#the second one is more compelling to me personally as a retelling

[loverboyfae]

is there any version of the jekyll and hyde story that's good? lemme know

[veliseraptor]

April Reading Recap

Stars of Chaos vol. 2 by Priest. I'm not quite grabbed by this one yet. I'm not not enjoying it, but the main relationship doesn't quite have me compelled, and the politics aren't quite sharp enough to get me either. I'm not totally sure I'll keep buying the published volumes, at least not at this time, and just read the rest online to see how I end up feeling about it as a whole before making the financial commitment.

Medea by Eilish Quin. Listen, I'm a Medea apologist, but I'm a Medea apologist who is very much of the "she absolutely did all the awful things she's accused of and she is valid" and the author here is going "she did all the awful things she's accused of but it's not as bad as you thought it was because she didn't mean it!" and I'm just. I'm not mad, just disappointed (again). I was so hoping for a book that would do something interesting with a Medea retelling but I probably should've known better than to think it'd be this one. Why, you may ask, do I keep reading myth retellings about my problematic faves when all I do is complain about them? Hope springs eternal, I guess.

She Who Became the Sun and He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan. Exceptional. Might be my favorite books I read in April. I'd already read She Who Became the Sun back when it was first published and knew I'd enjoyed it (was rereading to refresh my memory for the sequel), but I felt like I enjoyed it more the second time around, and I might've liked He Who Drowned the World even more than its predecessor. If you're looking for works of just-barely fantasy with delightfully fucked up queer characters, come get 'em here. I won't say most of them are happy (they're not) or that things end well (they don't), but boy is it good reading.

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling. Decent horror but not particularly outstanding, in my opinion. I liked The Luminous Dead more.

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee. I continue to struggle with novellas. This was a perfectly good novella but it felt like it could've been a stronger short story, which I guess is better than the other way I usually come out of novellas, which is "this was a fine novella but it should've been a novel."

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I really liked this. It has more of a thriller-ish edge than I expected, but for all that I think it's a thoughtful book with some interesting things to say, and I feel like it's one I want more people to read so I can talk to them about it. It's set in a sort-of spooky, near-future dystopia, but a lot of it is about, like, the nature of thought and consciousness. Anyway, I found myself compelled.

Islands of Abandonment: Nation Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn. I found myself reading this thinking a lot about The World Without Us, a book I read many years ago and would kind of like to reread, and which I think I liked more than this (at least in my memory). I was hoping for more analysis than I got from this book, which was beautifully written but more nature/travel writing than science. One thing I did appreciate was the attention paid to the human cost of the "abandoned" places examined in this book - the pain that abandonment often signifies, and the trauma it indicates, in spite of the beauty that may come after.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard. I really liked the way that Beard chose to do this one - namely, taking it by theme rather than by emperor, and breaking down different areas of the emperor's life over time rather than trying to tell a linear narrative. It also let her do some of the better "skeptical" reading of sources that I've read in a popular book on ancient history, where she was actually digging into the "rather than what this says about what this person may or may not have actually done, what does it say about expectations, beliefs, and tropes that people had" kind of reading. And after some of the other popular histories of Rome I've read, thank god for that.

Metamorphoses by Ovid, trans. Stephanie McCarter. Continuing on with my "reading new translations (by women!) of classical epics" run (started with The Odyssey, The Iliad is on my list). It was fun to reread Ovid! As usual one of my favorite parts of this was reading the translator's note and introduction, and I wanted about 500% more of that through the text (tell me about the assonance you're preserving in the Latin!) but did get some of (thanks for the information on the penis/pubic hair puns!). Overall would recommend as a good translation of Ovid that very much does not flinch away from - and makes/keeps appropriately uncomfortable - the sexual assault.

Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat. Slightly more YA than I usually like, but I enjoyed it! I was a little :\ about it for a while, very much feeling the YA cliches of it all, but the late hour twist got me interested again, and I will be picking up the sequel. Did miss the full balls-to-the-wall iddy joy of Captive Prince, though, since I probably wouldn't have picked this book up without the author recognition.

Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other by Judy Klitsner. I really liked this one, particularly for its commentary comparing and contrasting Eve, and the other women of Genesis, with later Biblical narratives. I don't know how much I buy all of her arguments when it comes to intentionality of all of the comparisons she's drawing, but it certainly makes interesting food for thought, and a good sampler for me of what literary-based Biblical scholarship can look like (and an indication that I'm interested in trying more of it).

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. I read most of my way through this book continuing to really appreciate what Banks does with the Culture novels and planning to continue on reading the next one, but not enjoying this specific one as much as I did The Player of Games in particular, and then I got to the very end of it and went "hang on what the fuck???" but in a decidedly good way. And I'm still kind of thinking about That even though it's been a while, which I think is a positive. Anyway, I don't think I'd recommend this as a starting place for anyone to read the Culture novels, or as a must read, but it was on the upper end of a three star rating.

Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid. I wanted this to be more gothic horror and less romance and it ended up being more romance and less gothic horror, was my feeling. Not necessarily the book's fault, but if anyone else is eyeing it wondering...now you know.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. I really enjoyed this one! I was kind of skeptical going in - I'm not a big magic school person, as a rule, and the more I feel like something is hyped to me the more I tend to drag my heels about it - but Naomi Novik is really good at what she does and she clearly had a lot of fun here. It's tropey for sure, but I enjoy the narrative voice (very important, in a first person narration), and the action moves along with what I felt was pretty good momentum. The other thing I was worried about - that it'd feel too much like this was just ~commentary on/against Harry Potter~ without saying anything for itself - didn't materialize for me. I'm looking forward to reading the next ones.

The Monster Theory Reader ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. I'm so rusty on my academic/theory reading and I felt it reading this collection, some of which was definitely better than others. Kristeva's essay on abjection was particularly rough as far as "I'm reading words and I know all the words but something about the order they're going in is just not making sense to me." Overall...it was a decent primer? There were a few very interesting essays in there; my favorite might've been the one on tanuki in modernizing Japan's folklore, but there were a couple on "monstrous" bodies that made me wish I had someone to discuss them with. That's probably my main problem reading academic works these days: I want a seminar to dissect them afterwards and I just don't have that.

The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I'm trying to read something Jewish on Shabbat now and finally getting around to reading some Heschel after years of meaning to. I thought "oh, I'll start easy with something nice and short" - yeah, no, Heschel's got a very particular style of writing and there's a lot of theological depth packed into a very short volume. I'm looking forward to reading The Prophets, though.

The Husky and His White Cat Shizun vol. 5 by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou. I think we're juuuuust about caught up now with the official translation to where I started reading the machine translation, so I'm very excited for (a) things I don't remember as well (b) reading it not in machine translation. Also looking forward to everything about what happened with Nangong Liu and Nangong Xu making more sense this time around, on account of not reading it machine translated, because I didn't follow it so well on my first read and I feel like I'm already doing better. (Though that could also be because it's a reread, no matter how different an experience of one.) Still feel real bad for Ye Wangxi, on so many levels. Mark that one down for 'characters I'd love to know more about what they're thinking.'

The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang. I really enjoyed S.L. Huang's other work with the Cas Russell series, and I liked this book a little less than those. It felt like an almost winner, for me. Certainly I read through it quickly enough, and I can say I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd give it an enthusiastic recommendation. It falls somewhere in the middle between "a fun action/adventure story" and "something I can sink my teeth into" in a way that didn't quite satisfy either itch. Still, it did make me curious about the source material, which is one of the Chinese classics (Water Margin) and I might go and find a place to read that, if I can; if I'd had that background going in I wonder if my experience of this work would've been more edifying.

--

I'm currently rereading A Memory Called Empire so I can (finally) read the sequel (A Desolation Called Peace); I also checked out from the library the next two Scholomance books so I'll be reading those. I'm going to try to throw some nonfiction somewhere in there (maybe The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman, which I also have out from the library, but maybe something else), but I've still got the sequel to The First Sister sitting on my shelf (also from the library).

Outside of that I've got no big reading plans - I'm working my way through some of the unreads on my own shelf (despite what it may look like, about the library books) and eyeing The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky or a reread of Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett so I can continue that series.

[iravaid]

(in reference to your reblog)

I would absolutely love an exhaustive breakdown of all of your decisions regarding ‘Simon Riley in Situations’

That series consumes me. Much like in the way that Simon was consumed by the desert. I have been fundamentally altered by it.

Oh my god, genuinely thank you so much for asking

This became a very long set of rambles that I have two split in two, possessed by the talk too much demons... sad! Here is the first part, the second part I'll tack on in a later reblog.

More below, I get a little bit Pepe Silvia in this, but oh well lmao

An Introduction

I’m going to preface this with stating that the comics are bad. On an artistic and writer’s standpoint, their net value is negative. I have read those six wretched issues at least seven times through and feel confident in that assertion. I have no idea why people think they’re actually good, in the face of muddy rendering and an overall displeasing art style, Americanised writing with poor panelling and pacing and dialogue, among other torture-porn related things.

That being said, there are moments of competency that shine through, past the early 2000s edge and casual sexism + racist stereotypes, which in turn irritates me because it does show there could have been a better story here. And Yet. But the comics have been a well of spiteful inspiration, first with Except You, and second with In The Desert (and perhaps more to come), and I do want to talk about that. (and I do know that the comics aren’t necessarily canon for the reboot Ghost, but like. C’mon. Work with what we’ve currently got. Even if my money is on Makarov in the reboot having something to do with Ghost’s past, considering the knowing look he and Price share upon seeing the photo.)

Simon is a character that has been doomed by the narrative since day one, and while it would not be a surprise if he survives MW3 on account of the company wanting to make money off his multiplayer counterpart, there is a certain compelling grief in knowing his fate was always going to be how it was in the original trilogy. Simon suffers: Simon dies; Ghost suffers: Ghost dies. There is no other way this story ends. And there is something about the cyclical nature of his life, and patterns to be found in a such a story, which I think are extremely fun to try and enforce, as well as emphasise. It’s this, among other things, that makes him a compelling character to me. Well – that and him being tall, built like a brick-shithouse, gravelly voice, wears a skull mask, has a strong sense of loyalty and compassion for fellow soldiers… (but that’s beside the point!!!!).

The things he went through in the comics had occasionally been so over the top that I need a moment to stand back and go ‘… really? Like. Really? After all that, you put him through more?’ after every reread. It’s not enough that his entire family was murdered but also his psychiatrist and superior officer, and so on and so on. But unfortunately, I have to reiterate that the comics have been a source of inspiration. ‘Simon Riley In Situations’ is an extension of this spiteful motivation to retell/improve upon what the comics were trying to do, as well as occasionally extrapolating on them, or even warping canon to better accommodate my own headcanons/the rebooted universe.

I love stories were a main/side character goes through an incredible change, to the point where they’re noticeably and irreparably different to how they were at the beginning of the story, for better or for worse. Examples that come to mind, currently, are Jinx from Arcane, Zuko from ATLA, Ahsoka in Clone Wars, Steve from Stranger Things. To me, the transformation of Simon into Ghost is something very compelling. The Simon Riley that’s about to fly to the states with Major Vernon is a man very, very different to the Simon Riley freshly recruited into the 141 by Shepherd. But fundamentally they’re still the same person, and that can be an important facet for a big change in a character imo.

I like using a lot of poems and songs and the occasional bible reference in my works. I know it’s fanfiction and maybe for some people that’s overdoing it, but I love it. I love how art informs and inspires itself, and I love using the inherent emotional and cultural connections attached to a specific work in order to enhance that of my own writing. I think it’s good practice, and maybe it doesn’t matter that it’s expressed in the form of fanfiction. I’m a better writer because of it, and that’s something of significance to me: I never studied English lit/creative writing at a higher level of education, so this is where it will be expressed.

Skulls, Death, and the Ghost

Skulls haunt Simon throughout the comics; in turn, Simon has been haunted by the Ghost he’s doomed to become for a very long time. Roba wears skull face-paint when torturing and attempting to brainwash Simon, Simon’s father used to wear skull face-paint when performing, Simon smeared toothpaste on his face when in recovery from Roba’s captivity and it resembled a skull, Tommy wore a skull mask to emulate his father, and Simon hallucinates skeletons/skulls at different points in the comics. Finally, when his family are killed and Simon goes on his revenge mission, he wears the same face paint as he did during Día de Los Muertos when Roba captured him. He claims that the brainwashing didn’t ‘work’ (as the comics put it), but here Simon is, wearing the same mask as his tormentors. I wanted to stretch that recurring imagery by adding the vocalist wearing the skull face-paint in chapter one of Except You. Something there about returning to form, or perhaps finally looking back to see what exactly is that thing who’s been lurking in the back of your mind. I describe the skull reoccurring as “morbidly familiar” in that this has always been Simon’s fate, and it doesn’t matter what he does to try and escape, because he will always return to it.

It can also be stretched to symbolise his close relationship with Death. Simon has ‘died’ a lot of times in the story. At first he believes he’s dead on a subconscious level (nightmares with Roba’ saying he killed him), but then issues 3+4 happen, and that belief escalates into a conscious conviction that he died on the concrete floor in Roba’s captivity; he died out there in the desert; he died surrounded by his family’s corpses on Christmas; he died the moment he killed Roba; he died for good at the end of MW2. Roba killed Simon, and Ghost put whatever ‘Simon Riley’ once was to rest in the funeral pyre of his childhood home. Ghost has always had to everything on his own up until this point: even give himself a proper sendoff. A part of me wonders if Ghost believes himself, on some level, to be the keeper of Simon’s memory and identity. That is what a ghost is, right? The thing that lingers after a tragedy.

It's something incredibly interesting to consider present-era Ghost. Does he still think he’s dead? Is he waiting for the rot to set in? Has he been so dissociated from himself for so long that he doesn’t know how else to function, and on some level is terrified of what might happen, should he in turn look back to face whatever is left of ‘Simon Riley’? Maybe Ghost can be interpreted as the one that came back ‘wrong’, and he’s waiting for other people to notice that there’s nothing left but a corpse. He has gotten very little help by way of therapy/counselling, and probably doesn’t have the tools nor language at his disposal to neither work through these things, nor know how to voice them in the first place. That’s one of the reasons I wrote Simon as not fully aware of the definition of ‘child abuse’ and how it related to him. He knows Nigel (his father) was a cunt and a wifebeater, but he doesn’t know those necessary psych terms to properly begin processing what happened to him both as a child and adult, because who could have taught him? He never got the chance to go to DBT or CBT, and that hazy moment of time with Dr Halloway probably wasn’t conducive to learning about things like CPTSD and trauma and abusive households. I tried to extrapolate this, with Simon’s internalised ableism also being a block to fully accepting or even processing those terms. He’s in a lot of pain, and he very, very desperately wants to move on, to return to how he used to be before all of ‘this’. Will talk later on about how the military factors in to keeping the status quo of ‘the Ghost’.

In tarot (love you tarot love symbolisms in it love when it’s used in media mwah mwah), the death card symbolises major change, rebirth, and endings and beginnings.

If anything, Simon Riley is defined by his deaths and rebirths, how he keeps forcing himself to change in order to survive a brutal narrative set for him. And Ghost, who bears a skull-face not dissimilar to the grim-reaper, perhaps wears this taboo symbol to ward off ‘evil’, or to use that fear in order to keep people at arm’s length, in response to these injustices done to him by fate and the machinations of people far crueller than Simon. He has been through a lot, and still he keeps moving, keeps completing missions and being a ‘good soldier’, because that’s all Simon knows. He’s like a shark in that way, or a well-trained dog: he was never taught, nor given the chance to learn, how to not be a soldier. This is something me and @narramin, affectionately refer to as hound-coding, which, god, really suits Simon. Will talk about it further on.

Roba Himself

Manuel Roba is certainly there. It’s honestly incredibly disappointing to see how this specific character was handled, how heavily the writers leaned into stereotypes to depict Roba – there’s a panel of him holding a burrito for fuck’s sake. This caricature of a villain is both lazily written, but also serves to reduce the impact he has on Simon. This man is supposed to be the primary antagonist, above Simon’s abusive father. He is the reason that Ghost exists, the reason the Riley family are dead, and can be considered the primary catalyst for most of the comics’ plot. And yet this man, and all that he represents in Simon’s suffering, is reduced to the fat ‘El Gordo’ with dialogue lines that are ultimately meaningless, a personal motivation that is only said in his dying breath without further exploration, and ultimately is a villain without any teeth. I think Roba has the potential to be a terrifying figure, one this kind of dark story needs in order to ensure that Simon’s suffering isn’t made a joke when compared to the one at the source of it all.

There are moments of competency and personality that shine through here and there. The pink deck chair in the sensory overload room, the ‘plant flowers over [the grave]’ line, as well as Roba choosing to make himself appear as the grim reaper himself as a way to express ultimate power over his captives’ lives (and, in turn, Simon killing Roba and choosing to don the skull-face could be seen as him taking that control back).

There is a set of panels, one from issue 5 and another from issue 6, that piques my attention when placed together (seen below). Simon has tried so hard to convince himself and others that he is fine, that Roba’s brainwashing failed, that he is not deeply affected by the seven months of torture and humiliation and dehumanisation. But then he comes back from the dead wearing the same face-paint as Roba. He refers to himself as death, as does Roba. That man has his claws deep in Simon, and Roba knew this, and he died with a smile on his face because of it. As quoted by his final words: in the end Roba is just one man. Killing him won’t bring back the Rileys and it won’t stop the pain Ghost is in (but by god is it Ghost’s right to put that man down for what he did to him.).

The following paragraphs will discuss the torture Simon was subjected to in Roba’s captivity and features discussion of the sexual assault he experienced, as well as being him drugged + detailed acts of dehumanisation. The section itself will be bracketed with a ‘-’, feel free to skip to the final paragraph marked of this section if you’d prefer.

-

In my writing I want to show a competent, terrifying Roba. He should be purposeful in how he goes about breaking these men down in order to build them up into the dutiful hounds Roba so obviously wanted. That’s part of why I think, and wrote, Roba having never touched Simon, he made sure it was his men assaulting Simon while he watched (for one reason or another). And when they were finished Roba would try to manipulate the situation into one being Simon’s fault and that Roba, and only Roba, could fix for him. Simon needed to see Roba as the one with the power to control all these awful things happening to him, and that his own obstinance is the reason he’s suffering. Roba would make an offer – if you listen to me, follow what I say, I can make this stop. I can stop them from touching you ever again. It’s purposefully and insidiously phrased, he’s trying to make all this seem like Simon’s fault for not ‘giving in’. In turn, the prolonged torture and dehumanisation would best be served as well-thought-out tactics.

I’m not a fan of how every other captive was noted as too ‘weak’ or whatever to hold out against all that Roba was doing to them, only for Vernon to say that his methods were ‘genius’ – not with a near 100% mortality rate it fucking isn’t. It would be interesting to explore a fic where Roba was actually competent enough for those aforementioned super soldiers to be a real thing (and we’ll make death proud of us touches on this very well I recommend this fic). But, regardless, I find exploring the ways Simon could have been dehumanised/tortured without succumbing to infection or shock or a sudden heart attack from the sheer amount of stress and trauma to be morbidly interesting. I’m a morbid person, so this tracks lmao (it’s regardless a matter of balance, though, because we’re trying not to fall into that Edge the comics loved so much). I also want to note that Roba rarely, if ever, called Simon by his real name. It’s always ‘English’ or ‘Mr. Death’. A name is a powerful thing to control, stripping a person of their name is a common dehumanisation tactic, one that even the military has been known to use in order to get all these individuals into acting as one mass. It’s also a sign of non-acknowledgement, in my eyes. Simon was not a person to Roba, not really, just a dog that needed moulding. In a way, Ghost referring to himself as ‘Ghost’ may also be a tactic to distance himself from Simon in order to cope with the Everything that’s happened to him.

The next point is just as important as the prior ones: what kind of effect would all this have on Simon in different stages of the comics? And what kind of inner monologue and mindset would he have in order to endure these awful, awful things? And how would he heal from it, considering how the events of the comics went down? He has no control over the situation as a whole, but I imagine that Simon is the kind of person to try and grasp for anything to have control over regardless – he’s exhausted but he still might try to lay in a way that keeps him protected or stills his roiling gut, he’ll occasionally still try to lash out against the narcos, he’ll try and joke with Sparks and Washington in order to help them cling to their humanity (as well as preserve his own identity as a protector, which I want to get into later). He especially utilises dissociation as a ‘tool’ developed from living under the same roof as Nigel Fucking Riley. It provided a very necessary reprieve, and Simon probably believes he’d been ‘broken’ by his father long before Roba ever got his hands on him. Simon at this point probably (maladaptively, in the long run) perceives his ability to dissociate from the body to be a way to control what he truly feels. He can get some kind of control over experiencing multiple instances of sexual assault, over MONTHS, by creating a clear delineation between the body and the person. I wonder if this laid the groundworks for the self-perceived split between Simon Riley and Ghost.

He’s out of that place, Roba is dead and whatever was left of the Zaragoza cartel is hopefully long gone. But where does that leave Simon, whose primary coping mechanisms are either feeling horrific, yawning numbness, or forcing all that pain and fear and humiliation into over-powering anger? All these things kept him alive then… but now what? He has been subjected to a horrific slew of experiences in seven months, over two-hundred days. How do you approach that kind of deal and unpackaging and addressing of that trauma? It’s something in and of itself would be a compelling story to tell, especially with his childhood trauma informing how he processes those experiences. Simon has been physically and psychologically changed by Roba, even if he tried to ‘resist’ – even though interrogation resistance training only lasts for so long.

Sometimes I wonder at what point did Simon realise they weren’t torturing him for information, but to make him into something that wasn’t human. At what point did he realise that there was a reason they made him crawl down the hallways on his hands and knees with a collar around his neck, or that they fed him dog food off the ground, or that he might have been kept in retrofitted dog kennels, in a long-abandoned dog fighting pit.

I wonder if there were times he wished he’d just let go and listen to Roba, and kill the people the latter wanted him to kill; just so that the pain would stop, and he could be more than this thing surviving on the concrete floor. Very interesting to consider, what with the comics implying that Sparks and potentially Washington were also drugged in order to force a dependence on them, as a way to further exert control over them. I’m not sure why Simon didn’t also experience this. Yet another Comics Cringe Moment.

-

Ultimately, when I see Roba I think of a Judge Holden-esque figure: an intelligent man who has taken a step back, looked at the violence of the world, and ultimately came to the conclusion that, 1.) It is in man’s nature to wage war and be violent, and 2.) It is Roba’s right to control that flow of violence. He had Simon, Sparks, and Washington, and others who came before them, tortured, brutalised, dehumanised, starved, assaulted, and vivisected with intents to brainwash them into his own personal soldiers/bodyguards. He wanted to perverse nature and control something that was never his to control, and I think a character like that should ooze calculated cruelty and a disdain for the optimistic/what he perceives as weak. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, in Roba’s eyes, and he wants to be the one holding the leash.

Dogs and Hounds

Speaking of dogs, let’s get into hound-coding. Dog/hound/wolf metaphors are used for characters in a plethora of ways: dogs and other canines are embedded deeply in a lot of cultures and that can be seen in how disparate a dog can be used in symbolism. The rabid dog that requires put down, versus the loyal-to-a-fault dog whose diligence will be its downfall. The dog that hunts you down relentlessly against the dog that protects and nurtures. Vicious and borderline obsessed, pursuing a singular goal with tunnel-vision; dangerous predator stalking you from the shadows; wholly dedicated to a sole purpose in life; kicked to the point where anger lines their teeth and they meet the world with a bite, because they’ll never let anyone hurt them again; a caregiver and teacher, sometimes even a leader that will look out for who they see as family.

With Simon Riley, I feel he is a hound, the kind that’s been kicked enough times to know to bite first and ask questions later – but can someone please be gentle? Please, can’t someone let him rest? Then the narrative slaps his muzzle and tells him the story isn’t done yet. Simon, off the coattails of escaping his childhood home as a teenager, finds purpose in the military and clings to it. So much of Simon’s identity can be tied to him being a protector, as well as a soldier; he’s proud of his achievements within the SAS, cocky, even. He is well trained in violence and well experienced, too; he’s risen above to make a reputation for himself as a tough sonofabitch within the SAS, which is pretty famously full of that type of person.

The dog can be moulded into a lot of different things in fiction, just as it has in real life. So can Simon, so can Ghost: he’s a character that has been subjected to extreme kinds of change, with some very clear distinctions between Pre-Roba Simon, During-Roba, Post-Roba, Post-Family Massacre, and Post-Jungle Raid. That’s one of the reasons why I think the dog metaphor, and its imagery, can provide very impactful parallels for Simon. What is a dog, if not loyal and loving? Didn’t we make it that way? And what is a dog, if not defined by the job it can fulfil. We made it that way. What use is Simon to the military, if he won’t do what he was trained to do. I wonder if he worries about that in between missions: losing his purpose and identity one way or another.

Ghost is a good leader; he knows how to direct a team and how to keep Soap calm during the chaos in Las Almas. I imagine he found sanctuary in the camaraderie that can be found in a military environment, compared to his chaotic homelife. He doesn’t necessarily have to be open about it, or all that externally happy. But it’s regardless a community that has provided Ghost with some form of support (ironic, again, considering it’s the military, but that is how it works). Like a pack animal, one might say.

His potential relationship with Soap, if people take it that way (I do and will be talking about it more later #peaceandlove), reminds me of the poem ‘bait dog’ among others, here's an excerpt from the end of it: “And she still flinches / When I reach to pet her / but she smiles / once I get behind the ears / you will not heal from everything / that does not mean / you will stop being loved.”, and I feel that’s a very lovely image when applied to Soapghost, y’know? Simon has been through a lot, and Soap is emotionally mature enough to recognise that and give him space, while still putting in that necessary work to bridge certain gaps. Kind of like the slow burn of getting a rescue dog to trust you, except it’s your human superior officer with CPTSD and an edgy comic book backstory. They will doubtless have issues and bumps in the road, but they’ll also have shitty jokes and a lot of patience to keep things buoyed. Love wins or WHATEVER.

Roba tried to make Simon into an attack dog, too. Treated him like one, and I imagine there was a point where Simon was starting to believe it. Then he gets buried alive and has to dig his way out. He has to drag himself through the desert (more to come on that) and survive months of recovery until he has a chance to return to the state he physically was. I imagine this time of injury was awful for Simon: he felt incompetent on top of the other churning emotions one would have after surviving so many months of All That. Simon, I imagine, has always defined himself by his ability to provide, protection or otherwise, as well as his own physical prowess. It’s what kept him and his family safe all this time. It also led to him being picked for that fateful mission. I think Simon is a man shown to be capable of that single-minded focus of a hound that’s caught the scent, especially when he spent months tracking down Roba in the jungle.

Simon is a dog constantly having to remember its teeth. There is a lot to be said about dogs that learn to bite back.

I have reached a character limit here but still have a lot to talk about, please hold (and tysm, again, for the ask)

[dsneybuf91]

An Uncharacteristically Early Wicked [Part I] Review

The second Broadway musical adapted to cinema by Chinese-American director Jon M. Chu, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman's Wicked loosely retells novelist Gregory Maguire's dystopian reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz, fleshing out the backstory and motivations of the so-called Wicked Witch of the West.  When Chu and the writers couldn't figure out how to streamline this long-running musical into one movie, they ended up expanding the adaptation into a two-parter. Although live-action musicals and stories about Oz often prove a tough sell to moviegoers, Wicked Part I - which Universal advertises as standalone - has become Chu's first movie to gross over $400 million worldwide, and - after Crazy Rich Asians - only his second non-sequel blockbuster.  Perhaps more importantly, the craft, compelling characters, and social commentary of Wicked Part I help it seem destined for a long shelf life.

Wicked [Part I]

Wide release date: November 22, 2024

Director: Jon M. Chu

Writers: Winnie Holzman & Dana Fox (script); Stephen Schwartz (songs)

Something has changed within mе. Something is not the same. I’m through with playing by the rules of someone else's game.

-Elphaba Thropp

Naturally covering only Act I of the Wicked musical, Wicked Part I shares events preceding those recorded in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its embellished 1939 movie adaptation, focusing on ostracized sorceress Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo)'s term as a student of Shiz University.  The lifelong outcast seems to acquire newfound acceptance as she impresses her teachers with her wisdom and powers of levitation, and develops an unlikely friendship with privileged roommate Galinda (Ariana Grande).  After the forced literal silencing of Oz's talking Animals results in the firing of Shiz's non-human faculty members, a disturbingly enlightening visit to the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) will require Elphaba and the self-rechristened Glinda to choose whether to pursue the approval of Oz's elite, or the need to help those the elite treats unfairly.

Prior to the release of Part I, Wicked became one of the few musicals that I saw professionally staged twice. (However, I missed the beginning of the former performance, and also have only read extracts of the novel.) I ended up preferring Act I to Act II, for such reasons as the former delivering a larger number of my favorite songs, and the show's flow gradually worsening as it approached Elphaba's defeat.  Part I reached cinemas near the end of a year that distressed me for reasons both societal and personal, but provides an appropriate diversion from my worries that next year will suck even harder.  By expanding Act I into a movie that runs even longer than the play, Part I seamlessly reinforces Wicked's often-jovial and surprisingly intellectual strengths.

Wicked takes impressive advantage of its second change in medium.  The prolonged runtime and protracted production time allowed the writers to flesh out and update the characterization and worldbuilding, including additional looks at the discrimination against green-skinned Elphaba and the Animals.  Intimate photography and emotionally-driven editing allow a palpable pace for the story.  One of the most solid casts I've seen for a contemporary movie musical unleashes nuanced physical performances and believable chemistry, both in between and during stellar new renditions of iconic showtunes.  Padding rarely feels obvious, and never distracts the audience from remaining invested in Elphaba's and Glinda's arcs.  Sequences in which all of the aforementioned non-specist elements enhance the evolution of the witches' relationship beyond stage-bound limitations include "What is this Feeling?", now an energetic montage tracing several days of playful "loathing" all over campus, and the Ozdust Ballroom dance, a pathos-injected look at a disgraced "Elphie" and a remorseful Glinda sharing a cathartic evening.

Like The Wonderful Wizard... and its most-beloved adaptations, Wicked has persisted for decades by supplementing the fantasy with fascinating characters, and timeless and relatable themes.  In addition to promoting the importance of companionship and self-confidence, depictions of Oz often establish it as a place where one can't always trust their first impressions.  The seemingly-unfeeling could possess a human level of sentience, and a supposed wizard actually can't produce any magic more powerful than inner strength.  Perhaps it seemed inevitable that even if pre-Wicked portrayals of the Wicked Witch of the West left no room for sympathy, such Oz fans as Maguire, Holzman, and Wicked's own admirers would want to redefine her title.  Erivo and Chu help Elphaba endear through her typically self-assured and confident attitude, but also showcase her humanity whenever she needs to overcome heartbreak or disillusionment.

While Elphaba's universally-comprehendible searches for acceptance and her calling remain the main focus, this movie notably makes an even greater effort than the play did to engage viewers in the Animals' endeavors as well.  The addition of more Animals and a shadow puppet show to "Something Bad" chillingly elaborate on the oppression occurring outside of Shiz, while other scenes prove that Elphaba and campus heartthrob Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) sympathized with Animals even before their ban from the faculty.  In the nearly-three decades since Maguire launched the Wicked book series, its notion of tyrants vilifying marginalized groups and their sympathizers has unfortunately proven realistic more than once.  Just as people of Oz persecute Animals and Elphaba for crises either exacerbated or created by the Wizard's lack of genuine magic, Chu has recalled that while he filmed In the Heights, media blaming Chinese-Americans for the COVID-19 pandemic provoked the harassment of his friends, and instilled in him a fear of venturing outside his residence.

In an interview released four days after Wicked Part I entered wide release, Chu confessed that when Universal offered the musical to him during lockdown, he realized that the empowering lyrics of the Act I finale, "Defying Gravity," paralleled his newfound determination to speak out against the obstacles society places against immigrants.  The separation of Wicked's acts repurposes the deservedly esteemed song, now the number that ends the musical for viewers either unable or unwilling to watch Part II.  It works surprisingly well in either context, as the final justification for Elphaba to disconnect from both self-preserving Glinda and the deceptive Wizard; apparently kicking off the lonely future the opening confirms for the witches.  Her introspection and strengthening mastery of the Grimmerie's spells evoke Baum's original Oz books, in which major characters discover the solutions to their problems inside their humble selves.

The film breaks up "Defying Gravity" with some illustrations of Elphaba's improving sense of self-worth.  In a moment of silent tension before the final verse, she must ascend from a free fall by summoning her broomstick, and envisions her younger self (Karis Musongole) plummeting beside her.  The broom returns to her grasp after she and her younger self reach out towards each other, as a triumphant reflection of Elphaba proving to herself the importance of resilience and seeking new means to achieve justice.  Visually, the number's other most notable embellishment occurs when Elphaba shuts down the Emerald City's lights before soaring into "the Western sky."  As another of several obviously-symbolic lighting choices, it separates a population submissive to the Wizard, including people "in the dark" about the true extent of his supposed powers and generosity, from the enlightened "Wicked Witch."  Back on the ground, Madame Morrible (Chinese-Malaysian Michelle Yeoh, whom I hope to have more to say about after Wicked Part II) pulling Glinda into the darkness places the women who once showed strong support for "Elphie" in between the extremes; knowing the truth about Elphaba and the Wizard, but actively refusing to take a genuine stand against his atrocities.  I've had less trouble than other fans in adjusting to the changes in "Defying Gravity"'s momentum, particularly because the Original Broadway Cast Recording's edits to the dialogue resulted in a similar experience when I first attended the play.

Whether or not a viewer has already seen Act II, they presumably know from at least one version of The Wonderful Wizard... that eventually the Wizard's eagerness to please and incapability for enchantments will prompt him to surrender Oz's throne.  However, the beginning of Part I confirms that despite this duology's myriad of differences from other versions of Oz, the liquidation of Elphaba will prohibit her from supporting any chance of improvement in the next regime.  Fortunately, the framing device of Glinda wistfully remembering the truth behind her "wickedness" suggests a devotion to continue Elphaba's cause.  At least for an optimistic viewer, this demonstrates that even when a movement for justice seems hopeless, it could still yield a beneficial effect; in this case inspiration for other people to disagree with tyranny.  Thanks to such passionate talents as Jon M. Chu, the first half of Wicked's conscious and charming fable is now skillfully preserved in a form suitable for empowering generations of fantasy lovers.

Plug

Violence towards Asian-Americans persists at alarming levels.  I would like my readers to donate to The AAPI Community Fund, even if I personally take no share of the funds.

[brown-little-robin]

ROBIN ROBIN ROBIN

watched all of S1 and most of S2 of Mob Psycho 100 and I am losing my MINDDDDDDDD legitimately I see why u love it so much now. It’s so. It’s so compelling. In the best way. I love it so much. It’s making all the wheels in my brain go brrrrrrrrrrr.

Do u have any MP100 fic recs or fandom posts/blogs you rly enjoy? Or personal head anons or analyses about MP100 u wanna talk abt? I’m really enjoying the show and I hope to finish it next time I get access to Netflix/Crunchyroll but that’s weeks away lol.

YAYYYYYYYY RIGHT????? IT'S SO GOOD OUGH ok SO I'll keep my rambling about mp100 and headcanons and analyses to our dms, but I'll build you a big list of links to my absolute favorite mp100 analysis and fics and so on, and hopefully it's not too overwhelming!!

my tumblr analysis posts:

In-depth breakdown of the "I'm the worst" moment

The color red in the anime

if you want more analysis, my tag #mob meta will lead you to all the analysis posts about mp100 that I've made or (more often) reblogged! #Mob Art 🖤🤍🖤 is my mp100 art tag. beware major spoilers for the entire story in both of these tags, though!

amvs:

I don't know if you like amvs but the mp100 fandom has a million of them, testaments to how beautiful the animation is and how deeply the story emotionally resonates with people. my favorites are:

Children's Work, THE defining Mob and Ritsu brotherhood amv, I have watched it so many times and it always makes me emo

(S1 only) Try to Change, an amv about Mob and ???%, waugh

Jealousy Jealousy, a very short very catchy Ritsu edit that punches SO HARD for being only 29 seconds long

(SPOILERS FOR S2) Karma (are you angry about how Mob is treated? guess what! so is he!)

(SPOILERS FOR S3) Love Like You, an amv about how Mob impacts those around him and the theme of isolation vs connection in mp100

(SPOILERS FOR S3) all of the amvs by @exilepurify but especially the heartbreaking world-changing You're In Ruins. Blue, you specifically will probably enjoy the Ritsu-centric I Sit By You On The Curb, but warning for s3 spoilers!

this one's an animation, not an amv, and it's so silly and fun and I love it: Hello Hello Hello!

and finally, extremely silly Reigen edit :]

My absolute favorite fics:

(warning for zombie-typical gore) my friend @quirkle2's zombie au, a MP100 AU where zombie-hood is a reversible disease that gives you (among other things) intense brain fog rather than something that truly removes your humanity. makes me CRAZYYYYY

A Breach of Trust, a massive longfic AU where Mob gets kidnapped by Mogami at age 10 to be his living psychic power source. It's gritty, it's sweet, it changed my entire brain chemistry, it changed my relationship with food for the better. read this incredible fanart comic of A Breach of Trust too—it's what got me into ABoT, which finally got me to watch mp100 all the way through!

Temporary Accommodations, a 14-chapter alternate ending to the story written before the manga finished! Reigen is forced to play host to Mob's soul, and he's not meant to have psychic powers, so he starts breaking down. Really REALLY good Reigen characterization.

Won't Repeat, a post-canon oneshot where Ritsu accidentally hurts Mob with his powers and has to deal with the fallout. very sweet yet so so real

(SPOILERS FOR S2) The Real World, a short fic about the catharsis of Mob returning to the real world from Mogami's nightmare land

(SPOILERS FOR S2) Petal-Patterned Reunions, a short post-canon fic about an adult Mob running into Minori again!

(SPOILERS FOR S3) schrodinger, a fascinating little 2nd-person POV of Shou Suzuki dealing with issues about his father.

(SPOILERS FOR S3) Childlike Wonder, In The Palm of Our Hands, a 1-chapter post-canon fic about Shigeo and Ritsu collaborating to really, truly test the limits of his powers. so so precious to me

oh yeah (edit) also, I wrote a mp100 fic!! Mrs. Kageyama Reaches ???%, a fic that retells all of canon and a little beyond from Shigeo's mom's perspective, with a twist headcanon that she's more Like Shigeo than it may seem :)

[frazzledsoul]

So I've been writing and deleting this over and over for the past few days. I didn't want to upset anybody or come off too strongly but I kept thinking and thinking about it, and I needed to get it off my chest or I'd just keep obsessing over it. I guess it's something I still feel strongly about.

The idea that an original content creator should have any influence or input over whether one continues to create or consume fanworks is borderline offensive to me. The idea that one should consider that person's intentions or should refrain from continuing the story in our own way if it upsets the creator's sensibilities is really, really offensive to me. As a practical matter, they cannot look at our work (creators are encouraged if not legally compelled to stay away for plagiarism reasons) and as long as we are not making a profit off of it and are not breaking any laws, we are free to continue the story in any way that we wish. This is why AO3 exists, because there is a long history of capricious creators targeting fans for fanworks. The site is there to protect us because it is not the creator's sphere. It is ours. We do not need their permission to create and they do not need ours. We don't need to respect or even like the creator to continue the story and we certainly don't need to like the story itself. In fact, most fanworks come into being because we hated at least part of it, and wanted to try to make something better.

When it comes to the matter of Amy Sherman Palladino, we certainly do not need to respect her value system, to the extent that she has one. I decided a long time ago that I won't let that woman have any power over any enjoyment I got out of her work or the ways in which I sought better means of writing or enjoying the way other people write her story. I do not believe what she believes.

The story is over, and for the most part fans haven't like most of what she's written since 2006, and yet they keep begging and pleasing for her to come back and write an ending that they'll sure will make them happy. The series ended with a positive future for almost everyone involved and fans said it wasn't good enough. Fans asked for years for her to come back and write the real ending, because only Amy can write an ending that satisfies us. We'll respect anything you give us, Amy. Then we got AYITL and almost everyone hates it. She took away the youth and promise of almost all the characters and robbed them if the futures we wanted for them and undercut the premise of her series with that ending. And yet fans still beg and plead for more. Surely when she writes the second revival, she'll finally give us what we want! We'll respect anything you give us, Amy! It's a destructive cycle that never ends.

This woman has done more than enough damage to these characters over the years. She does not need to write for them again. We certainly don't need her permission to want better futures for them, or to only imagine those futures because it's what she wanted. She doesn't want them to be happy, and she doesn't want the fans to be happy. Her intentions should not ever be something that HAS to control the ways in which we retell her story.

As to why I rejected that woman's value system, it's because the show often felt like it was cribbed from my life before it was written, and once I did find comfort in the values I thought it expressed. I thought it was a story that valued compassion, integrity, loyalty hard work, sacrifice, and general human decency. By the end of season six, it was made clear that ASP found most of those things deeply embarrassing if not downright ludicrous. Her universe was proved to be full of moral rot: the only thing she valued at that point was narcissism, money, and emotional destruction. By the end of that season, Lorelai and Rory used the values that the men in their life held dear against them because it made them feel vindicated in hurting them. Luke dared to prioritize someone other than Lorelai and Lorelai used his loyalty and devotion to his family against him, knowing it would cripple him to know she chose Christopher, but choosing to do so anyway because Christopher would never, ever prioritize his daughters over her. Rory used both Jess and Logan's love for her in order to try to use one against the other: she knew that trampled over Jess's boundaries and beliefs in doing so, and yet she attempted it anyway. And ASP defended this as a moral good because Logan deserved to be hurt! (Rory expresses zero remorse about trying to hurt HIM). At least Rory felt bad about it and acknowledged Jess's worth as a person in doing wrong, but the morality of her actions never comes into play. And as for Lorelai? I would love for her to be one of those flawed characters who actually accepts responsibility for her actions, but she almost never is that person when ASP is writing her. The most important lesson ASP had to convey is that nothing in the world matters as much as what makes Lorelai Gilmore feel better, and the people that she hurts certainly never matter as much as her feelings do.

And apart from all that bullshit, I can't help remembering that Lorelai and Rory rejected the decent, dependable, loyal men in the story for the rich, charming Lotharios with a recent history of betraying them. That rejection may have been necessary in Jess's case (because Milo didn't want to participate in this charade anymore), but it does seem that ASP was arguing that Luke and Jess and all of their goodness didn't mean as much as money and charm. They were never, ever going to be good enough. And you know what? Lorelai and Rory hurt the people they chose, too. I feel ASP is as immune to the consequences of that as she was the the overall classist message she was sending here. Money and charm are to overrule all. Well, what if they don't?

So, yeah. I reject that belief system and the way she told me that everything I hold sacred in the world is essentially meaningless and not worth honoring. I've spent a lot of time in my adult life living out the consequences of the emotional destruction that Lorelai and Rory wrought so easily and in Lorelai's case, without shame or remorse (I don't think ASP would have ever let her apologize for what she did). I've spent a very, very long time cleaning up the mess that gets left behind. So no. I do not respect the message that this kind of shit is in any way justifiable.

So any attempt I make in my piddling fanfiction career, or all the shit I write on this hellsite, or even the stories I seek out, always is going to be a repudiation of the story as it was originally told. I am not interested in that story and I have zero interest in letting its implications control the one I prefer.

Gilmore Girls is not a comfort show for me. However, its fanworks are. It is important to me that they are not the same thing.

[allalrightagain]

I wanna ask all the writer emoji ones!! haha but I'll refrain and only ask for 🛒 🎶 and 💖

Hi friend!! Thanks for the ask 🥰

🛒 What are some common things you incorporate in your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc.

I think each work usually has something I’m aiming for specifically, but in general I think there’s usually two flavors of LT fics: complicated family interactions (especially for Harry lol) and tragic endings, specifically where it’s this long march towards The End. I also love playing with the fact that it’s fic and we as readers know the whole story— what do we know that the characters don’t? What happens if we change the information that they have, and give them more or less or crucial information at a different time? That’s something you just can’t do with traditional fiction, except maybe for a retelling, and HP as a series plays really well with it.

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

I actually can’t write and listen to music haha, it’s too much distraction. What I end up doing is like, pregaming feels and listening to a song or playlist while I’m doing something else (driving home, walking the dog, doing the dishes etc) and then once I’m done, turning the music off and writing. I’ve been listening to Noah Kahan’s album Stick Season recently though, and while it’s not really the same vibes, it gives me a lot of Pocket Dad!Peter emotions.

💖 What made you start writing?

This is a hard one, actually!! In some ways I’ve always been writing, I won third in a school writing competition in like second grade for a story about superhero siblings in Australia, and I’ve got HP fic still saved from grade school (I kill Harry bc of course I did), but on the flip side I didn’t write a lot or very frequently— it’s been a short story here or there and then a few years before the next one. (This is, for the record, not the way I would recommend getting a degree in writing lmao. I skated through on personal essays and prose poetry because it was the path of least resistance to getting a bachelors in anything but I’m not particularly impressed by anything I created during those years 😅). I think it’s equally true to say I always have to be thinking of a story and sometimes a story is so big or compelling that the only thing I can do is put it on paper, no matter how long it takes.

Ask me questions on my sick day!

[cherrybombfangirlwrites]

14 and 21 for the Pride OC asks? ^-^

Pride OC Asks!!!~

14. Do you have ocs on the aro or ace spectrum?

HOO BOY DO I. Most if not all of my characters will inevitably be aspec coded because I'm aroace, but here's a quick rundown of my canonically aspec characters:

Snow is partnering aroace, and sex repulsed and romance indifferent. She's in a QPR with her best friend Lan.

Lan is nonbinary/genderqueer and on both the aro and ace spectrums. They are sex and romance indifferent, and in a QPR with their best friend Snow.

Sapphire is demisexual. She fell in love with her bodyguard Raven after they'd known each other for a few years and made a strong emotional connection when they talked about their childhoods one night and bonded over their mothers (Sapphire's bio mom died when she was young and Raven's mom is alive and well and he loves her very much). Raven is bisexual.

Nickelle is aroace, and sex and romance indifferent. She's the team leader in my superhero wip, has ice powers, and is very protective of her friends and family.

Kylee is PanAce. She's nonspeaking autistic, has superspeed and invisibility powers, and is sex favorable. Due to her autism sexual intendeduo does tend to go over her head (like me lol), but she is far from innocent and can have a dirty mind if she knows the joke. She also uses She/They pronouns <3.

Chase is Pansexual Aromantic, and romance 'i just don't think about it much or care'. They haven't thought about having a sexual relationship much before due to his mental disabilities that are considered "scary" and dangerous" and how that would be hard on a partner (He has OCD and a bipolar mood disorder). He also has chronic anxiety and depression which affects his veiw on his relationships platonic and otherwise with people. He also uses He/They pronouns <3.

Corie is aroace, and romance indifferent and sex repulsed. She's a cyborg bounty hunter in Galaxy Destroyer, and is the only 'sane person' on a ship full of allosexuals.

I did go much more in depth with my Aro OCs for Aro Visiblity Day on June 5th in this post

21. Free ramble card wee 

I wanna talk about Snow Knight, the second book in my FSF series.

I was a huge bookworm growing up, and blew through all the books in the school library up until high school (I still love books, I'm just a very slow reader now). I loved fantasy, but something always bugged me about how I could never seem to find a fantasy book- especially a fairytale- without romance.

I did like romance if it was between two well written characters and it made sense- but a part of me was still very pissed off that romance was always a must have in fantasy and the genre couldn't seem to exist without it. Every character had to be paired off at the end, even if it made no sense or the relationship wasn't very healthy.

Then I realized I was aroace. I started to see all the amanormativity in the world- especially mainstream fiction- and I became even more pissed off. I wanted a fantasy story where not only was there no romance- but the female main character was also interesting and had a compelling arc, while also being badass and doing awesome stuff like wielding a big sword and wearing cool armor. (I didn't have much access to indie stuff yet).

Unlike the other fairytale retellings in my FSF series, Snow White wasn't very realized when i dreamt up the project, and just a vague vibe in my mind. I knew I wanted to include a retelling among the other five- but the whole romance part felt not only felt unnecessary, but very wrong to me.

Then I decided, you know what? Screw society's stupid rules about romance, Snow White doesn't need any romance in her story. No man, no woman, no romantic partner at all. She should be allowed to have a close platonic relationship with her best friend without it needing to be anything else. She should be allowed to do cool and badass things that I see allo female mcs do all the time. The story can be just as interesting and awesome without a speck of romance to be found for Snow's character.

And just like that, Snow, her arc, her best friend Lan, and the story of Snow Knight was born. It's honestly been very cathartic as an aroace writer so far to write this story, and I can't wait to share it with the world.

Thanks @sternenmeerkind !

[gaymersrights]

tagged by @cosmicrhetoric (thank you isha <3) to post nine book recommendations. I would literally die for some of these books

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer: This is a Native American history book that tells the history of what happened after the massacre at Wounded Knee, leading up to modern native history. Because so many history books only tell about the massacres of Natives, an overwhelming amount of people don't know anything about modern day Native history, or about the time between Wounded Knee and now. I recommend this book to anyone who wants an introduction into more contemporary Native issues. The book does a great job of being clear with all of its information while still telling a compelling narrative that doesn't just end in death. I also was lucky enough to talk with the author about this book and his other work and it was a super cool experience, definitely recommend his works.

Another Country, James Baldwin: I struggled with deciding which James Baldwin book to put on here, because his work is consistently good and interesting. I ended up picking Another Country because it's just to be one of those books that manages to have a little bit of everything in it. In my mind, this is the Platonic ideal of a litfic book. It's brutal to read, in that way that only really James Baldwin books can be. There's so much about this book that I could talk about but just can't get into without starting to talk about a million other things that are equally meaningful and impactful. I honestly cannot even tell you what this book is about without just reciting the entire thing back at you so. Just trust me on this one.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman: This book quite honestly blew my mind when I read it last year. This book uses archival material to create fictionalized reconstructions of the lives of Black girls from the early 20th century that history forgot. The only evidence that some of these women even lived at all is a single photograph, or one surviving court room document. This book makes you empathize with the lives of people that history tried its hardest to make you forget, so that the reader is forced to find beauty in ways of life that run counter to our cultural narratives of the era.

Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut: I also had a hard time picking which Vonnegut book to put on this list; real ones know that I'm a really big fan of his work. I chose his debut because its really underappreciated. This book got me back into reading after I burnt out in the middle of high school. It's a cautionary tale about automation (which feels more relevant now that AI is becoming a thing) and it really captures that classic scifi feel that i just can't get enough of. Its a silly, quick read, that fills you with the beautiful melancholy that Vonnegut books are so good for.

The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie: I couldn't post book recs without at least one fantasy pic, and I honestly love this one. It's a fantasy retelling of Hamlet focusing on gods that gain more power the more followers they have. It's a simple premise that the book manages to pull off incredibly well. Personally, I'm a really big fan of the second person pov sections of this book (second person pov is so sexy do not @ me on this). The treatment of the gods in this book is absolutely my favorite part, and I think it manages to combine with the main narrative very well. It's a very fun read.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer: God I love this book. It's been a few years since I've read it, but it completely changed a lot of the ways that I looked at the environment and at how our society treats science. This book is a nonfic about how Indigenous knowledge is often dismissed in scientific discussions as being invalid. This book argues that scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledge are not mutually exclusive ways of knowing, and that combining these approaches is the way forward for environmental study. Also along the way you'll read absolutely gorgeous descriptions of American plants, and the ways in which people can build connections around them.

Nature Poem, Tommy Pico: This is the first book of poetry I ever loved, and the only book that I keep saved on my phone, just in case. Basically, the one sentence description for this one is that its a book about a queer ndn poet who can't bring himself to write poems about nature. This book is part of a tetralogy but can be read standalone with no real barriers. If you like this one I highly recommend checking out the others too. These are the kind of poems that you binge in a day and think about for a month straight.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley: How could I not recommend Frankenstein rn. If you haven't read it, read it. You already know what its about, and that it is without exaggeration the sexiest book of all time. So read it. Not optional. This book has changed my life like five times over and I honestly can't trust anyone who can't admit that it rules.

The Monk, Matthew Lewis: THE MONK THE MONK THE MONK THE MONK THE MONK THE MONK!!!!! No one does it like her !!!! This is quite literally the most batshit insane book I've ever read, and I love it. I'm writing a thesis about this book. I told my advisor that I wanted to write about it, and then she immediately told me that if I was going to write about it, then she HAD to be the chair of my thesis committee. Every single person who reads this book is cursed to be a more weird version of themself who tells everyone they meet that they should read The Monk. This is the ultimate Gothic story, about a monk (holy shit) who is renowned for being uncorruptible, who upon meeting one (1) woman, is immediately overcome with lust and corrupted. I cannot stress enough that I have no way of determining if this book is even good, but it is the MOST book you will ever read. Please read the monk.

tagging blue @glasspigeons you don't have to do all nine but I at least want a top three

[julictcapulet]

1 3 4 13 for end of year book ask

end of year book asks!

1. How many books did you read this year?

65 books, but I read pretty much every day so I'll finish more by the end of the year.

3. What were your top five books of the year?

As of right now: 1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 2. Penance by Eliza Clark 3. Happy Place by Emily Henry 4. The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi 5. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

I wouldn't say so? I've read new authors this year, but even though I've loved some of them, I haven't read enough of their books to consider them a favorite, if that makes sense?

13. What were your least favorite books of the year?

In order from least to most disappointing Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati. I have a deep-rooted resentment for the rise of Greek mythology retellings. Taking a recognizable female Greek figure, sticking a sword in her hands, and writing a bunch of paragraphs beginning with "For women…" does not make your #girlbossfeministslay novel groundbreaking. I don't think any of them could write a convincing or compelling anti-hero if they tried. You can write these stories as original works considering how little they have to do with any of the original myths, but these authors know that by hopping on the trend, they cash in on recognizability points for a built-in fanbase, and it gives publishers an excuse to stick some flowers on the cover with art vaguely reminiscent of Greek pottery. A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson. I don't know how much time S.T. Gibson spent on Tumblr while writing this book, but she wrote every single line like she was waiting for someone to put them in a quote post under #spilled ink. The "themes" of obsession, meditations on abusive relationship, sapphic love, power dynamics, jealousy—sorry, where were they? There's one, maybe two scenes that explicitly discuss feminine desire and attraction, but it's not given any build-up or payoff in a gratifying way, and the abusive relationship is told from a perspective that is so gratingly self-aware it sounds more like a therapy session. 600 years fit into little more than 200 pages, with paragraphs of the same metaphor written multiple times so you know Gibson knows what a metaphor is? Overwritten and boring. Verity by Colleen Hoover. This book wasn't as egregiously offensive to my eyes as November 9 (more commonly known as the worst book I've ever read—and I've read a lot, I don't DNF books), but it was just a really shitty thriller. Not only did it lack any tension, but she gives away multiple twists through the narration and it being written in first person makes the main character an idiot. I guessed one of the plot twists right away, and as for that final chapter, it makes no sense. The second you ask one question about either possibility, you realize just how many plot holes there are. Ripoff of Rebecca with some knockoff Gone Girl characterization thrown in because Colleen Hoover has never had an original thought in her life, and whenever she does, it's bad. None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell. Just really really stupid and also weirdly apologetic of…pedophilia? This book dares to ask the question: What if a pedophile isn't bad because the girl he groomed and abused…wasn't a good person? Which can again be traced to the fact that her mother was also a shitty mother. Also, the book had really bad writing; I sat through multiple paragraphs where one character, Alix, would listen to our resident "crazy woman who is crazy because she is just crazy" Josie, and would have an inner monologue filled with stuff like "It's interesting to hear her talk and point out all the nuances in what she said. It made it much more engaging to listen to and she was sure other people would feel the same way." Well, I didn't. Psyche and Eros by Luna McNamara. Personally, this is the most offensive to me because the myth of Cupid/Eros and Psyche is my favorite myth of all time and this was…absolute garbage BYEEEE this book was badly written crossover fanfiction and it sucked so bad, it's the worst book I read all year.

[kingfisher4130]

The Chocolate Caper

Ok so I'm in a creative writing class rn (specifically the creative nonfiction part) and I've just been remembering a lot of random stuff from my childhood in general so I wanted to post this here. Basically it's a very embellished retelling of my 9th birthday party but if you want to be pretentious about it you could say it's a cautionary tale about peer pressure.

Ok, for for my 9th birthday party I'd decided to have a sleepover (I really wanted a pool party but having the misfortune of being born in January and not rich enough to have access to an indoor pool, that was literally impossible). My mom had allowed me to invite four people, so I'd chosen my two best friends and two of my cousins.

Meet the brew: First, there was Emma, my best friend. We'd known each other since kindergarten and did everything together. She had black curly hair that she always kept cut shoulder-length and a huge My Little Pony obsession that she'd passed on to me. At the time we were still holding onto our shared dream of starting a horse ranch together. Yes, we were that kind of horse girl.

Unfortunately, my other friend Audrey, an intelligent strawberry-blonde girl with the memory of an elephant, was unable to attend due to an event at her family's temple (they were Jewish). Maybe if she'd been there, the whole thing would've gone much more smoothly. She had more brain cells than the rest of us combined.

Lauren, my cousin who was older than me by a little less than a year, was the planner. If we decided to do something, Lauren would plan every step to the last second. She'd brush her curtain of long, dark hair behind her shoulder and get right to business.

Alyssa, Lauren's younger sister, was her second-in-command, but if she didn't want to follow orders, she would make it extremely obvious. Her curly brown hair and bubbly personality was the antithesis of Lauren's. She and I loved to match with each other more than with our own sisters. We wore matching teal nightgowns with an ice cream cone print to bed that night and identical sunset orange t-shirts the following day.

My little sister Hailey was the last guest. Even though I hadn't invited her, my mother compelled me to include Hailey in every activity. Funnily enough, it was actually her idea to go through with the Chocolate Caper.

Much to my disappointment, nobody else wanted to watch The Sound of Music (a movie, according to my mother, that I'd had memorized since the age of two, thanks to my great-grandmother who always put it on when she watched me at her house while my mother was at work). Therefore, we retreated to the bedroom Hailey and I shared to turn our bunk bed into a fort. I designated Hailey's bunk (the bottom one) as our headquarters.

"Why?" Hailey asked. It was her favorite word, and every time I heard her ask it I felt a piece of my soul die.

"Because I said so," I told her.

That response usually worked, but since we had company, Hailey wasn't ready to concede so quickly this time. She narrowed her blue-grey eyes at me, put her hands defiantly on her hips, and declared, "Mommy says you're not the boss of me."

I knew this was true, but I was a manipulative little shit, and with our guests intently watching the exchange, I wasn't going to back down and lose my authority as The Birthday Girl. I retorted, "It's my party, and that makes me the boss tonight."

Hailey pouted like a four-year-old (which she was) and let us use her bunk as our headquarters. We hung our blankets down from the top bunk (which had been established by Lauren as our lookout tower), then climbed one by one into Hailey's bed.

We spent two or three minutes staring at each other excitedly. None of us had ever made a fort before. After those first minutes were up, we started to get bored. We'd left our stuffed animals in the living room where we'd be sleeping that night, and nobody wanted to go and get them, leaving nothing for us to do.

Hailey was the first to voice her opinion, since she had no filter whatsoever. "I'm boooored."

"Me, too," Alyssa chimed in. Emma, Lauren, and I all glanced at each other.

"We could play My Little Pony," Emma suggested. It was a game the two of us played at school during recess where we pretended to be two ponies that we'd made up. I was more than willing to play, but everyone else... not so much.

"Sure!" I chirped.

"No!" Everyone else groaned.

"I'm hungry," Hailey complained.

"We can go eat some of the snacks," I suggested half-heartedly, referring to the store-bought plate of baby carrots, grape tomatoes, broccoli, chopped celery, and ranch dressing my mom had prepared for us to snack on while we waited for the pizza to arrive. To five kids under the age of ten, this was less than appetizing.

"But broccoli is yuckyyyy," Hailey whined, once again stating what everyone else was too polite to say. "I want chocolate!"

Chocolate sounded much tastier than the vegetables and ranch. I remembered that we somehow still had plenty of candy leftover from Halloween, and as soon as I mentioned this, we were ready to plot a caper.

Lauren took control and made the plan. Hailey was the lookout. She would check to make sure there were no adults in the kitchen or the living room, where we'd be visible. If the coast was clear, we'd hurry to the kitchen and grab one of the swivelly bar chairs. I was the best at climbing, so I would climb on the chair to reach the candy that was hidden in the highest cabinet to prevent sneaky little girls from eating it when we weren't supposed to. While I did that, Emma and Alyssa would hold the swivelling seat still so I didn't fall. If the adults came, Hailey would report to Lauren and Lauren would stall until the rest of us bagged the loot and made our escape back to our "headquarters."

At first, it all went smoothly. Hailey reported that the adults — my mom, my two aunts, and my grandparents — were outside on the back patio chatting. We hurried unnoticed into the kitchen and set the barstool in place. I climbed up on the chair and opened the cabinet.

That was when my dad entered the house, having just returned home from work.

When I say everyone was scared of my dad, I mean everyone was scared of my dad. My cousins, my friends, even full-grown adult men were scared of my dad. A 6'3", broad-shouldered, stone-faced ex-Marine, the guy was pretty intimidating. To this day I am the only one of my siblings who isn't too scared to argue with him.

Lauren, despite being the adults' favorite, chickened out and was unable to stall him. Hailey couldn't stall to save her life, so our dad walked straight past her into the kitchen, where he found me perched on the bar stool that was being held steady by Emma and Alyssa. All three of us froze when we saw him.

Maybe he was being lenient because it was my birthday, or maybe he was just tired from work, but all he said was a stern, "No. Get down from there."

I was quick to obey, but I doubt it would've made a difference, because all he did was grab a beer from the fridge and head outside, where my grandparents were chatting with my mom and her two sisters, who were visiting for my birthday.

We watched him go, then glanced quickly around at each other, half-terrified that we'd been caught, half-relieved that we weren't in trouble.

I was the first to recover, and I looked accusingly at Lauren and Hailey. Lauren apologized sheepishly.

"He scared me," she admitted, shrugging.

"Guys, this is our chance!" Alyssa said, effectively getting us back on track. I climbed back up onto the chair, opened the cabinet, and fished out the canvas bag in which my mom had stored the candy. Once I'd hopped down, Emma and Alyssa put the chair back, and we hurried back to our fort to begin our saccharine feast.

When my Mom came to tell us that the pizza had arrived and it was time to eat, she found all five of us huddled on Hailey's bed with chocolate all over our faces. I was savoring a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup; Hailey was in the middle of testing how many Milky Way Minis she could fit in her mouth at the same time; Alyssa was working on her eighth fun-size bag of M&Ms; Emma was rifling through the bag for more Almond Joys, and Lauren had just finished her third Tootsie Roll and had begun to unwrap her fourth.

My mom didn't even get mad. She simply burst into hysterical laughter (though I'm not sure if she was actually amused or if she realized how hard it was going to be to get us all to sleep that night after all that sugar we'd just gorged ourselves on) and went to grab the camera.

Everyone, even Alyssa, who ate like a bird, had room for two slices of pizza and a slice of birthday cake. However, right before bed, we were all instructed to put our shoes on and go run laps around the backyard until we had a sugar crash and we were too tired to do anything but troop heavily back into the house, crash on the sofa, and go to sleep.

It was probably the last good birthday party I've had.

[veliseraptor]

June Reading Recap

Heaven Official's Blessing: vol. 6 by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. BOOK FOUR OF TGCF BABY, WE LOVE A DOWNWARD SPIRAL

I'm not saying that book four and all of the continuous trauma and misery that comes with it is my favorite part of TGCF as a whole, but I am saying it's very good for me personally and has some of my favorite moments.

Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City by Ben Wilson. I read Darwin Comes to Town some years ago and was very struck by it (drove people around me crazy by referencing it constantly in conversation), so when I saw this book on a new releases table I immediately put it on my to-read list. I ended up being...not dissatisfied with it, but not really satisfied, either. A solid 3-star read, for some interesting stuff around how cities have and are dealing with the question of nature in an urban environment. Read interestingly paired with Fuzz by Mary Roach, which I also read recently.

I felt like in some places the author veered a little more into apologetics for why cities are good for nature, actually, than I found strictly convincing. But I'd say if you've got some spare time and any interest in urban infrastructure and the natural world, it's worth a read.

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati. A second book in recent memory that was a retelling of a Greek myth and didn't make me actively angry! I don't know that I'd say I recommend it either, though. There were things I liked about it, and it was certainly interesting to see an iteration of the story of Clytemnestra that makes use of the version where Agamemnon was her second marriage and she had a previous husband and child. I think what I lost with that version, though, was that it ended up with an Agamemnon who was never anything but nasty and brutish, which, while I don't necessarily mind that as a version, I think makes for a slightly less compelling story. A genuine betrayal is always more fun than vindication of existing hatred, don't you know.

If you're as obsessed with Clytemnestra specifically as I am then I'd say to read this even though it's not the best work of Clytemnestra lit I've read, but otherwise I don't think I'd recommend it more broadly.

Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini. I checked this one out from the library and was deeply self conscious as the librarian was looking at the title, because boy could that go a lot of directions. Ultimately, I appreciated a lot of what this book was doing, and learned a great deal, but I don't think I'd say I enjoyed it, even in the sense that one can enjoy a book like this. I felt like it dwelt a lot more on the history of race science than I was expecting it to, and didn't dig as much into the current (as in, past 10 years) resurgence as I would've liked. She got into some of it, but it felt like most of the book was more about the 20th century than the 21st. Still, though, a compelling and thorough overview of the history of race science in Europe and North America.

The Gathering Storm / Towers of Midnight / A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan. I feel like I have no way of objectively assessing Wheel of Time as a series because it is so intensely intertwined with a whole bunch of really strong emotions and I recognize that. That being said, I did cry during A Memory of Light so I was obligated to give it five stars by my own rule, even if overall I don't think it's one of my favorites. I spent too much time during this readthrough thinking about Brandon Sanderson-isms and I would have appreciated if I hadn't been doing that, but I wouldn't have been doing it if it didn't feel so obvious to me.

I think of these three The Gathering Storm is my personal favorite. Reading Rand in it got really rough, though, and I think I'm sort of in the minority in not hating the catharsis on Dragonmount at the end. I can see peoples' points with it, but for me personally I don't think the tension could've gone on any longer and I don't know that I have a tone-consistent way of releasing it that I would've written.

That's all for June, which was a pretty slow reading month...probably going into another one for July. Currently I'm reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (a historian I've read before and really liked); I'm not sure what I'm going to read next but leaning toward one of the SFF new releases waiting for me on my shelf. Maybe Witch King by Martha Wells. I do want to try to finish QJJ this month, also - I'm very close to the end, just need to sit down and read the rest in ~an hour or so.

Also: taking horror novel recommendations, I've been feeling a hankering lately.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: The Mummy (1932)

The Mummy (1932)

Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-mummy-1932.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

The second classic Universal monster movie I was able to check out at Cinema Salem this October, The Mummy is one of the few such films where the classic 1930s version isn't the definitive example these days. In 1999, Universal remade it as an Indiana Jones-style action/adventure flick starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, and if I'm being perfectly honest, having now seen both movies I kinda prefer the '90s version. The original still has a lot going for it even more than ninety years later, but the remake's pulpy, two-fisted throwback style is just nostalgic for me in ways that hit my sweet spot. That said, I will argue that this was a better and more self-assured film than The Invisible Man, having a monster and effects just as memorable but also remembering to keep a consistent tone and, more importantly, have a compelling non-villainous character for me to root for in the form of its female lead. It is, shall we say, of its time in its depiction of Egypt and its people, but there's a reason why Boris Karloff is a horror legend, and here, he made Imhotep into a multilayered villain and a compelling presence on screen -- rather appropriately given how he's presented here as ominously seductive. At the very least, both it and the Fraser version are a damn sight better than the 2017 Tom Cruise version.

The film starts in 1921 with a tale as old as the first exhibit at the British Museum of ancient Egyptian artifacts, as an archaeological expedition in Egypt led by Sir Joseph Whemple discovers the tomb of a man named Imhotep. Studying his remains and his final resting place, they find that a) he was buried alive, and b) a separate casket was buried with him with a curse inscribed on it threatening doom to whoever opened it. Sure enough, Joseph's assistant opens that casket, reads from the scroll inside, and proceeds to go mad at the sight of Imhotep's mummified body getting up and walking out of the tomb. Fast-forward to the present day of 1932, and Joseph's son Frank is now following in his father's footsteps. A mysterious Egyptian historian named Ardeth Bey offers to assist Frank and his team in locating another tomb, that of the princess Ankh-es-en-amun. It doesn't take much for either the viewer or the characters to figure out who "Ardeth Bey" really is, especially once he starts taking an interest in Helen Grosvenor, a half-Egyptian woman and Frank's lover who bears a striking resemblance to the ancient drawings of Ankh-es-en-amun.

Let's get one thing out of the way right now. Lots of modern retellings of classic monster stories, from Interview with the Vampire to this film's own 2017 remake, often throw in the twist of making their monsters handsome, even sexy, as a way to lend them a dark edge of sorts. In the case of the Mummy, however, doing so is fairly redundant, because Karloff's Imhotep is already the "sexy mummy", if not in appearance than certainly in personality. He is threatening and creepy-looking, yes, but he is also alluring and erudite, his hypnosis of Helen presented as seduction and Frank becoming one of his targets because he sees him as competition. He may be under heavy makeup in the opening scene to look like a mummified corpse, but afterwards, Karloff plays him as an intimidating yet attractive older gentleman, the famous shot of him staring into the camera with darkened eyes looking equal parts like him peering into your soul and him undressing you with his eyes. And if it wasn't obvious when it was just him on screen, his relationship with Helen feels like that of a predatory playboy, especially in the third act when she's clad in a skimpy outfit that would likely have never flown just a couple of years later once they started enforcing the Hays Code. He's a proto-Hugh Hefner as a Universal monster. I couldn't help but wonder if Karloff was trying to do his own take on Bela Lugosi's Dracula here, perhaps as a way to make this character stand out from Frankenstein's monster; if he was, then he certainly pulled it off.

Zita Johann's Helen, too, made for a surprisingly interesting female lead. As she's increasingly possessed by the spirit of Ankh-es-en-amun over the course of the film, she's the one who directly challenges Imhotep on what he's doing to her, pointing out that, even by the standards of his own ancient Egyptian morality, his attempt to resurrect his lost love is evil and in violation of the laws of his gods, reminding him why he was entombed alive in the first place. It's she who ultimately saves herself, the male heroes only arriving after everything is all said and done, which was well and good in my book given that I wasn't particularly fond of them. Not only was the romanticization of British imperialism in their characters kind of weird watching this now (the fact that they can't take the artifacts they collected to the British Museum and have to settle for the Cairo Museum is presented as lamentable), but they didn't really have much character to them beyond being your typical 1930s movie protagonists. Frank is the young boyfriend, Joseph and Muller are the older scholars, the Nubian servant is... a whole 'nuther can of worms, and there's not much to them beyond stock archetypes. This was one area where the Fraser movie excelled, and the biggest reason why I prefer that film to this one.

Beyond the characters, the direction by Karl Freund was suitably creepy and atmospheric. I was able to tell that I wasn't looking at Egypt so much as I was looking at southern California playing such, but the film made good use of its settings, and had quite a few creative tricks up its sleeve as we see Imhotep both assaulting the main characters and observing them from afar. The direction and makeup did as much as Karloff's performance to make me afraid of Imhotep; while this wasn't a film with big jump scare moments, it did excel at creeping dread and making the most of what it had. The reaction of the poor assistant who watched Imhotep get up and walk away from his tomb struck the perfect note early on, letting you know that you're about to witness seemingly ludicrous things but at the same time making you believe in them despite your better judgment. This very much felt like the kind of classiness that we now associate with the original Universal monster movies, a slow burn even with its short runtime as "Ardeth Bey" spends his time doing his dirty work in the background, either skulking around or manipulating people from his home through sorcery.

The Bottom Line

The original 1932 version of The Mummy still stands as one of the finest classic horror movies. Not all of it has aged gracefully, but Boris Karloff's mummy is still a terrifying and compelling villain, and the rest of the film too has enough going for it to hold up.

[cyberbenb]

Oksana Lutsyshyna: Every wave is for you

Now it seems to me like I always knew Vika Amelina. This past week has been hellish – a mix of anticipation, knowing, and the impossibility of reconciling with this knowledge. How can I imagine life without her now? Where do I even begin?

We met in 2014 in New York at a poetry reading organized by the Shevchenko Scientific Society. It is notable that later Vika would organize a literary festival at the town with the same name, but located in Ukraine, in Donetsk Oblast, not on the shore of the Hudson River. Ukraine has its own New York, a town once founded by the Mennonite community, a town that was dear to Victoria’s heart.

At that time, we didn’t have a chance to have a real conversation because the company was large and, despite the tragic historical circumstances and the outbreak of the war in eastern Ukraine, everyone in the group was happily noisy. Victoria gave me a signed copy of her novel “The Fall Syndrome.”  

By that time, I had already heard about her from colleagues and friends, especially from Marianna Kijanowska, who was the first to say that Amelina’s prose was a unique phenomenon in our literature and that it was a must-read.

Vika always had a lot of questions, and they were about everything in the world: specific books, literature, the quality of what is written and unwritten, motivations for actions; about things small and big.

How a celebrated Ukrainian writer turned into a war crimes researcher

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has galvanized Ukrainians into action, compelling them to figure out how they can contribute to their country’s victory. Oftentimes, it has called for a radical departure from the known comforts of their daily lives. That’s exactly what happened to Ukrainian…

The Kyiv IndependentKate Tsurkan

In 2016, when I arrived in Lviv, Vika was already a completely different person, no longer the delicate girl who cautiously, as though entering cold water, stepped into the still unfamiliar world of literary gatherings. By then, she was already finishing her second novel, “Dom’s Dream Kingdom."

Perhaps it was a bit of a sad year for her, because writing, no matter how much she loved the process (and the result), seemed not to have brought her what she hoped for. It didn’t ease her pain for Ukraine, for the East, for the children in the East. Ultimately, she was always interested in something beyond literature.

In a photo that I, unfortunately, can no longer find, we are leaving the legendary cultural hub Dzyga in Lviv – the Polish novelist Zanna Sloniowska, the poet and publisher Marjana Savka, Victoria, and me – but Victoria’s face is sad. It’s as if she’s looking into space at something visible only to her.

By then, it was already a close friendship and, like all close friendships, unlike anything else but itself. It’s impossible to describe or retell these things, all of those midnight conversations, musings, and funny nicknames we gave each other.

There were times when we laughed uncontrollably, and there were times when we cried – sometimes in person, and more often to each other through the phone. We wrote to each other, “Talk to me, I feel really bad,” without shame or hiding the pain.

If you were to read this drawn-out, years-long correspondence, you might get the impression that we mostly talked about pain. But then, maybe a friend is the least reliable narrator in the world, to use literary terms. Vika, however, didn’t speak in literary terms. She often poked fun at herself, reminding you that she didn’t study literature at university.

Oksana Lutsyshyna and Victoria Amelina. (Courtesy of Oksana Lutsyshyna)

I told her every time that there’s no point in imagining literature as some kind of examination session in an ivory tower or, if we go by Fowles, an ebony tower. On the contrary, it’s much more interesting and valuable when people with different backgrounds, and not just “philological” ones, come to literature. After all, I am now writing a story of friendship, not of literature… I think Victoria would have liked it better.

In 2019-2020, Victoria’s family – she, her son, and her husband – lived in Boston, in the Brookline area, relatively close to Harvard. I visited several times, once for the publication of my poetry collection in English translation by Boston-based publisher Arrowsmith Press, whose editor-in-chief is the writer Askold Melnyczuk.

It seemed like Victoria was even more excited about the publication than I was, dragging me out in the snowy Cambridge evening to someplace with oysters and wine, and insisting that I, who finds it difficult to be in the spotlight even with my own iPhone camera, take a photo with the book. “Come on, it’s your book. It needs to be celebrated and documented for history. It’s very important,” she said.

During that time, Victoria was studying at Harvard for a while, taking creative writing courses. She wrote in English. Her fellow students, teachers, and new friends, like Askold, loved her. Everyone predicted a great literary future for her, even in this foreign – or rather almost her own (since Victoria had lived in Canada for some time with her father) – language.

But she didn’t feel good in that big, cold city, the definitive cradle of poets, one of the main cities on the cultural map of the United States. She was always driven and tormented by something – she suffered without Ukraine, without the East. In fact, her attempts to write prose in English were about Ukraine, the East, and the war.

This Week in Ukraine Ep. 15 – Why culture matters during war

Episode #15 of our weekly video podcast “This Week in Ukraine” is dedicated to Ukrainian culture, the important role it plays in war, and why it has been a target of Russian dictators for decades. Host Anastasiia Lapatina is joined by the Kyiv Independent’s culture reporter Kate Tsurkan. Listen to

The Kyiv IndependentAnastasiia Lapatina

When the pandemic started in 2020, our planned joint reading at the Shevchenko Scientific Society had to be canceled. We had been looking forward to spending time together, at least for a few days in New York (although not the one she loved so much).

After Feb. 24, 2022, the internal calendars of Ukrainians changed forever, and the pandemic simply disappeared, drowned like Atlantis in a sea of new pain. But back then, in the spring of that year, the pandemic was terrifying.

It seemed like we had all become characters in some fantasy, and an army of darkness was closing in on us. The news published daily numbers of how many people died and how many got sick in the States. Victoria would go for walks every evening along the Charles River and call me, and we would talk endlessly.

In the summer, I had to urgently find another place to live after going through a breakup, and I was surrounded by a desert in every sense: The pandemic had disrupted the delicate mechanisms of friendly relationships, Ukraine was far away, and I don’t know what would have happened to me then if it weren’t for Vika. When I went to look at apartments, she would also look at them with me through video chat, listen to my hesitations, and give advice.

And then she returned to Ukraine. We continued to talk, though less frequently. She had the New York Festival in Donetsk Oblast to attend to, and she immediately invited me (virtually, as I couldn’t travel), there were articles and essays, and she threw herself into work; she was in her element.

As our fellow poet Julia Musakovska once pointed out, Vika herself was an elemental force. She always wanted her friends to be as fully involved in her life as possible and, I confess, due to my own work, I couldn’t keep up with her, lagging behind, not finishing reading something, or not recording a video she asked for. And she would apologize for overwhelming me and said only that she wanted me to be a part of her life, to know what she was currently living through.

Victoria Amelina, Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist, speaking at a public discussion during the 29th Lviv Book Forum on October 9, 2022 in Lviv, Ukraine. (Photo by Les Kasyanov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

Since February 2022, she did everything she could for her country: she hosted refugees, wrote, made calls, promoted important information, and gathered evidence of war crimes.

She searched for the buried diary of the tortured Volodymyr Vakulenko, the poet and children’s writer. She told me about the families she had taken in from the occupied territories, writing about them as though they were her own kin: “They are now my family, and they live with me.”

We finally reunited in December 2022, in Krakow, where Vika had come to see her son. I was heading to Ukraine – just for a week and a half, to see my loved ones.

We met in the old city center and embraced as Krakow shone with Christmas lights. I was struck by how much Vika had changed: her hugs, always gentle, had become stronger, and her own strength radiated around her like an ocean around an island.

We spent several hours together, talking: She told me about the human rights organization Truth Hounds with which she was now involved, and I shared my dreams with her, where I found myself in an occupied city, with fires burning, and at the last moment, I was saved by some unknown train. I walked with it, not knowing whose it was, ours or theirs. I heard the Ukrainian language, exhaled, and woke up.

“Oh, poor you,” Vika said. “That’s quite a secondary trauma you have there.” And she asked, “May I hug you? I ask everyone now since I started working with people who have experienced violence."

Writer Victoria Amelina dies following Kramatorsk strike

The writers’ association PEN Ukraine said in a statement that Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina died on July 1 after she was critically injured in a Russian missile strike on Kramatorsk.

The Kyiv IndependentOlena Goncharova

… What did she write about? I read many of her texts, both published and unpublished, and they were so different. She started writing poems and was shy about them, occasionally sending me one or two with an ironic comment as if it were a moment of indulgence in writing.

As for her prose, I once said that it was a prose of nuance – not just details that, contrary to popular belief, could still be invented, but actual nuances, emotional, historical, and those pertaining to the plot.

“Dom’s Dream Kingdom,” in particular, captivated me with the discovery of the storytelling dog. Without this, the story would have been tragic, but thanks to this endearing narrator, it became balanced. It was a story that made room for love, not just sorrow. For me, this setting of the novel, this special tone, placed it not only in the context of Ukrainian but also in world literature.

It was a narrative that was not confined to suffering without an exit. Vika wrote not only about how people suffered but also about how they loved (not unlike Imre Kertész, who once said that in his writings he meant to show love in Auschwitz, not just the horror). And furthermore, she loved all her characters equally, making it impossible to guess whom she felt closer to or with whom she associated herself. She maintained balance even in this aspect, her love encompassing everyone, even in these realms.

The coffin of Victoria Amelina, a renowned Ukrainian writer, draped in the Ukrainian flag, at her funeral ceremony in Lviv, Ukraine, on July 5, 2023. She died on July 1, 2023, after she was critically injured in a Russian missile strike on Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast. (Photo by Olena Znak/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

I am finishing this text, this pain for Vika, while outside my window, fireworks are bursting like the cannonade of a new day: Tomorrow is a holiday in the United States, Independence Day. It feels like the sound of war, like the worst of all triggers, the most painful of all reminders.

I pull up my old notes, and social media posts, searching for something, something that I may have forgotten that needs to be said about Vika. I come across some photos that we sent to each other, and I see her gentle face, her beloved black dresses of which she had a whole collection, and I almost scream from the pain.

Loss is when you’re afraid to wake up in the morning, to fall out of the safety of a dream.

In the fall, Vika was supposed to go to Paris on a prestigious scholarship from Columbia University, where she was selected out of thousands of candidates to write a non-fiction book about the war, in particular, about women who write about war.

A person of her caliber often doubts themselves and, more than once, Vika wrote to me in a difficult moment, saying that nothing was working out for her in her writing, that everything was somehow not right… But she never doubted this book of hers.

…And in May, a dear person took me, perpetually overwhelmed, to the sea, to a beautiful corner of the world, to an island with cozy coves. The waves were crashing in the bay, and I couldn’t resist recording a short video for Vika. She always loved one of my poems, which I call the poem about cats, although there’s actually only one line about cats. It’s a poem about how all the good forces in the world are on your side.

do you hear – the sea roars? it says to you: I am on your side on your side

(Translated by Olena Jennings)

I spoke these words while recording the waves for Vika, the waves that are for her, forever for her, in this world, and in all possible worlds.

Ukrainian soldiers hold a portrait of the Victoria Amelina in her honor during her funeral service on July 5, 2023, in Lviv, Ukraine. (Photo by Les Kasyanov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

Editor’s Note: This article was published by Suspilne Culture on July 4, 2023, and has been translated and republished by the Kyiv Independent with permission. The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.

[forgetmenotblues]

52 in 52 2022

It is a fact universally recognised that the best time to do your book roundup for the year is 4 months into the next year

I kept not getting round to it,then I watched loads of good movies and was gonna do them but I want to stop procrastinating this so I can always edit those in

2022 Books

1)Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

This was utterly fantastic. Or at least it was once I googled “should I have any idea what’s going on?” and was reassured that no, no I should not. For some reason I only seem to read the Locked Tomb books when I’m on night shifts, and these books are hard enough to keep up with without being sleep deprived. The book is split into two sections, one of which is a retelling of book 1 but with the main character changed, and one is in second person, with the protagonist being traumatised, lobotomised, schizophrenic, and haunted. There’s murder via soup, there’s a threesome with God, there’s a DIFFERENT threesome with God in which I think every participant is at least 2 or 3 different identities… The Necromancer God Emperor of the Universe makes a None pizza with left beef joke… this book has it all. The ever-ramping up pace where you cannot stop reading because the entire last third is one long ever increasing climax (phrasing) reminds me a lot of Terry Pratchett, just queer and Goth and Kiwi.

2)A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, KJ Parker

The third in the loose trilogy starting with 16 ways to defend a walled city. Similarly quasi-Roman historical fantasy with an amoral con artist getting so out of their depth they end up having to conquer the world in order to stay ahead of the heat… you know what you’re getting with a KJ Parker book. Honestly this one didn’t do it as much for me, I think because I binged KJ Parker in 2021 and when every book is similar it works better reading one per year or so… still an utterly enjoyable read.

3)Fellowship of the Ring

Yeah it’s this pretty indie fantasy series, you probably haven’t heard of it… I went with an audiobook this time around, by Phil Dragash. He uses background music from the Peter Jackson films and models the voices on the actors, while doing the full unabridged novels. It’s a great approach to capture the cinematic feeling of the films with the beauty and complexity of the books. Shockingly enough, an unauthorised audiobook using unauthorised film soundtrack is not legal, so if you want to check this out, archive.org hosts a full version just to teach you the error of your ways.

4)Graham Greene – Destructors and Other Short Stories

I really really thought Graham Greene did like… fun thrillers, kind of James Bond-esque… no idea where I got that from. This was a collection of pretty morose stories, but utterly compelling. There was a very charming post-apocalyptic one with kids gathering blackberries and coming across the wreck of a ship from the before times, there was a very weird kind of dark Narnia story about a man going to his childhood home and finding that the vast forest he remembers getting lost in was actually a small patch of brush, the vast lake he remembers sailing across is basically a muddy pond etc… but then starts to find evidence his more fantastical adventures might have been true. May We Borrow Your Husband is a pretty fantastic, if deeply sad, story about repressed homosexuality in the early 20th century, The Destructors is utterly heart-breaking. Annoyingly, the version I had from the library cut off the ends of some stories, so I had to go hunting for the last few sentences.

5)Invisible Man, HG Wells

I always feel a bit of a prat when I read well known, widely agreed upon classics and go “oh wow, this is actually pretty great, has anyone heard of this… Shakespeare guy?” Well here I am again, having just discovered HG Wells. You’re welcome. I absolutely adored War of the Worlds in 2021, Invisible Man isn’t quite as good, but that’s just because of the very high bar. The whole story is set around my neck of the woods, and the depiction of Sussex folk as a bit simple, but utterly intractable reads incredibly true. There’s also this oddly charming balance between the genuine horror of the idea of a violent man wanting to kill you and how hard it would be to defend yourself if he’s invisible, vs the slightly tongue in cheek way that the invisible man declares himself king of the world, but is consistently laid low by obstacles like… gravel.

6) The Time Machine, HG Wells

Another absolute banger. - a quote I expect to see on the cover of the next edition of the Time Machine. This one I had a predisposition to liking, beyond my growing love of HG Wells, as I often feel I might be the only person in the world who watched, and loved, the early 2000's film adaptation. This is another of those early genre books where it just has such fun with what was at the time a completely novel concept. In a hard to define synesthesia type way, this story is the feeling of walking barefoot on the grass.

7)The Two Towers, Tolkien

It’s very hard to judge, but this might be my favourite book of the trilogy (I know, not a book, not a trilogy etc etc). The Treason of Isengard is utterly fantastic, and probably has the most fun in the whole of Tolkien’s work just bouncing around and introducing us to new places and peoples. The Ring Goes East has yet more fantastic setting and characters, and “Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy” is one of the strongest cliff-hangers I’ve ever seen.

8)Return of the King, Tolkien

There just isn't much to say about LoTR that hasn't been said a million times before. Its absolutely wonderful. I enjoyed reading this around the time of year it's set, there's a strong seasonal theme I'd never picked up before.

9,10,11) The Blade Itself, Before They’re Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings

I’ve combined these three because they it's very much a story in three parts trilogy. I'd always heard Joe Abercrombie dismissed as straightforward shallow grimdark, so I was blown away by this trilogy. It's a fantastic series, some incredible characters. Spoilers - the overall theme is basically what if gandalf was evil, manipulating the world over his incredibly long life, for the greater good. I adore Jezal as an utterly slimy character propped up as a fantasy hero for the sake of a figurehead, and Logan Ninefingers is the richest take on the wandering badass wolverine type character I've seen. I read these ones mostly on psych night shifts, which were lovely for snug on call rooms and long uninterrupted hours.

12) A Game of Thrones

Again, what is there to say that hasn't been said 8 million times. I run an ASOIAF art blog for crying out loud. So this time I'll just comment on the edition I read - the beautiful folio edition. Very luxuriant, very lovely, though I will admit having a separate map instead of it being in the book itself was kind of frustratingly unwieldy.

13) Elric of Melniboné

One of the big classics of fantasy I've always meant to check out. Sadly so far the most compelling part of the collection has been the Neil Gaiman short story used as an introduction! I do enjoy the stories, they just tend to drag a little in the middle. I think the best way I can put it is that if a story says there will be a quest to 7 dungeons, most will either have a twist or a montage after dungeon 3 or 4, so as to not just repeat the same structure the whole time... Elric stories will give you all 7. Theres a lot of great imagery and it reads very well.

14) Redwall

A classic from my childhood I felt like revisiting. It holds up incredibly well, a nice mix of cutesy woodland creatures having supper with very genuine medieval warfare. It reads like a much older book than it is, and I think the reason is that Matthias is a very classical, almost Nietzchean hero - he's not the hero because he's meek or humble, he's the hero because he's competent, well-liked, and, when he needs to be, utterly ruthless and bloodthirsty.

15) The Red Knight, Miles Cameron

I had really mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, it's got some incredibly rich worldbuilding, some great Byronic characters, and the author is a world renowned medieval sword fighter and clearly knows his stuff. On the other hand, they mention in the afterword it was inspired by roleplaying campaigns and I think that shows - a lot of fights for the sake of fights that could have been condensed.

16) Art of Garry Gianni

A fantastic artist who does a lot of ASOIAF artwork. He goes for a very picture-book illustrative style that makes the books feel like a half remembered childhood memory of reading tales of king arthur. He also has a lot of more realistic medieval work ie silly looking hats and hosiery, which does a good job of balancing out the all black leather of the tv show.

17) A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Clearly I was inspired by the GG artbook!

Lovely as always.

18) The Count of Monte Cristo

Every year, I make great progress in reading lots of books in winter, then as spring starts I get cocky and take on a mammoth book that takes me months. This was this years. I listened to a CC audiobook, which was fantastic, but I only saw 4 parts out of the actual total of 6, so underestimated the overall length. I will say, I thought he was gonna have to really rush his revenge! Again, a hard novel to say anything new about - I loved it. Every single time I read a revenge story I think "I want them all to suffer, I'll never learn that people are complex and revenge ends up hurting innocents and view it in a more nuanced way" and then whaddya know?! I was fairly enjoying it as an "old timey novels ramble a bit sometimes, maybe paid by the word*", but at the end the elements all come back together in a way that gave me chills as I began to see not a word had been wasted.

*I did have a drinking game for every time the exact same life-long description of one character was given, about half a dozen times in one chapter and a few times after. It felt like oral tradition type storytelling.

19) The Hero, Dreamsongs

Okay this is clearly where I panicked about CoMC slowing me down so much and counted short stories as separate. Cheating? Maybe, but the stakes could not be lower. I've bounced off of Dreamsongs a few times as it opens with stories GRRM wrote when he was literally about 6. Which is fascinating from an archival kind of perspective, but doesn't make for the best reads. This is the first of his actually published works, it's about a grizzled space marine type ready to finally retire from the war and see the earth he's been fighting for, who then gets killed by the brass because he's too dangerous to ever actually go back to earth, then written up as a war hero killed in action for further propaganda. Its solid stuff, nothing world shattering, although GRRM did send it in as evidence for his conscientious objector application, so maybe it did change the world!

20) Last Exit to San Breta, Dreamsongs

Basically the question of what would happen to ghost cars in a world where technology has rendered cars obsolete. Again, not revolutionary but very well written.

21) The Second Kind of Loneliness, Dreamsongs

Before each group of stories in dreamsongs, GRRM does a bit of a retrospective. He describes this one as where he really got started and some of his finest work... I dint know if it was just the raised expectations, but it was probably my least favourite. Similar to Moon in some ways, it has someone working at a hyperspace gate counting down to the supply ship coming to relieve him, then panicking as it misses the deadline. As his mental state declines we learn he took this lonely job out of building anxiety after a romantic rejection, and eventually that this panic caused him to destroy the supply ship before the story started and reset his memory, and that this loop may have happened before. Which has some good bones, especially as a parable of incels and the internet, but it does have some feelings of nice guy-ness that isn't just the narrator but the story itself.

22) With Morning Comes Mistfall

On the other hand, I loved this one, which I get the impression is not the most highly rated. Essentially there's a holiday resort planet, it's got pretty lovely mountains and forests, but its main draw is rumours of spectral ghost-like beings. Scientists come to investigate, find that it's all bullshit, people stop coming and the resort fails. It sounds pretty humdrum, and relies on the "mean scientist dislikes enthusiasm and imagination" trope which I hate, but it really sells the love the resort host has for his planet, and the heartbreak of his passion being destroyed. Again in a post internet world, the idea that the planet has beautiful mountains, forests, and seas, but no one would visit for just those because there are planets with perfect sea, perfect mountains, or perfect forests feels very powerful.

23) Song for Lya, Dreamsongs

Another one where high expectations maybe hurt it a bit. A very solid fantasy story about the question of would you go into a state of permanent absolute bliss where you achieve nothing, or stay in real life with ups and downs... or as philosophers call it, the box full of porn and nitrous problem. It was absolutely good, but I've often heard it cited by ASOIAF fans as the best thing ever and it just... wasnt, for me.

24) Tower of Ashes, Dreamsongs

This one fell fairly flat. Quite nice guy-ish in a not fully intentional way, quite intriguing setting but not especially explored.

25) 7 times never kill man, Dreamsongs

This might be my favourite of the lot. Scary space marine death religion comes up against little ewok type creatures, the protagonist tries to train the ewoks up, 7 samurai style, and then... the ewoks/ the planet-wide consciousness is able to manipulate the death cult religion into becoming a suicide cult, and possibly every religion in the galaxy was seeded by this planet as an immune response style defence against potential attackers? If I'm remembering right? Genuinely creepy and haunting, I kept mulling this one over for a long long time. This is basically the gritty reboot of James Cameron's Avatar, way ahead of time.

26) Stone City, Dreamsongs

Another that didnt massively work for me, nothing terrible and some cool concepts, but just didnt really spark anything for me personally.

27) Bitterblooms, Dreamsongs

Another major contender for my favourite of the collection. A LOT of ASOIAF DNA in this one, with decade long winters roamed by the undead, X of House Y titles, a lot of familiar names. The story itself has a sort of twisted Doctor Who plot, a person from the ASOIAF-esque planet finds a spaceship, and is seemingly whirled around the galaxy on an adventure but can only look out the window from within the ship, eventually it turns out the ship is broken down and hasn't moved, and they were just watching record logs on the windows.

28) Princess and Mr Whiffle, Patrick Rothfuss

I took a break from Dreamsongs to read... a short story by an acclaimed fantasy author with a long delayed finale to their subversive fantasy epic! This is a fun book, with a good reading by Rothfuss on youtube, I'd thoroughly recommend. It seems like a slightly dark childrens story, then turns out to be a very dark regular story. It's worth watching the youtube reading as he also explains his thought process, honestly it's made me a little less optimistic regarding kkc as it has a slight vibe of a "technically I didnt lie to you" twist...

29) Interview with a Vampire, Anne Rice

I've spent a good part of my life goth-adjacent, I grew up on Buffy and have a real love for all things vampire, so this was always on my horizon. I was put off by Anne Rices whole... vibe online, and everything I heard about "well by book 17, it's mostly about the war between the Atlanteans and Hell". I cant speak for any of that, but the first book was everything its hyped up to be. Lovely slow moody southern gothic. From everything I know about Anne Rice's personal politics, I do wonder if shes one of those authors who sort of backed into being a queer icon by trying to depict the worst thing she could imagine, that being just... a queer relationship.

30) Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell

This was one of those very book club type books you see everywhere for a while... I didn't love it. The idea is to tell the #feministretelling of Shakespeare's life by focusing on his wife, and what she went through when their son Hamnet died and he wrote a play called Hamlet. The issues are: a) it buys into the whole witchy cottagecore vibe with Anne Hathaway being pretty explicitly descended from the Fair Folk and having magic healing powers, which I think shoots the whole 'women were an important part of history and deserve to have their stories told' stone dead, as it suggests said stories are so boring they need literal elf magic to make them worth telling; and b) that it still fundamentally fails in that I spent most of the book going "wonder what old Billy boy's up to" the scraps we get of him are way more interesting.

31) Sherlock Holmes, The Empty House

The other big short story selection I read this year - most of the SH bibliography. I didnt realise until starting out that the vast majority of SH was short stories, and there were only 4 full length novels. The only one I'd read prior was Hound of the Baskervilles. I'll touch on the stories briefly then give a longer wrap up.

Not sure why I started with this one, it's the one where SH comes back to life after the Reichanbach falls. I don't know if there was a lower bar for what counted as mysterious back then, but basically: the guy is found with a bullet in his head in a locked room. The window is open. No one heard a shot. It turns out... he was shot through the window with a silencer. Like... I get ACD was practically writing under duress, but it feels pretty fucking phoned in.

32) SH, The Devils Foot

Again, the mystery here is: 3 people are found in a room, 2 insane and 1 dead, having been left perfectly well. The solution: theres a magical mushroom from Darkest Africa™ that makes people insane or die when burned and inhaled. I don't know if I'm coming at SH with the wrong attitude, but I continued to find the 'mysteries' pretty underwhelming. This one gets 1 bingo point for 'never previously described technology/item from The Colonies™ that solves the whole mystery but has never previously been established" (see the silenced air gun in the empty house actually), but also wins a point for "Sherlock decides the murderer is a pretty legit dude and just let's him go".

33) SH Abbey Grange

Another with the "Sherlock decides the murderer is a pretty legit dude and just let's him go" plot - honestly my favourite part of reading Sherlock Holmes, and very interesting to compare to modern copoganda shows with their "cool motive, still murder" attitude, especially as so many police procedural end with "well, you were right to fight against the wildly unjust system, but you did a crime so we have to arrest you. Deal with the unjust system? Nah, not my department mate "

34) SH The Speckled Band

The mystery: 2 heiresses live with their evil uncle. One dies in the room next to his, her last words "the speckled band". The other is moved into the same room and fears she'll be killed next. Sherlock finds that the bed is bolted in place directly under a vent joining to the uncle's room. It turns out the uncle pushed a venomous snake through the vent.

That's not a fucking mystery!!! I'm not even a big whodunnit person, but if you have heiresses killed, obviously their last living relative is doing it. Also the story spends the whole time telling you he's evil through details like "he let's romani travellers stay on his land"... oh yeah, this story hella racist. So maybe it's not meant to be a whodunnit but more of a howdunnit... except the second you hear "she died in the room next to his, then he moved me to that room, and theres a vent in the adjoining wall"... there's no mystery! The snake is a nice orientalist touch, but wouldn't be fundamentally different to evil mushroom gas or anything else. Incidentally she said "the speckled band", describing the drake's characteristic feature, as her last words instead of "uncle murdered me" or "snake vent, beware!" because [explanation not found].

It also gets a bingo point for "needlessly dark John Watson framing device that renders the whole story pointless" - it opens with "I can now tell this story because the last living person involved in it is now dead" - the sister they saved is the only survivor, so I guess after all that she just got his by a fuvking bus or something.

So at this point I thought, boy, this is unfortunate, 64 sherlock holmes stories, of course there would be some stinkers, what are the odds I'd exclusively pick them. So i looked it up. The speckled band is considered the best sherlock holmes story, ACDs favourite, critically acclaimed. At this point, it's safe to say I'm just not clicking with Sherlock Holmes.

35) Meathouse Man, Dreamsongs

In a dystopian future, neural mindlinks are used to make corpses into cheap labour, with one person puppeteering several corpses in dangerous environments. The corpses are also used as sex workers.

So yeah, it's pretty nasty. It's got some great dystopian imagery of giant industrial machines strip mining whole planets, and it Mark's the point where GRRM starts to really interrogate some of his nice guy-isms into dark, insightful takes on toxic masculinity.

36) Hound of the Baskervilles

As I said, this was the only SH I'd previously read, and I remembered it being pretty good! That had been when I was a kid, and all these short stories had sucked so bad... was I just misremembering? Fortunately, no! HotB is exactly what you want from a Sherlock Holmes story, great setting, cast of possible suspects all of whom are more than they appear... this is one of those cases where the best known work is best known for a reason.

37) A Study in Scarlet, SH

Decided to see if it was just a case of SH novels > short stories, and read the first novel. The first half or so is pretty classic SH fare, with a London murder, mysterious clues written in blood, footprint analysis etc etc and then... the entire 2nd half of the novel is a fucking western. We get the whole life story of a guy in a wagon train, sets up a life with Mormons, gets hunted down by murderous mormon death squads... and then in the last 2 pages, we jump back to London with a "and that's why he murdered this guy". Love it. I genuinely checked a few times to make sure I hadnt got a messed up copy of the book spliced with Mormon Murder Cowboys.

38) Arthur and the Seeing Stone, Kevin Crossley-Holland

The first of a wonderful trio of arthurian novels. They contrast the mythological arthur with a historically accurate young noble called Arthur in ~1200, with parallels between the mythological arthur and his counterpart that serve to highlight the historical context for the arthurian mythos and why these stories mattered to people. They're ostensibly childrens books and I first read them as a kid, but there's a lot of value to an adult reread.

39) The Final Problem, SH

The one where ol Holmes-y dies. Its shocking the extent to which ACD was clearly just ready to be done. Sherlock pops up, says "btw all of our cases were masterminded by an evil genius, I've never mentioned him before but he's so bad that it wouldnt be the worst thing if I died fighting him" and then whaddya know! It's very fun to me because I remember the trend of superhero comics killing off their heroes and the exact same writing tropes were in play - I've never mentioned this before but I have a really ultra mega serious nemesis.

40) Valley of Fear, SH

Another of the full length Holmes novels, and weirdly enough has the same structure - half a pretty standard SH mystery, second half a shockingly long largely unrelated story in America that leads to a 2 page "and that led into this mystery" denouement. It also has Moriarty awkwardly shoehorned into the story to retcon him into being a serious threat, which it does by some other top class SH bingo tropes - Watsons narration ending with "oh btw, the characters of this story fell off a ship like 4 months later".

41) Elric, Fortress of the Pearl - Moorcock

I'm starting to worry Elric might just not be for me. Theres some fun stuff in here, and a very conan-esque vibe. The issues are that of the 2 I've read, Elric is such a powerful character that the only route to drama is having him be suicidal apathetic until he's almost done for, then suddenly snapping to and fighting back out of the abyss. Secondly, I've mentioned before that Moorcock is not one to cut corners. There are 7 or 9 or 12 magical dream realms described to traverse, so he traverses them each in turn. There's no deviation from this pattern once its planned out, just plodding on through.

42) Beyond the Deepwoods, Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell

The 1st of the Edge Chronicles, a series I read piecemeal bits of when I was a kid and always stayed with me. Extremely creative and grotesque, with lots of bulbous and oozing creatures brought to life by Riddells signature style. This first book has a very fairytale structure with the protagonist essentially running into some new creature each chapter and escaping by the skin of his teeth. This gives it a lovely simplicity, the later books get a bit more into fantasy worldbuilding which has pros and cons.

43) Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman

Collection of short stories, if I was being consistent these should be separate like the GRRM and Sherlock Holmes ones but it's my list. Also some of these were like 2 pages and I couldn't justify counting that to myself.

Chivalry - one of Gaimans best known, a little old lady finds the grail at a charity shop, Galahad tries to get it off her. I liked it more this time around, but I still find the old lady a bit too mean.

The disappearance of miss finch - this is one my favourite of the many many Gaiman stories of "you go to a circus/magic show and it turns out to be real" - this one gets the balance of the person "deserving" it better, and a pleasant impression they're happier for it after all.

Bay Wolf - probably my favourite of the collection. Beowulf as a futuristic noir detective episode of baywatch. Grendel is a steroid junkie called Grand Al. Top notch stuff.

Murder Mysteries - another fantastical noir detective story, this time about an angel created to solve the first murder. Manages to combine classic noir elements with theological questions shockingly deftly.

Snow Glass Apples - one of my absolute favourite Gaiman stories. Theres a tumblr post that makes the rounds every few years about "hey snow white is deathly pale with ruby red lips and spends a long time seemingly dead in a coffin before waking... vampire?" and every time I dutifully comment that this exact story exists and is fantastic.

44 Stormchaser

Book 2 of the deepwoods books, this is where the series turns more towards steampunk fantasy worldbuilding. On the plus side, this is fascinating well written world, on the other... it's pretty fucking grim. Which is weird to say about a series written for children, but its genuinely quite depressing. Poverty, exploitation, mutilation etc... I had to take a break after this trilogy as there was a repeating pattern of introducing a likeable memorable crew of misfits and outcasts, then killing them all off one by one.

45 Midnight over Sanctphrax

This one is less grim in itself, but it ends with a "and the adventure continues" hook, and I remember from the sequel books that it continues into misery, despair, and most of the cast dying of dysentery. Again - grim!

46) Into The Narrowdark, Tad Williams

Book 3 of the new Osten Ard series. One of the best fantasy books I've read since ASOIAF. There was a part where I couldn't stop reading until I discovered one characters fate, even though that was about 400 pages. There was a reveal that made me swear at the book and walk away, just to come straight back.

47) This is How You Lose the Time War

A very fun short novel about opposite agents of battling time travelling agencies who start to write each other encoded gloating messages (encoded in the rings of wood of a tree one agent will cut down to build Genghis Khans trebuchets to change history, for example), and gradually fall in love. Very poetic and beautifully written.

48) Fire and Blood, GRRM

Gave this one another read, inspired by how much I enjoyed HotD. I think the first read I went in with very low expectations which gave it an edge, this time around I knew it wouldnt be terrible so less of a pleasant surprise and I noticed more of the... issues. That said, HotD showed me how some of the seemingly flat characters can actually be rich and nuanced. One in particular I wonder about is Jahaerys, who makes a lot of sense as a potentially great person with rot at the foundations - if he knows that at some level he only has power by usurping his cool lesbian sister, all his misogyny makes sense as a retroactive justification. Because honestly on this reread, he seemed like a Shittier dude than Maegor.

49) Fairy Tale, Stephen King

A take on the Narnia style portal fantasy by the one and only Stephen King. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, not necessarily a world shaking masterpiece but recaptured the feeling of being a kid and getting utterly engrossed in a story. You can definitely tell Kings age by how he writes his teenage protagonist - he conveniently only watches the classic movie channel so can only quote films from Kings reference pool, there's some pretty realistic sections of him doing home repair by watching youtube videos but keeps calling it The Tube... its very sweet and endearing. As is classic with King, he's so good at writing day to day life you almost dont want the fantasy elements to start, but once they do they're so fun you wished they'd shown up sooner.

50) Arthur at the Crossing Place

Book 2 of the seeing stone trilogy. The trilogy is fairly classic 2 part trilogy, with part 1 working as a very standalone novel, while part 2 is mostly set up for part 3. However, theres a lot of good material, lovely prose, and well worth reading.

51) Dracula (daily) Bram Stoker

A certified 2022 phenomenon. This was a huge amount of fun, parcelling out Dracula chronologically, letting a whole fandom form, having dramatic long hiatus and bursts of action. I also love matching stories to their chronology, as I mentioned with LOTR, which would be very suited to this same format. I've read dracula before, this definitely enhanced my enjoyment. In my memory theres a real drop after the Jonathan Harker diary, but this format a) acknowledged that by having the long hiatus and b) overcomes that and makes the latter part of the story feel much more significant.

52) Arthur King of the Middle March

The third part of the trilogy. This one focuses on the disastrous Fourth Crusade, where half the people who had RSVPd didnt show up, leaving the ones who did with an enormous bill for more ships than they could use, which Venice agreed they could pay off by attacking Venices enemies... who were other Christians. This allows the conceit of contrasting the real world chivalry knights with the idealised Arthurian round table to come to a head, fantastically showing the moral decay and sense of stagnation as they occupy and loot their ostensible brothers in christendom. The book came out in 2003, but has incredibly on point vibes of the Iraq war as a whole... although I suppose the issue here is that the crusaders never even reached the middle east.

[seasteading]

so you're missing a plot

over the course of my 3+ years on writeblr and some time on writing twitter, i’ve noticed that a lot of people can come up with characters and worldbuilding, but then get stuck on creating a compelling plot around those characters. so, here are a few tips that have helped me, and that i hope will help you too!

note: this will apply mostly to fantasy and sci fi, since that's what i write and what tends to have more plot-heavy storylines. 

these are also all my opinions! you don’t have to listen to any of this—all of these are tips that i’ve used in my own experience, and what works for me won’t necessarily work for you.

tone

this is one of the first things you want to decide. even within the same genre, you’re going to have a lot of variety in tone and atmosphere. the kind of plot that works for a fun fantasy adventure romp might feel odd and out of place for a darker fantasy with an emphasis on political intrigue. to figure out what kind of tone works best for your wip in particular, you want to look back at your characters. writing is a massive investment of time and energy, so you want to go in a direction that’s actually interesting to you. this is the very first step, and will help you decide what direction you end up going, and will most importantly give you a hint towards what ending will best suit the story you’re trying to tell. if you go with a more lighthearted tone, then suddenly having a tragic ending won’t make any sense since it’s the equivalent of a bait-and-switch. the same applies for having a darker tone—a happily ever after where everyone lives and gets therapy won’t necessarily fit. 

worldbuilding

worldbuilding is important of course, but it doesn’t need to be completely developed before you start coming up with a plot. in fact, you should try to avoid dumping all of your time into worldbuilding, and instead get the basics down before moving onto the plot. i’m sorry to say it, but you’re not tolkien. you will never be tolkien, and you don’t have to aspire to be like him either. you don’t want to write yourself into a plothole because something in your worldbuilding ends up conflicting with the story, so generally it’s good to have a little bit of wiggle room. sometimes you also run into a situation where the plot itself inspires an important piece of worldbuilding that makes the story richer and more interesting. your worldbuilding is there to enrich your plot and inform your character motivations, not the other way around. however, you do want to establish any rules your world has before getting into the plot, since breaking them can itself become a driving factor in characters and their arcs. this is especially common in fantasy, where a frequent premise lies in the fact that everybody can’t use magic while the protagonist can, or the other way around. this isn’t a plot quite yet, but it can be a good starting point.

character driven vs. plot driven

you will also need to decide the main focus of your story. character-driven writing is common in literary fiction and shorter works, and it’s focused specifically on the internal conflict within characters, as well as their thoughts and personal arcs. few external events are going to happen in character-driven stories, which tend towards more towards slice-of-life where not much really happens but you’re still invested due to the characters. plot-driven writing puts emphasis on (you guessed it!) the plot, and this is a lot more common for longer works. the two can and do certainly overlap, but most works tend to lean a bit more one way or the other, and you can determine this by asking whether you’re more interested in the characters as people or in what happens to them. 

motivation

so now that you have an idea of the direction you want to go, how do you actually come up with your plot? no matter if your story is character driven or plot driven, you still need compelling characters, and one way to find your plot is to look at their motivations. every one of your characters should have something they want to achieve or to obtain. your character’s want is going to be their main driving motivation. something is wrong in their life—if it wasn’t, then you wouldn’t be writing this story—and they think that obtaining what they want will fix it. this can be a macguffin-style quest for an object/place/person, the desire to climb the social ladder, solving the mystery behind a disappearance, etc. at this point, i would recommend taking a look at media with similar character motivations to yours and dissecting them to see what works and what doesn’t. you want to be genre-savvy and know what tropes are common to the type of story you’re telling.

gay is not a plot

repeat after me. gay is not a plot. gay is not a plot. gay is not a plot. there should be something to your wip’s plot other than “they’re gay, what more do you need?” (see this post). a romance isn’t going to be interesting if the characters aren’t interesting on their own, and that requires them to actually have their own motivations which (see motivation) themselves create the basis for a plot! in that same vein, having representation shouldn’t function as your plot or your primary selling point. representation should be a given, and making that the only descriptor for your work essentially boils down your characters to just their marginalization.

retellings

i know retellings of fairytales, myths, and shakespeare’s plays have gotten really popular, especially as of late. retellings are a great starting point since they already give you a base off which to work with, and instead of having to come up with all of your concepts from scratch, it becomes a question of putting your own spin on them. these tend to require some knowledge of the genre and common tropes, which you should have regardless of whether you’re writing a retelling or not. here, instead of having characters and a world first and a plot second, you’re working backwards from an existing work to reinterpret the characters and world surrounding a common plot. the important thing to note is that just because you have a starting point doesn’t mean that your work is done—i’d recommend researching other variations of the story you’re retelling and cataloguing similarities and differences, what works and what doesn’t, and moving things around/restructuring them depending on the changes you yourself want to make in your retelling.

prompts

i actually wouldn’t recommend relying on generators and prompt lists for your plots, since they tend to be extremely vague and difficult to get invested in, since you weren’t the one to come up with them. prompts can be really good for sparking inspiration, though, and once you get an idea for a few scenes, you can build off of them to figure out what circumstances lead to each one and what the pivot points are. prompts are a useful tool, but shouldn’t be used as the basis for your entire story.

final thoughts

if you’re here that means you’ve made it to the end of this behemoth of a post, and hopefully something here was helpful! at this point you should be able to find a premise, but it’s important to note that a premise is not a plot. here is where the real work begins—interweaving your characters and worldbuilding with your storyline, figuring out if there are any holes in your cast or if there are a few darlings you need to cryogenically freeze for now. you don’t need to fill in all of your plotholes; that’s a problem for when you actually have a draft down and more material to work with. for now, focus on creating a storyline that’s interesting to you. most importantly, don’t try to force it. you don’t want to treat a plot as a trope checklist, but instead let it come naturally so it actually fits the story your characters are made to tell.