#nia....reviews things

[sydsaint]

Quick Review of King/Queen of the Ring

Overall? It was a decent PPV. Matches were kinda slow at times but they all can't be bangers right? 5/10 Average PPV card. not good not bad.

Match Reviews and Rating below the cut

Pre-Show:

Bianca and Jade vs Indi and Candace- Solid match for the pre-show. Love seeing Bianca and Jade team up. My queens! Their gear ate as always. Candace and Indi also looked good. 7/10

Main show:

Becky vs Liv- LIV NEW CHAMP BABY!!!!!! Match was good. had some solid spots. I like Becky but she ain't that good in the ring if you ask me. glad that they let Liv take the belt so we can have Liv vs Rhea when she comes back 6/10

Sami vs Gable vs Bronson Reed- Good 3-way match. Would have liked it more if it was just Sami vs Gable though. Some good action and I can't wait to see Otis leave team Gable. Solid watch. 6/10

Randy vs Gunther- Best match of the night. Love seeing two big men go at it! Gunther and Randy both look great. I thought Randy was going to win but i'm not mad at Gunther winning! 9/10

Lyra vs Nia- Lyra should have won. Nia is boring. That's all I'll say. thanks. 5/10

Cody vs Logan- Solid match. Love me some shenanigans! Logan cooked in the ring like always. Say what you want about him. DRINK PRIME. 7/10

[james-stark-the-writer]

they saw Ms. Marvel and Barbie: Princess Charm School and said "we could do that", and they could not. but the attempt is still pretty fun! this is shockingly lightweight, like cinematic popcorn, but for what it is, and everything it had to be, it's surprisingly good. the Carol bits are really good, the Monica bits are pretty sparse but fun, and the Kamala bits are an imitation of the sincerity and depth of Ms. Marvel. dont meet your heroes, kids. this is more of a very long but fun one-shot than a movie that feels like it's 100 minutes long. side note: Marvel needs to bring the one-shots back.

My ★★★★ review of The Marvels on Letterboxd

[specialagentartemis]

godddddd i have disliked becky chambers' work since long way to a small angry planet and I agree that that fish scene is SO much of what is wrong with contemporary SFF especially queer SFF. refreshing take, great review, thank you. would love to hear what authors or works you think of as the antidote to that sensibility.

The thing is, I enjoyed The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet when I first read it - it was a fun, light adventure, clearly a debut novel but I was excited to see where Chambers would go from there. And I actually really do think the sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit, was good! It did interesting things with AI personhood and identity.

... and then Chambers just kinda. Did not get better. She settled into a groove and has a set number of ideas that I feel like she hasn't broken out of, creatively. And they I M O kind of rest on an assumption that "human nature" = "how people act in suburban California."

As an antidote to that sensibility, I'd say... books where people have a real interrelationship with the land they inhabit, a sense of being present, and reciprocal obligations to that land; books that recognize that some things can never be taken back once done; books with well-drawn characters, where people have strong opinions deeply informed by their circumstances, that can't always be easily reconciled with others, and won't be brushed aside; books where these character choices matter, they impact each other, they cannot be easily gotten over, because people have obligations to each other and not-acting is a choice too.

And it's only fair that after all day of being a Hater I should rec some books I really did like.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - A man lives alone in an infinite House, over an equally infinite ocean. Captures the feeling that I think Monk & Robot was aiming for. Breathtaking beauty, wonder at the world, philosophy of truth, all that good stuff, and actually sticks the landing. The main character's love, attention, and care to his fantasy environment shows through in every page. (Fantasy, short novel)

Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie - An AI, the one fragment remaining of a destroyed imperial spaceship, is on a quest for revenge. Leckie gets cultural differences and multiculturalism, and conversely, what the imposition of a homogeneous culture in the name of unity means. (Space sci-fi, novel trilogy)

Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee - An army captain's insubordination is punished by giving her a near-impossible mission: to take down a rebelling, heretical sect holing up in a space fortress and defying imperial power. She gets a long dead brain-ghost of a notorious criminal downloaded into her head to help. Very, very good at making you feel like every doomed soldier was a person with a past, with a family, with feelings, with hopes and dreams and frustrations and favorites and preferences and reasons to live, right before they brutally die in a space war. Also very much about the imposition of homogeneity of culture as a force of imperialism. (Space sci-fi, novel trilogy)

The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed - Maya Andreyevna is a VR journalist in high-tech dystopian future Russia, and she decides to investigate the truth that the government doesn't want her to. She might die trying. It's fine. Also has digital brain-sharing, this time in a gay way. It's bleak. It's sad. It feels real. Not making a choice is a choice. Backing out is a choice. And choices have consequences. Choices reverberate through history. About responsibility. (Cyberpunk, novel)

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez - Nia Imani is a spaceship captain, a woman out of time, a woman running from her past, and accidentally adopts a boy who has a strange power that could change the galaxy. Spaceship crew-as-found-family in the most heartbreaking of ways. Also about choices, how the choices you make and refuse to make shape you and shape the world around you. How the world is always changing around you, how the world does not stay still when you're gone, and when you come back you're the same but the world has moved on around you. About how relationships aren't always forever, and that doesn't mean they weren't important. About responsibility to others. It's a slow, sad book and does not let anyone rest on their laurels, ever. There is no end of history here. Everything is always changing, on large scales and small, and leaving you behind. (Space sci-fi, novel)

Dungeon Meshi / Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui - A D&D style fantasy dungeon crawl that stops to think deeply about why there are so many dungeons full of monsters and treasure just hanging around. Here because it's an example of an author thinking through her worldbuilding a lot, and it mattering. Also because of the characters' respect for the animals they are are killing and eating, their lives and their place in the ecosystem, and the ways that humans both fuck up ecosystems with extraction and tourism, but also the ways that you can have reciprocal relationships of responsibility and care with the ecosystem you live in, even if it's considered a dangerous one. (Fantasy, manga series)

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang and How Long 'Til Black Future Month by N. K. Jemisin and Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe - Short story anthologies that were SO good and SO weird and rewired the way I think. If you want the kind of stuff that is like, the opposite of easy-to-digest feel-good pap, these short stories will get into your brain and make you consider stuff and look at the world from new angles. Most of them aren't particularly upbeat, but there's a lot of variety in the moods.

"Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self," "Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black," and "Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist" by Isabel J. Kim - Short stories, sci-fi mostly, that twist around in my head and make me think. Kim is very good at that. Also about choices and not-making-choices, about going and staying, about taking the easy route or the hard one, about controlling the narrative.

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells - Security robot with guns in its arms hacks itself free from its oppressive company, mostly wants to half-ass its job but gets sucked into drama, intrigue, and caring against its better judgement. This is on here because 1) I love it 2) I feel like it does for me what cozy sff so frequently fails to do - it makes me feel seen and comforted. It's hopeful and compassionate and about personal growth and finding community and finding one's place in the world, without brushing aside all problems or acting like "everybody effortlessly just gets along" is a meaningful proposal. also 3) because it is one of the few times I have yet seen characters from a hippie, pacifistic, eco-friendly, welcoming, utopian society actually act like people. The humans from Preservation are friendly, helpful, and motivated by truth and justice and compassion, because they come from a friendly, just, compassionate society, and they still actually act like real human beings with different personalities and conflicting opinions and poor reactions to stress and anger and frustration and fear and the whole range of human emotions rather than bland niceness. Also 4) I love it (space sci-fi, novella series mostly)

[pyroclastic727]

The Marvels is being scathed by critics, and that's a good thing.

I finally saw The Marvels today. I'm a bit late to the party, so all I saw about the movie was the teaser at the end of Ms Marvel, and way too many critical reviews of it.

Now, obviously on Tumblr you find the good reviews, like, the cats outnumbering the white men and how Kamala Khan is, like, basically all of us. But in person, I've had someone tell me that it's bad because Rotten Tomatoes rates it 43%, which-- besides wondering why anyone would listen to Rotten Tomatoes, I'd have to wonder why the website would give it such a low rating. The easy answer is that the Tomatoes review committee is populated by white men, who, upon having no one to relate to, react badly to the movie. But I think there's more to it.

The Marvels is a revolution. Through its character-driven writing and brazen exploration of morality, it rewrites the superhero formula completely, by questioning what exactly it means to be a superhero.

The Marvels was directed by Nia DaCosta, an award-winning Harlem native and creative visionary whose approach to this film was to define these characters as humans, not as superheroes. Her approach to heroism directly addresses that the idea that a hero is not always right. A hero, DaCosta claims, is "someone who's trying their best with the information and tools they have at the time. They'll always get it wrong." Carol Danvers's arc directly addresses this, as the resolution of her subplot involves her re-igniting the sun that she snuffed out. Her heroic act is to undo the damage that she wrought.

When compared to old Marvel, this message just doesn't come through. In WandaVision, Wanda's grief is for a family that was killed by the Avengers. Yet, she is painted as a villain, even as she searches for a happy home, even as she at one point joins the Avengers. The Avengers cannot undo what they did, and don't really try. They defeat the big bad, sacrifice their lives, but nothing brings back Wanda's family. Nothing undoes that war. No one searches for Wanda after the event, to try to help her with her grief, except for Monica, and she's working against orders. Their heroics are militant, but while they excel at destruction, they leave the people they hurt in the dust.

This antiheroic plot of old Marvel is precisely what appealed to so many American audiences. Their protagonists are: a rich corporation, a super-soldier, a privileged teenager, a scientist who makes weapons, an ex-convict, a man born into godlike power, and I'm sure there are others but I don't actually care that much... (these would be iron man, captain america, peter parker spiderman, hulk, antman, thor, and etc). All these archetypes appeal to American ideals that the wealthy would sympathize with. They claim that there are people who are inherently bad and seek the power that they have, in the way that a poor person might want a job that a wealthy person wants their child to secure. They claim that it is their business to save those which cannot save themselves, and use this to get involved in wars that are not theirs, and beat up badguys whose backstory they have no way of knowing-- and they punch before they stop and listen.

They are cops in every sense of the word. The responsibility of the vigilante is to defend against evil, but part of that responsibility is to figure out who exactly is evil and who is in need of help.

The Marvels creates a team that tries to distinguish evil from good, and delves into the grey area between them. The final battle between Carol Danvers and Dar-benn has the superhero pinning the grey-haired antagonist to the ground as she begs for, then demands, that Carol fix what she damaged. Monica urges her to listen. Through this, The Marvels argues that a hero does not always beat up the bad guy and fight against unrelenting evil, but that a hero can be wrong, and that a hero can reconsider. It's kindness in the way that is revolutionary, where it's much easier to choose cruelty.

The fact that the movie is getting torn apart by critics, then, is not just because it is a "girls movie" or it doesn't have a strong white man for the white male viewer to sympathize with. The Marvels cannot appeal to Marvel fans because it rewrites the genre itself. It takes a film series whose purpose was to depict the struggles of cops, of the wealthy, of people with too much power who are trying to learn how to responsibly wield it, but don't. And it gives that power to people who have watched superheroes try and fail, who are slowly learning to be better heroes than the ones before them.

The next generation is a critique of the last, a group trying not to make the mistakes of the chosen ones that came before them, and as such, the movie exists to critique the movies that came before it. Therefore, a viewer of Marvel who would positively review it, due to sympathizing with the previous heroes and enjoying the power fantasy, would dislike it out of its existence being critical and contradictory to the films they like themselves.

The Marvels is not for Marvel fans-- at least, not those who saw the Avengers as purely heroes. Instead, the film reaches out to people who would have been against the old Avengers, who want a story that dismantles the unquestioned idealism of superheroes and writes about people trying to protect their communities and the people they care about.

So, let the critics complain. The MCU is shedding its roots as a pro-cop and pro-colonialism power fantasy, and evolving into an exploration of what it means to be a true hero.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #55 – The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Introduction

The Spear Cuts Through Water was one of my favorite reads of last year, and I’ve been meaning to get around to Jimenez’ other work basically since I finished it. Months and months later, my TBR pile and the library’s hold queue cooperated and I finally got around to it. Of the two, you can definitely tell Birds is the debut novel, but despite the roughness I can’t help feeling like it's also the one I prefer. I do have complaints (of which, more below), and the story certainly has issues with structure and allocation of wordcount, but this really is the rare book where I feel no compunctions whatsoever giving five stars.

Knowing myself, this isn’t entirely unrelated to how fucking heartbreaking it is at points.

Synopsis

To brutally over-summarize, the book follows Nia, a starship captain hauling crops on a freight route from a ‘resource world’ to Pelican Station, one of the great centers of human civilization and Allied Space. Due to the peculiarities of faster than light travel, the round trip that is for her and her crew experienced as a span of months is for the people at both endpoints an absence of fifteen years – a convenient way for her to keep making the same mistakes as far as personal connections and relationships go. On the last loop of the route before her contract is completed, she finds herself taking care of a mute, deeply traumatized young boy discovered miraculously unharmed by the locals in what seemed like a fiery wreck. The boy – at first nonverbal, inexplicably a musical savant, deeply traumatized and mysterious in a hundred different ways – finds his way into her heart to the point that even after they return to Pelican and he’s been turned over to the security services, she can’t stop trying to find out what happened to him and making sure he’s alright.

It’s at this point that the two of them come to the attention of Fumiko Nakajima, the Millennium Woman – designer of the five great stations at the heart of Allied Space, and (thanks to the magic of cryo-sleep and FTL time differentials) one of the last survivors of long-dead Earth. She sees in the boy the possibility of something miraculous – truly instant interstellar travel – and so hires Nia and a few reliable agents to take him into Fringe Space, safely out of view of any of her ‘friends and colleagues’ who might take a similar interest in him. For fifteen years. The story then reveals itself to be one of, basically, child-rearing and coming of age – at least until the moment where the child’s miraculous abilities really do reveal themselves, and all at once things get much, much deadlier.

Structure

The book is – not quite incoherent (the thesis is very clear), but certainly unfocused. At first I thought that was rather the point – the first three chapters are each incredibly effective, melancholic short stories in their own rights'; each leapfrogging into the perspective of a character whose actions or legacy shaped the previous, but with dramatically different casts, setting and plots. These are almost certainly the most aesthetically successful and artistically disciplined sections of the book, and as I read them I assumed it would continue in the same vein for the entire book.

It does not – the book settles very firmly into being the story of Nia and the boy who is later named Ahro. The middle of the book is an almost light-hearted coming of age story, spread across the years Ahro spends growing up in the Galactic fringe with his ragtag accidental family. The final act then dramatically shifts tone again, becoming largely about recovering from betrayal and the destruction of your life, and of striving in defiance of all sense and reason to reconnect with someone you love.

There are, then, three very different vibes here, and I can’t say the shifts between them are handled with the most grace in the world. The book absolutely never stops experimenting with style either, shifting voice, perspective, level of detail, and even format (several chapters are relayed as diary entries) basically whenever the mood strikes it. It absolutely feels like an incredibly talented author showing off a bit beyond their limits – you can see the seams, the allocation of effort between the parts is...questionable, and there are a couple vital characters/subplots who just needed another chapter or two of focus – but it’s the sort of messiness that leaves me incredibly endeared.

Love, and its Discontents

Those first three chapters are essentially short stories connected by setting and a character or two – but most of all they’re connected by theme. Each is, one way or another, the story of the protagonist falling in love – the sort of love that defines a life, that cuts you to the core whenever you remember it – and then having that love fail, leaving the lover damaged or lessened in a way that never quite heals.

Things do not stay quite so melancholic, but for a story whose whole climax is centered around the quite literally metaphysical and reality-shaking power of pure love this book has a bracingly tragic sensibility of it. Love is hopelessly one-sided, or turns rancid with resentment for just long enough to make sure it can never be restored again. Romances end in betrayal and murder, bonds both sororial and paternal in half-thoughtless abandonment, soul-deep friendships in vicious arguments and a severing of ties. Love, the book says, is deeply contingent and often more transitory than it seems – and if it isn’t, that can do far more harm than good.

Nia as a protagonist has plenty of baggage about this. She’s introduced as a woman with deep abandonment issues – that is, she keeps abandoning people and then feeling bad about it (her ship is the Debby, after the kid sister who lived and died seeing her for a few days every fifteen years due to the time lag of interstellar shipping). She latches onto protecting and caring for Ahro almost more as an attempt at redemption for herself as anything about the boy himself, it’s only over time she really grows to love him as more than a talisman.

I can’t say it was particularly well-spent time, but the book does something I love at least the idea of. Nia’s crew is introduced in the second chapter with a fair amount of detail and personality, each of them having little idiosyncrasies and distinguishing habits and virtues; one is a best friend she found stranded on a wrecked hulk and nursed back to health. The whole dynamic is that of the grumbling and bickering but affectionate found family crew you’ve seen in a thousand other stories. So when she commits to spend up to fifteen years of her life taking care of Ahro on the galactic fringe in exchange for truly unbelievable amounts of money, she sits down with them, tells them the score, and asks them if they trust her enough to come with her.

And all but one of them say no, and never show up in the story again. Which is possibly the first time I have ever seen that kind of scene not end with re-commitment and affirmations of trust from at least most of the real characters that were asked.

This makes the whole found family situation with Nia, Ahro and (most of) the second crew that do spend years in the outskirts of ‘civilized’ space with them works for me far, far better than these things usually do. Because, unlike functionally every piece of fiction I can think of that’s ever been promoted as being about found families, this one really does sell it as something precious and exceptional, rare and worth fighting to preserve.

It also gets all but three of the people involved killed, of course, and of those three one’s permanently crippled and death would probably have been kinder for the second. The book’s really big on stretching ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ to the absolute breaking point – right up to someone choosing not to die despite an existence of nothing but torture and pain just for the infinitesimal bit of hope and connection of a loved one singing through the prison bars.

The Banality of Evil

The villain of the piece is, without question, the monolithic and monopolistic Umbai Corporation, something between a neocolonialist conglomerate and a sovereign, expansionist empire in the classic sense with a few affectations from its earthborn roots (the specifics of the politics of Allied Space are vague and in any case more impressionistic than anything like a detailed speculative political economy). Which is kind of fascinating, in that it is specifically the Corporation as a corporate body that is the villain – agency and responsibility are spread across whole bodies of Allied nobility and corporate Judiciary officials, armored Yellowjacket thugs and career-minded techs and surgeons. There’s no CEO or President, no Board of Directors who set the agenda and bear ultimate responsibility – there’s no face to it at all, really. I’m fairly sure no agent of the company ever even appears twice. Which is just interesting on its own terms, given Umbai as an entity defines both the setting and the plot to dramatic degrees.

The world of the Vanished Birds is a horrifying dystopia in a hundred different ways, but until the very end of the book this just isn’t really something any of the characters particularly care about. It’s in the incidental details and the little asides in the exposition – that there is a great apparatus of censorship on every Allied world dedicated to controlling and slowing the rate of linguistic drift to ease the flow of time-shifted commerce, that the culture and economy of Umbai ‘Resource Worlds’ are societies deliberately starved of information and culturally engineered to be easily managed and quiescent single-commodity resource exporters. Even in the distant past, Umbai and institutions like it used their control over the Ark Ships escaping earth to filter the species – denying berths to (among a great many other things) anyone of ‘problematic’ politics or who seemed likely to be an economic burden.

It’s a universe where this system seems to spread inevitably and irresistibly, everything valuable bought up and parceled out for the benefit of the system’s functionaries diligent enough to save for occasional vacations, and the nobles and officials in the vaunted heights of far-off stations and City-Planets (the allegorical applicability is left as an exercise for the reader, a bit of restraint I did appreciate).

It is, again, not a system that’s worth analyzing as a speculative political economy or technical exploration of neocolonialism either present or future – but it’s not trying to be, either. And it works very well at seeming like a real, functioning world that the characters are just trying to live in.

The Anthropocene

Going off where most of its wordcount is spent, I’m not sure you could really call Birds climate fiction. But if someone was making that argument, I’m not sure you have too much ground to stand on arguing you shouldn’t either.

Fumiko’s first chapter, read as a stand-alone short story, absolutely is – the story of a love affair between genius savant designing the great orbital habitats which will sustain a lucky slice of humanity in the stars, and a talented but less world-shaping scientist doing what she can to lighten the burden of the remaining four fifths of the species being left behind upon the increasingly uninhabitable earth. This is where the book’s title comes from – the gradual disappearance of the birds Fumiko loved as a child, even from the sanctuary trying so ferociously to preserve them.

The world presented in that chapter feels just barely familiar enough to be unsettling, a scarred and fortified world that’s still on a clear and irreversible decline – which might be either chicken or egg to the fact that the commanding heights of government and industry have given up trying to save it entirely to focus on an escape to the stars.

For the rest of the book, environmental collapse isn’t really a topic that much comes up – though the human shaping of and impact on the environment certainly does. It’s just largely a matter of deliberate engineering.

There is, however, a very easy allegorical reading of the fact that on discovery of a way to travel instantaneously between stars, Umbai ruthlessly exploits and monopolizes it to attain unprecedented degrees of power and wealth as they reshape the entire galactic economy – all of galactic civilization, really – around the new technology. All without the slightest thought or care that this new technology is based on harvesting a specific and finite resource and their brave new world will collapse entirely without it. Omelas-child instead of oil but still – not exactly subtle, but I do appreciate the book restraining itself from directly and explicitly pointing it out.

Fumiko

The ‘millennium woman’ is probably the most interesting single character in the book, and also almost certainly the biggest structural weakness in the whole thing. Which is annoying to me, personally. She simultaneously has some of the best chapters of the book and also ends up feeling like a ball being tossed around as the plot requires.

Her Methuselah existence is only vaguely justified and explained, and it’s entirely unclear just how exceptional she is (beyond the fact she isn’t unique, anyway) – the story never even gestures to the existence of any of her peers beyond vague mentions of the Umbai executive class or Allied nobility. She’s an oligarch-savant with nigh-infinite resources and cadres of loyalists installed in every institution worth owning – until a single mistake is made and the powers that be unite in a perfectly coordinated strike to kill them all and leave her stranded in the torn up ruins of her private research colonies among the corpses of two thousand executed minions.

A character being ruthlessly crushed without warning or chance of contesting it by the powers that be rings more true when the character isn’t one of them, I suppose? As it was, it felt like being dropped into the climax of a story without any of the rising action.

The effect is, I think, at least mostly intentional. The entire chapter is about Fumiko being so distracted with the failures of her memory and a complete preoccupation with her latest project (Ahro) that she cannot even pretend to remember or care about this whole vast infrastructure she has built up for her own advancement and curiosity, or the hundreds of followers who treat her as a living saint (to the point of not even remembering her friend, confidant and second in command until the moment before he’s executed for, in essence, her failing to consider the consequences of breaking a minion’s heart). The fact that there’s a battlecruiser en route to bury everything she’s built in napalm and she just forgot to do anything to prepare is actually very plausible. In which case, I just wish it had been ore dwelt upon and made a point of. Or just – it felt like she really needed another chapter or two from her POV before things go horribly wrong, I suppose?

Her chapters are very well-done and affecting, to be clear. And her mirrored character arc with Nia – both women who get a certain pleasure out of other people caring about and being more invested in them than they are in return, both dealing cosmically poorly with rejection, both forever decorating their life in half-conscious memory of someone they left behind – is both well done and compelling (Nia gets better, Fumiko’s story in an elaborate murder-suicide/terrorist attack).

Too Long; Didn’t Read

Beautiful, emotionally affecting book. Very much a debut work from a talented author – experimenting and showing off a bit more than be supported, some fundamental structural weaknesses – but nothing I found detracted from the experience. Actually one of the quite rare books where sitting down and writing out a review has made me like it more rather than less.

[uwmspeccoll]

It's Feral Friday!

If Special Collections were compared to a National Park- a thoughtfully curated, accessible experience of the wilderness of the natural world- where would its edges lie? What would be considered off the beaten path, how would its boundaries be defined, and in what ways would the landscape beyond those boundaries inspire our imagination and broaden our conceptions of the world and our communicative capacities?

That’s the realm of pluralistic inquiry explored by Feral Fridays, a new weekly post where we’ll feature items from our collection like zines, experimental book arts, independently produced poetry and other unruly materials that exist at the margins of publishing and literary traditions.

Let’s get Feral!   

--Ana, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Images:

That Way Issue 1, Spring 2021

That Way Issue 1, Spring 2021, pp. 23-24 (excerpt from interview w/Erma Fiend)

Thing Issue no. 3, Summer 1990

Re: Creation by Nikki Giovanni, Broadside Press, 1970

Aquarius Rising by Ben Fama, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010

excerpt from Ugly Duckling Issue 6, October 2003

Lynch by Inch: an interview to Ali Khalid Abdullah 2003

Blue Horses for Navajo Women by Nia Francisco, Greenfield Review Press, 1988

Mildred Pierce Issue 3, April 2009

The Match! Number 97, Winter 2001-2002

[zahri-melitor]

DC Pride #1 (2021)

Right, I'm reviewing this, largely because 'how many decent stories are in this' is always a consideration for the various themed anthologies.

The ratio of interesting stories to formulaic 'did you notice we are queer?' stories is about right in this. It's one of the hazards of these type of titles: I want queer stories, and stories about queer people, but personally think DC should start keeping house a bit more strongly about how tokenistic some of the stories end up feeling. But this was the first up, and I wanted to see how it started before it evolved.

The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass is a Kate Kane piece that is as much about her identity as a twin as her identity as a lesbian, and how one affected the other. Enjoyable! Gorgeous art! It got a little bit 'there are so many of us who are queer' at the end but I could overlook that in favour of the extremely solid themes.

To the Victors is Midnighter and Extraño fighting a neo-Nazi vampire, and then Constantine picking up Extraño. It's very much a Midnighter story but the violence level could have been higher.

Try the Girl is Renee Montoya as the Question (so not set in exact 2021 canon then hey) where Renee has the hots for a Defence Attorney who's now running for Gotham City Council. Renee thinks she's been kidnapped, Valeria gets herself out of trouble, and Renee gets kissed on the mask (the lipstick stain is pretty funny tbh).

Another Word For a Truck To Move Your Furniture it's the annual unnecessary Harley/Ivy story. Was admittedly probably necessary for the first ever DC Pride to help sell it, but even the team of Mariko Tamaki and Amy Reeder doesn't get it past an 'eh' for me. (DC I am begging you give me some creativity in these stories; we don't need a ship that literally appears regularly in ongoings)

He's The Light Of My Life! is a very necessary attempt to try and fix how glurgy and formulaic Alan Scott's coming out story was in Infinite Frontier #0. This time we actually get Alan and Todd having more of a conversation about things and things being somewhat awkward with the friction between Alan and the way he'd navigated hidden years compared to Todd's far more Millennial attitude to being out, framed around the history of the bar/restaurant they were meeting at. A major improvement.

Clothes Makeup Gift I knew literally nothing about Jess Chambers before reading this, but what I will say is the story's got the same cute incidental feel to it that I've seen in several Wally/Linda short stories in various anthologies, which is a very good association to have when you're also a Flash character. It was lightweight filler but it was charming lightweight filler.

Be Gay, Do Crime honestly if the Kate Kane story hadn't been so great this story would have won best of for me entirely off the back of Hartley's very tired sounding moment when he says "It's...not as simple as that. When you get older, the necessity for systems becomes a bit clearer. Mind-controlling people for quick fixes is not the solution--" because oh wow do I want to say things just like that to a whole lot of people who sound and have attitudes very much like Drummer Boy in this. Amazing characterisation beat, I loved it.

Date Night it's fine, of all the Nia Nal stories I've read in various Pride anthologies so far this was one of the most slight, but I guess it was the very first go around and so that's why it's just another 'running late for a date' story.

Love Life this could have been an email. I am shocked not shocked to discover my least favourite aspect of Pride anthologies, the Justice League Queer, first appeared in my least favourite type of story in that anthology, 'look we're at a Pride Parade!'. It's like a collision of the worst aspects of dull 'hey we exist!' representation without actually bothering to provide a compelling story. It's just so tokenistic and boring.

[vivalgi]

Almost forgot this month's Choices Insiders due to my lack of interest in the app that's taken me over again lately.

If anyone's wondering then here's what I wrote in the monthly questionnaire:

---

Of course we're getting new skill set and weapons because the ones we already have aren't underutilized enough:

The lead writer Emi also has a twitter thread about the series.

Let's be honest, the real reason why we're getting new skills is because PB really wants us to spend them diamonds on new bling. Fine, money has to come from somewhere, though I'm not really thrilled about it. I even pointed it out in my book 2 review:

--- "Our artists have also been hard at work..." Oh, screw you, PB! It's just some quick sketches for the ignorant masses. The real stuff was definitely baked in the AI oven. I've already seen - the new CGs, outfits and characters were all done with the help of image generators. Also, not a fan of that mini hitler blocking Nia's spotlight.

---

Did PB even let us send questions this time? I usually check Instagram daily and was looking forward to send another set of questions PB will never answer but I swear I didn't see one in the story feed. Regarding the replies, I don't get why PB doesn't want to spread out its release schedule on other week days. Each book would more attention that way.

---

The only one here I'm really looking forward to is Blades 3. I'm dreading what PB has planned for the wedding stuff in COP3 as PB has a really shitty track record with GOC characters. I just want to solve the father's murder and I'm already imagining a head canon about divorcing from Trystan 2 months after the wedding and starting dating Ruby instead.

Even though Bitten is a supernatural story with two LIs, it's still gender locked for some weird reason, so it's a no from me. I simply can't play with those ugly ass new female MCs and they're too much boring work to fix. The other two new titles Inheritance and Years Apart sound like boring Hallmark fillers🥱

---

Funny thing is that in the FAQ PB already said Blades 3 wide release would be in November so why put the ambiguous "fall" here:

---

It's sad to see Choices in such a miserable state and its new sugar daddy's murky background doesn't instill confidence either and it's all affecting my motivation to deal with the game at this point. I'm more excited about Candlelight's project but that one takes time make.

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

This is not good at all...

Insiders and nothing official, so take this with a grain of salt.. but it is brutal.

Regarding Kang and Loki:

“Marvel is truly fucked with the whole Kang angle,” says one top dealmaker who has seen the final “Loki” episode. “And they haven’t had an opportunity to rewrite until very recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him.” 

So they might have to re-write the upcoming movies/series while it's all still filming. My, my...

The Marvels:

Directed by Nia DaCosta, “The Marvels” [...] resulted in four weeks of reshoots to bring coherence to a tangled storyline. DaCosta began working on another film while “The Marvels” was still in postproduction. “If you’re directing a $250 million movie, it’s kind of weird for the director to leave with a few months to go,” says a source familiar with the production.  In June, Marvel held a public test screening in Texas. The audience gave the film middling reviews.   

I'm including a snippet from another interview here because Da Costa said this last month:

While some directors, such as James Gunn, receive almost full creative control for their MCU entries, DaCosta recognized she had to answer to Feige: "It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie." Da Costa did not have full creative control of the movie.

Picture me extremely worried now.

The VFX:

At the world premiere of “Quantumania,” [...] “There were at least 10 scenes where the visual effects had been added at the last minute and were out of focus. It was insane. I’ve never seen something like that in my entire career. Everyone was talking about it.”  The schedule swap with “The Marvels” had left the “Ant-Man” sequel in a squeeze, pushing up its postproduction schedule by four-and-a-half months. Some final effects for “WandaVision” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” were inserted after their streaming debuts. 

The VFX guys have so much work and Disney gives them impossible deadlines, to the point that the releases of their series arrive and they haven't had the time to finish their work. I'm so glad these guys are unionized now!

On Blade:

The project has gone through at least five writers, two directors and one shutdown six weeks before production. One person familiar with the script permutations says the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons. Blade was relegated to the fourth lead.

Holy fuck, that script? Seriously? I bet they would have tried to sell that as feminist, wtf... 🤦‍♀️

Bringing back the OG Avengers. No, really:

Sources say there have been talks to bring back the original gang for an “Avengers” movie. This would include reviving Iron Man and Black Widow. But the studio hasn’t yet committed to the idea.

"We're not working on the new characters well enough and people don't like them! What should we do?"

"Should we write them better?"

"No, let's just bring the old ones back!"

There is one good thing though:

Still, there was one bright spot in 2023: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” which became Marvel’s biggest draw of the year with $845 million worldwide. 

Fuck yeah, James Gunn! It's almost like when you focus on the characters and you tell a cohesive story, people like it and pay the damn tickets to watch it...

[darkfictionjude]

We are all into a painter MC but we are avoiding a writer MC who can be the next Lovecraft and King. Opinions of Ros and family if the MC keeps getting tons of money due their best sellers they made in the hospital and approved by the totally and not hot doctor?

As a writer I am partial to a writer mc 😌

Honestly dr. Madorna might take that money “for the hospital” (I love how y’all think she’s a milf when to me she’s like that mean teacher in Mathilda 😭)

Imre:

He would read them. Critique them and send you recommendations. Eventually he would somehow be your editor. He’s also the reason your covers don’t look like shit.

Nia:

She would read them but she would mostly buy many so you could get on some best sellers list. She would pay reviewers to give you stellar reviews. And pay people to go after those that don’t.

Lorcan:

One day out of boredom (+ curiosity) he would pick one up. Planning on hating it he would find that he really likes. Also there seems to be a character that reminds him of him who keeps getting killed off.

THE CROWNS

Now the thing about asking for the parents is that it’s the same. They really don’t give a shit. They would hate if mc is writing this without a pseudonym. Apart from that at least they don’t need to waste money on them.

Sally: he would love it. He would buy all your books. He even sends you a typewriter so you don’t have to write by hand.

Percy: ask you to make him a character and write him as the hottest, richest man around. Who’s the final girl. Also send a cheque every once and a while some of us are rich-poor.

Orla: do you honestly think she would read them? If she found out by someone there is a character like her she would sue you.

[gemsofgreece]

what is your stance on "my big fat greek wedding"? i need to know! haha

It depends on which movie of the trilogy we are talking about!

I love the original MBFGW. It is very funny and many moments ring true. Idk if you are Greek, but this movie is very loved in Greece. It is not exactly exaggerated, however it is representing the Greeks of diaspora better than native Greeks, because Greeks of diaspora are a little more traditional. It is a common occurrence in immigrants trying to keep their culture and customs alive in a new place. Besides, it was released in 2002, 20 years ago, which was a time such a type of comedy felt very relevant and fresh.

Things are different now - MBFGW 2 and 3 are disappointingly underwhelming. They feel like Nia beats the dead horse again and again. I haven’t actually watched the 3rd but the 2nd movie was an utter disappointment to me. It was some random American teen dramedy with some sprinkles of “Greek misfit”(???? the daughter felt bad to be half-Greek although she was 100% indistinguishable from Americans???) and a few of the old jokes from the first movie regurgitated. Utter, utter disappointment.

I fear the flop of the second movie might have sabotaged the third one too. It is a shame because this one has two important elements: a) it was made solely in order to honour the last wish of Michael Constantine, who wanted his character’s ashes (Mr Portokalos 😢) to return to Greece, which was such a sweet and noble last wish and even nobler that they all did it for him, b) well, it was about the Portokalos family coming to Greece finally, this was such a huge opportunity to rejuvenate the movie series. And yet it flopped, because it’s 20 years after the first movie and the jokes are the same again and Greece is portrayed in a way that is now irrelevant and inaccurate for the sake of ethographic comedy. That’s what I have heard anyway - the movie gets bad reviews from Greeks and foreigners alike. I think it didn’t do well even inside Greece commercially. It’s a pity, especially because it was Constantine’s wish.

But what is a MBFGW movie without Mr Portokalos anyway, right? He was the star and the heart. The first one is a classic you never get tired of.

[latinfeline]

Quick review of the choices stories ive tried and the app as a whole so far

Muder at Homecoming - Not really interested in high school stories all that much, but I like mysteries enough to see past that for now. I really liked how it let me choose a body type and pronouns instead of between being a man and woman, that was a monkeys paw moment cause I was struggling between being a masc or fem they/them.

Guinevere - Thought this one would be easy for me to pick a love interest until I found out Lancelot and Arthur's genders were customizable, now I have no idea who I want to romance.

Kindred - Not too interested in this one yet, but I'll see how it goes. I'm usually more into fantasy-like magic stories than witch-like ones.

The Elementalists - It's giving very minor Ever After Academy vibes, only because magic school, but it's got me invested. Plant lady hot.

Queen B - School drama is not usually my thing, was turned off when the love interest they were pushing all first episode ended up being the teacher. Might give it another few episodes to see if a route with Zoey or Poppy is possible.

Blades of Light and Shadow - Yes yes a thousand times yes. Reigning Passions vibes are coming off BoLaS in waves. Mostly because Nia reminds me of RP MC. I love fantasy and D&D especially. Even if I end up dropping every other story I will keep reading this.

Choices App - My biggest complaint is that since I'm playing on my chromebook it won't let me fullscreen, so the game just floats in the middle of my screen. Not choosing a love interest before the start of the story makes it harder for me to get invested, Lovestruck spoiled me. Being able to choose the MC and LI's appearances is both a blessing and a curse for my indecisive ass who wants to customize everything. Having a default name is a godsend, coming up with names on Lovestruck was fun, but I prefer having it picked out for me 9/10 times.

[signalwatch]

The Marvels (2023)

Watched:  11/09/2023

Format:  Alamo Drafthouse

Viewing:  First

Director:  Nia DaCosta

Marvel has been having some issues, of late, with quality and maintaining a fanbase.  I'm not sure why having a fanbase for sci-fi/ fantasy stuff means eventually that the absolute worst people on Earth feel like their opinions should dictate what the rest of the planet sees and what constitutes a "good" Marvel, Star Wars or whatever movie.  But I suppose it's the same reason that people think they get to tell other people they're the only *real* Americans.

I don't want to define the film Captain Marvel or TV show Ms. Marvel by the audience that manages to mix misogyny and racism into rocket fuel for social media, but I will say - in the event of this year's strike by SAG-AFTRA, it's been tough to get much in the way of promotion out there for The Marvels other than dropping trailers, and that's left a gap in the conversation those folks have filled.  It's more likely we'll see the occasional hit-piece by a major industry publication looking for clicks than Disney doing anything worthwhile to actually promote the film on their own.  We coulda really used the lead cast hitting Hot Ones and Good Morning America.

Look, I agree:  Marvel has put out too much content since Endgame, and that's had a deleterious effect on the overall quality of the material.  Even I have been asking "will this be necessary?" as I hear about each new Marvel thing still in the pipeline.  And sometimes you're watching, say, Loki Season 2, and you're thinking "I literally do not care what happens here" because something like "oh noes, the timelines will all collapse" is both meaningless, up it's own ass of the story being about itself, and insanely old hat to us aging comic nerds who've seen timelines and multiverses collapse and expand over and over for our *entire lives*.  And, yes, Superman will still get printed every month.

Movie superheroes still have to have an antagonist, and they still have to wind up in a big crescendo of a finale, but we've seen this dozens of times in the past fifteen years.  You can polish it, put a new coat of paint on it, but eventually it's someone in a slugfest with their evil opposite who has the advantage on paper (but not the heart of a hero).

So what you have left is what you can do with characters.

And that brings us to The Marvels (2023), Marvel Studios' latest offering.  

The movie has mediocre reviews and is tracking to open badly.  I haven't read the reviews, because (a) I already had tickets and was going, and (b) I kinda wanted to write this before I saw what Chris Spectacles of the Akron Observer thought of the film.*  And I didn't want this review to be me addressing the concerns of reviewers.  

I saw it in a 2/3rds full theater on opening night, and with not a child in sight.  I will say the following up top:  

First - there's no post-post-credits sequence to wait for.  Go home after the first couple of them.  This is not a trick.

Second - Before watching this, yes, you will have to have seen Captain Marvel.  You should see Ms. Marvel.  You will want to just skip Secret Invasion, which this movie pretends didn't happen, and that's fine, because that show was quite bad and more confused the MCU than helped it along.

SPOILERS

The Marvels (2023) is not going to change the world.  This is also not going to "save" Marvel Studios, if, indeed, Marvel Studios needs saving, or the *idea* of saving the studio that means anything at all.  

What I'll argue the movie does is provide a fun time at the movies with characters that are a good hang for the movie's speedy, non-stop runtime.  If Guardians of the Galaxy taught Marvel that what you need is a mix of action, comedy, space and family issues, this movie is absolutely a product of that line of thinking.  The Marvels isn't trying to copy Guardians (despite the fact the villain is a version of Ronan who is a mean lady instead of a mean man), but clearly those items were on a whiteboard somewhere while this movie was getting sorted out.  

The movie knows that the villain's plot is going to fail, and knows we, the audience, are just following the beats on that score.  And so it does the unthinkable of late for Marvel:  it uses the plot as an excuse to tell a three-sided story with three solid characters thrust together an inextricably linked, thereby creating a movie that's character driven.  The problems it addresses are personal in nature as much, or more!, than the need to stop Kree Hammer Lady.**

We catch up with the MCU as Kamala Kahn has settled a bit into her role as teen-hero, Ms. Marvel.  She's still very much a kid living with her family (Marvel understands when they've struck character gold).  Meanwhile Carol is in deep space, living with Goose and part of a network of folks helping keep peace across the galaxy, one supposes.  And, working aboard SABRE's orbital base, Monica Rambeau (I think last seen in WandaVision) is putting her powers to some use and being a scientist/ astronaut type.

But it seems since we checked in during the 1990's, the Kree had a civil war that somehow:  (a) messed up their sun? (b) evaporated their oceans and (c) ruined their atmosphere, creating a permanent state of planet-wide nightfall.  Not-Ronan has taken up the mantle and is trying to restore Hala, the Kree homeworld in a very Kree way - by murdering people.  She's obtained the second Quantum Band (Kamala having the first one we'd seen - there are two) and she's using it to open worm holes to...  

Look, the plot is the villainous plot from Spaceballs, and our villain is MegaMaid.  There's really no way around it.  It's not what *I* would have done as a writer, but Spaceballs was also 40 years ago, so... we may have to let this one go.  What's important is that MegaMaid is targeting planets in which Carol Danvers has an emotional investment and stealing their water, air and sun, and that's personal and mean.  But why?  Well, thereby hangs a tale.

But, like I say, it kind of doesn't matter.  She could be unleashing cooties on those planets.  She exists so our heroes get together and figure out their personal stuff.  And that's what the movie is about.

Monica has to figure out what it means that Carol didn't come back for Monica when Maria fell ill, both the why's and the impact.  Kamala has a parasocial relationship with Carol that Carol feels she has to live up to, even as it inspires Kamala and Carol doesn't feel at all like that hero.  But Kamala's hero-worship is kind of the unspoken opposite of how Monica has reacted to learning she has powers of her own.  And Kamala and Monica are complete strangers, navigating knowing each other while also seeing each other's relationship with Carol.  It's complicated stuff!  You could have made a similar indie movie about a movie star, her old friend and a fan, and gotten much of the same effect.  

But this one is in space, action-packed (I mean VERY action packed) and manages to balance the sincere moments with the incredibly silly moments with the pathos of inadvertently causing the self-immolation of Space Nazis.  And, in my opinion, it all worked.  

I liked the singing planet (but they did need to hold to the concept through the battle), I liked the kitten Flerkens and the absolute chaos of the evacuation scene.  I liked Kamala's family dealing with the nonsense of superhero/ SABRE life.  I liked the kooky three-way fights and the "we gotta synch up" montage.  The fight sequences are very well choreographed and work well despite what absolutely should have been a lot of confusion for the audience - ironically, only the audience is in a position to get what's happening. And I very much liked that our heroes *tried* to reason with the mad despot once it was clear they had the upper-hand and offer a way out of this.

In general, I was already in the bag for Brie Larson's take on Carol, and it's interesting to see a version 30 years older and with a lot of new, self-inflicted baggage.  Iman Vellani's Kamala Kahn is an absolute delight and can't wait to see her again.  And Teyonah Parris is very pretty great as my first Captain Marvel, and with decades of baggage to sort through with Carol, the blip, super-powers and how to be a superhero, which, frankly, she doesn't want to be.

Complaints:

So - did the singing planet die?  I have no idea what happened there.  It would be nice to know.  It seemed like everyone was going to die, and no one seems to care.

They basically borrowed the ending of All Star Superman, but didn't do it as well or with much emotional resonance, which is a real bummer.  Now DC can't use it, and this didn't land as well as it could have for Carol.  Felt like it needed a few more beats.

We gotta find more interesting ways to dress aliens.  Bright robes are very 1990's ST:TNG and it keeps happening at Marvel

Space is boring in this movie.  Marvel space was defined by James Gunn, and it is beautiful. Show that candy colored majesty, not ST:TNG white stars (the new Trek knows this).  There's definitely some more creative design they could have done, but maybe less is more if Quantumania was any indicator

Carol sure is good at astro-navigation and everything is apparently cosmically nextdoor in the MCU

I don't understand how the heroes became disentangled

Kamala uses her powers without her bangle, and I didn't know that was a thing

Spoilery Spoilers

It was fun seeing Valkyrie again, and good use of the character in her current role.  Also, sure felt like she and Carol knew each other pretty intimately...  Close to making that happen as Marvel will get, I guess

I don't know who Park Seo-joon is, but he was swoony.  I guess he's a big star?  Probably make the kids very happy

The first post credits scene was met with audible joy from the audience, so here's hoping that works.

The second post credits scene received an involuntary verbal response from me and a few others in the theater.  I like where they're going with this.  X-Men will not work in the MCU, but as close-universe neighbors, seems like a fine idea.  Also, thank goodness that isn't the last we'll see of Lashana Lynch

I was led to believe Richard Ryder/ Nova would appear, he does not.  

(late edit: this movie has the single greatest needle drop in Marvel history)

I don't think this one landed for me exactly as hard as the origins of either Ms. or Captain Marvel, but if the requirement was "I would like to spend time with these people, and see them together in a fun way" this managed that.  It feels unnecessary only in that it only barely strives to move a universe of stories forward and is, instead, self-contained and about these three people and their family/ friends.  It is very necessary as a "we should have solo stories that advance the characters but not carry the universe forward in obvious and awkward ways" sort of way.

Would I watch four more of these?  Yes.  

And thank god they got Nick Fury into a place where it's not a drag to have him around.

Look, I don't know what you people want out of Marvel, but I want something fun I can rewatch without feeling like I'm doing homework.  I like a good adventure and fight scenes and jokes and characters to enjoy.  I suppose I'll check out some reviews, and I think from my laundry list of nits to pick, it's clear I'm not giving this a 5/5, but when all you hear is "underperforming" and "mediocre reviews" in a world with ten movies about Vin Diesel driving cars fast and the general shit people get enthusiastic for, I won't even pretend to know what people consider a win.

*I swear to god, if I see one more person thinking they've got the edgy take on Marvel by saying "I don't consider Marvel movies to be *cinema*...   Dude, we get it.  You're very special and very smart and you can get your "I'm a very smart person on the internet" cookie on your way out the @#$%ing door

**no one is beholden to remember made-up alien names for longer than the name pass by in the credits

[nijigasakilove]

Date a Live V what a ride you were. The best this franchise has ever been and I’m so sad it’s over, but that was a beautiful finale that was narratively and thematically satisfying. Tears were shed at the end. Mio, you can finally be with your beloved ❤️

Congrats to everyone who came together to make this season happen. Could feel the love and passion that the studio and staff put into this. Was skeptical about wrapping everything up in one episode, but this had it all!

Starting off in Mio’s pocket dimension, the idea of Shido and Shin going Rizz for Rizz for Mio had me laughing so hard lmao. I was happy Shin actually told her he wanted her to move on and be happy and see new things. As I been saying after the last few eps, no way he’d want her continuing on this path, and having that verbalised had to feel like a tremendous weight off her shoulders.

Of course here come this loser Westcott ruining a great moment with yet another diabolical magic experiment gone wrong. At least that gave us a chance to see all the girls fighting together for the first time this season, even Nia back in the fight! Wish it wasn’t all cgi but oh well.

Mio’s sacrifice broke me man, but at the same time it’s thematically consistent. Mio started the episode by saying “Perhaps I truly did want to die this whole time” it’s no way she could ever let go of shin, so it’s fitting she saves Shido’s world and gets her reunion with her first love finally.

“You finally got to see Shin” 😭not a dry eye in the show or watching. Just beautiful, man.

That ending looked conclusive, but there’s still more to the story so I’m not sure. Honestly feels so good I almost want it left there because I’m not sure if the actual ending will be as good lol. Date a Live is kind of the last of a dying breed of that early 2000s/2010s urban fantasy genre. Strike the blood, Mahouka, Toaru, etc. :/ fun ride tho

review

Edit: oh yea, they tried pulling that Westcott sympathy shit at the end. Nah fuck him lmao

[syn4k]

go

thank you whoever you are for enabling me on this btw you have saved my life

(if you read through this review and decide that you wanna check this series out or buy it, the link to the official website is here!)

OKAY

SO

The Wingfeather Saga is a four-book fantasy series by Andrew Peterson. Despite being a series written and aimed towards children, it also deals with serious themes in a way that doesn't trivialize them or shove them to the side.

Do you like dragons? This series has dragons. Do you like themes of healing and dealing with some pretty heavy shit but healing nonetheless? This series has that too. Do you like hella good worldbuilding and a solid plot that is richly detailed and makes sense, but isn't muddled or confused? Like hell you do! Do you like actually decent representation in your works? You're never gonna guess what this has! That's right! It's got it all, baby.

This book has next to no romance in it, and all of the major relationships that it focuses on are platonic. But what even is in it in the first place?

The story is centered around a small family living in a small town. Their surname is Igiby, and they lead as quiet a life as one can whilst being occupied entirely by what's essentially a fully armed army. More on that later.

The members of this family are:

Nia, mother

Podo, grandfather

Janner, eldest sibling (12 when the series starts, 15 when it ends)

Tink (Kalmar) (11 when the series starts, ~14 when it ends)

Leeli (8 when the series starts, ~11 when it ends)

Now, the world these people inhabit is called Aerwiar. In it reside half-lizard creatures called Fangs, which have been making the lives of the people living on the content Skree horrible for years. The Fangs are under the command of Gnag the Nameless, the whole villain behind the whole thing, although we don't really figure out why he is like he is until the fourth book.

Through a series of events, things happen and this family alongside a few other characters go places and eventually have to run from their home.

What other characters? I'm glad you asked!

Peet the Sock Man (that's not his real name, it's later revealed to be Artham- again. lore. i'll explain later), the local village "crazy man" who lives in a huge treehouse in the woods and is actually related to the Igibys.

Oskar Reteep, the local librarian who runs a small bookstore called Books and Crannies. It's an odd place, but as a family friend of Nia and Podo's, he ends up going with them when they have to flee to their home.

Now, here's the thing. I mentioned representation earlier, right? Here's the cool thing. I wasn't kidding. This shit's fuckin' awesome. Let me explain.

Leeli, the aforementioned youngest sibling, has had a lame leg for as long as she can remember. She walks with crutches, and it's just regarded as a casually natural thing. She can keep up with her brothers just fine, but they also know that if she needs help, she'll ask for it. (This is literally said in plain text like, 6 pages in.) Even though she needs additional help from her family sometimes, they're also very respectful about it and stand up for her where they can!

Podo, the grandfather, was a sailor once and has a wooden leg. His original one was eaten by a dragon. He gets around just fine with this, and makes a lot of casual jokes about it as well.

"But Amys!" you say. "Why's it called the wingfeather saga if there's no mentions of wingfeathers in it at all??"

Allow me to elaborate.

The Shining Isle of Anneira was a kingdom that got totally and utterly destroyed about ten years ago by Gnag the Nameless for reasons that are elaborated on later about halfway through book four. It's revealed at the end of Book One that Nia used her maiden name of Igiby when she and her family fled to keep them all safe, but her husband's name was Wingfeather, so basically everyone's last name is Wingfeather. Yeah.

Where's the husband? Oh, he's dead. (Or is he?)

See, during the attack on the castle way back then, he just straight up dissapeared amongst the fire and the ashes. Everyone has long since made their peace with his death, or something close to death. Except for Artham, a.k.a Peet the Sock Man.

Artham, as it turns out, is heavily implied to have some heavy trauma/PTSD for [waves hand vaguely] lore reasons. I can't explain this perfectly, I'm trying so hard to not spoil anything because the best thing to do would just be to read it. Anyways, here's the incredible thing- at one point, he DOES face his fears and get through a large part of his trauma. Even then, though, he has recessions sometimes due to triggers! Healing isn't linear, and in fact he still struggles with his past throughout the entire series!! How fucking amazing is that! god i love artham he's one of my favorite characters in this entire goddamn series

Uhhhh let's see here *flips through notes* what else is there this is my second time writing this goddamn post (thanks Tumblr) oh yeah! There's uhhhh nonhuman transformations there's seriously good worldbuilding and lore and explanations for things there's some serious advice on how to persevere through difficult things there's a focus on the good in the world despite the evil within, there's really silly but still genuinely touching poems, there's a bittersweet ending that's still incredibly satisfying and zero plot holes that I have found, and best of all the art in jt SLAPS.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention. There is some SICK ASS ART in this series, both on the covers and in the pages of the books themselves. I can't find a good source for any of that so you'll just have to take my word for it but trust me it fucking SLAPS.

anyways i'm trying to not spoil anything so that you can go into this yourself because this series is chock full of detail and completely rewired some core bits of our brain. i promise uou will not regtet it i habe been going insane over this for years OLEASE AT LEAST TRY TO GET THENFIRST BOOK IF YOU CAN

thank you for coming to my ted talk, fuck you tumblr for deleting my first draft, and please for the love of god just give it a try

[theuntitledblog]

WWE King & Queen of the Ring (2024) - REVIEW

I first got into wrestling after watching the 1996 King of the Ring which was famously won by Stone Cold Steve Austin and the event became a firm favourite of mine thereafter. Part of the excitement was that you never quite knew who was going to win and then pushed to the next big star. With a couple of exceptions between 1993 and 2002 (Mabel, Ken Shamrock, Billy Gunn), most winners of the King of the Ring went on to much bigger things but the event itself fell out of favour post-2002 and was only brought back occasionally but it never really seemed to mean anything. The 2024 King & Queen of the Ring tournament by contrast for me has been a great success in part because it seems to have been given a new leash on life by creative. OK yeah there were a few stars who pulled out due to injuries or other reasons, but it's hard to argue that this years King and Queen of the Ring doesn't mean anything especially with the added twist of a world title shot awarded to the winners. The respective final match of the tournament may lack storyline heat between the competitors but the stakes of the tournament more than make up for it. WWE has had a great year so far with its PLE's and this one is no different.

Women's World Heavyweight Championship Match - Becky Lynch (c) vs. Liv Morgan

A minor feud that felt hastily put together following the injury to Rhea Ripley that none the less delivered a solid match with some significant story implications due to the involvement of one Dominik Mysterio. The match itself wasn't a classic but it certainly showcased just how far Liv Morgan has come as a competitor from her days as member of the Riott Squad to now being World Champion. Perhaps the most memorable element to the match was it's ending with Dominik Mysterio representing the off-screen Ripley while accidentally (or not?) costing Becky Lynch the match and title. It definitely felt the right call as Lynch didn't particularly need another lengthy title reign whereas it certainly felt the right choice to put the title on Liv Morgan and spice up her feud with Rhea Ripley at the same time. A good start to the show for me.

3/5

Triple Threat Match for the Intercontinental Championship - Sami Zayne (c) vs. Chad Gable vs. Big Bronson Reed

This is by and large the biggest and longest running feud on this card that has been brewing since WrestleMania and involving stars who had been hovering around the Intercontinental title since the Gunther run. This match was incredible and was boosted by the Saudi crowd reaction to Sami Zayne who probably got one of the biggest pops of the night. It's also reassuring to see that the work Gunther put in to raise the profile of the IC title seems to be continuing and it felt right for Chad Gable and Bronson Reed to still be in the mix and adding variety to a rather small card. This had everything you'd want from a good triple threat match with high spots, plenty of near falls and the drama between Gable and Otis at ringside helped to add a little bit more to this match. Outstanding.

4/5

Queen of the Ring Finals Match - Lyra Valkyria vs. Nia Jax

The coldest match on the card that also wasn't helped by a lack of crowd reaction which is a shame because this was a showcase for a newer star with great potential and a veteran who is probably on her best run in WWE. Lyra Valkyria had a great entrance, look and put in a good effort in a David vs. Goliath style match where Nia Jax utilized her size and style to great effect. The finish in particular was very impressive and the result felt right with Jax finally getting some much needed and deserved recognition. An interesting clash between Bayley and Nia Jax at SummerSlam awaits.

2.5/5

King of the Ring Finals Match - Randy Orton vs. Gunther

This was the polar opposite of the Queen of the Ring Finals match; a clash between two heavy weights in WWE who had never met before and with very different styles. That there was no real story between them going in felt irrelevant as their respective reputations alone made this a mouth watering prospect and it certainly didn't disappoint. This was an old school wrestling match with a deliberate pace, great selling (particularly from Orton) and a crowd that was into it at the start. It's a shame that the final pin by Gunther seemed to be botched with Randy Orton's shoulder not down on the mat but it doesn't take away that this was an incredible match with the right result.

4/5

WWE Undisputed Championship - Cody Rhodes (c) vs. Logan Paul

Coming off of a stunning finale at WrestleMania 40, it is fair to say that the one thing Cody Rhodes has perhaps been lacking is a compelling story since becoming champion. Sure there's the much teased feud with the Rock to look forward to but right now from a storytelling point of view, we're in a more episodic stage. On the plus side, the Backlash match with AJ Styles was outstanding and the match here, though not as good as the Backlash match, is still a very good main event. Rhodes and Logan Paul make for a good pairing with Paul in particular making for a natural heel against Rhode's babyface. It feels repetitive to say how impressive Logan Paul's in ring ability is given his experience, but he again puts in an impressive performance with Cody Rhodes in a compelling match that was otherwise predictable in its outcome.

4/5