the external drama, and then she justs keeps getting hit when she hears the UFB talking about her and finally Eva and Malik kissing... i could feel the weight of everything that had happened that night just falling on her shoulders and my heart shrank...her character was so well constructed im glad she got such a great season.

- The Rose Squad. I loved them, three out of four of them have clear characterization and it just placed them really high on my list...Ludo managed to make me care about Luai who has a total of like, 5 lines so i think its safe to say they are very well written and very well used.

-Filippo. At this point Filo is the father of half of that school i swear, it laughed so much with his scenes, from drunk Rami to Martino being a mess and just giving up on life in Filo's bedroom, also the fan service with Elia, i would've enjoyed it more had they not implaid that Elia was going to date Emma there at the end. (We stan safe sex kids)

- Episode 8. Was such a beautiful episode to watch, Martino and Sana are one of my favorite Isak-Sana dynamics after Amira and Cris, i loved their conversation cause it was more about understanding each other, Sana was right about some things and Martino was right about others, it was nice to see her finally open up to someone after just botteling up her emotions for the entire season, it was really sweet. Her message to the girls was heartbreaking, i legit cried and had to rewind the video cause my vision kept getting blurry and i kept missing parts of her speech, again Bea's acting really helped here, episode 8 was Sana not only opening up to her friends, but to us as the audience, that even after 7 episodes on her POV, still didnt understand her actions very well, it was a nice way of complementing the new perspectice her convo with Marti had given us, i loved it. (Also hide and seek to reunite Niccotino? I love Ludo Besse)

- The girl squad. I always thought Eva was very underapreciated (which is why i adore Skam España for giving her more to do after her season), i dont know why, but since the first time i saw norweiang Eva's season she stayed in my heart, and this version of Eva is one i love as well, i enjoyed her character and honestly her last scene with Gio? GOLD, her letter? One of the best things to come out of the Skam universe, i want to thank Ludo for handling her with such love. Silvia i really liked, her clip really puts things into perspective and i love that they kept her cat as an actual consistent plot device, she's had a nice character development, from wanting desperately to be noticed by the school coolest boy, to simply not caring about boys to finally opening up to someone, truly letting them in and accept herself, no only her body, but who she was. Finally Fede... the backstory of why she spoke to Sana was something i really appreciated, as well as the fact of her being so ashamed of what she he had done, i like that story because it shows how people can change once their prejudice is deconstructed, specially at that age we are the product of the education we were given, things like homophobia, sexism or xenophobia althought still not acceptable for a teenager, dont mean that they can't be redeemed, that their world view can't change in the future and that they can't grow. It was nice, you may have been an asshole in the past but as long as you understand what you did wrong and geniunly apologize, there is no reason for us to think someone cannot be redeemed.

- Every. Malik. And. Sana. Scene. Was so amazingly shot and constructed that even when i understood 30% of the dialogue the first time i watched it without subtitles i was smiling like an idiot, the date scene, those last few seconds? Them just staring into each others eyes? No kiss scene would've made us feel what that made us feel and that is a testament not only to good acting, but to the amazing direction of Ludo Besse.

- Ludovico Bessegato. This man has so much love for this project it shows on the end result, Skam Italia is pretry similar to the og in terms of plot, but Ludo made it stand out with his characters, his cinematography and some minor changes. The result is a story most of us already knew and loved with characters that some of us might love more than the originals in a setting that for me personally is more relatable than the norweiang one and has earned a place in my heart. I still can't believe he alone had to manage social media for the first seasons and had to fight with Timvision to get the show done, im so happy his work, and the work of all the other people who poured their hearts into this project (including the actors) got rewarded in such a way.

- The final speech. I understood very little of it while watching the first time, but that didnt stop me from crying like a baby while Gio read the letter, i found i cared for every person on that screen, from all of them i had good memories on the show and i couldn't believe that a fictional story could make such an impact in me, specially since this is the second time i see it, i'm probably way to biased with this show and the truth is idk why,i couldn't pin point the things that make me love it the way i do, i just do, and i am very satisfied with this ending, if this is the end.