x_los | Entries tagged with fantasy

- Actually a newborn baby wouldn’t dream yet, as newborns can’t. Occasionally Pratchett does say something that makes me think, ‘somehow despite being a dad you missed out on some of the labour and information associated with early childcare.’ Possibly this is a generational gender issue.
- Even though it’s Early Discworld, I had a good time with ‘Equal Rites’. This runs quite contrary to my lacklustre memories of the early Wizards books.
- This is written differently than a lot of the later titles. You lose a lot of Discworldiness and the whole referential resource of the ensemble cast and prior events, but gain a kind of—precision? There are different affordances. Weatherwax isn’t a badass yet here, but then the witches as a whole aren’t yet quite what they will be. Fundamentally, the world doesn’t yet work like it does in mid career books. Even this early, Pratchett does have trouble holding characterisation elements consistently in his brain for multiple scenes in the same book. But despite that frustrating editorial sloppiness, this prose is fairly tight and careful. The PoV and pacing are close, slow and absorbing. The way he’s working here feels less Pratchett, but very competent?
- We do the wizards duel from T.H. White (which he perhaps picks up from Tam Lin). This is a misstep. Weatherwax’s power should be fundamentally different: she should be able to compete on this level, but not by simply throwing aside her own way of doing things and disciplinary tendencies and performing identically to a wizard.
- Pratchett: hey, have a joke about Peake, because I don’t yet care about that not existing in this world. We haven’t put up that fourth wall yet.
- Why is there a fake Ridcully? He’s very Into Weatherwax, which I thought was Ridcully’s brand, but evidently she suits the popular taste. Granny as romantic lead is wild, but okay.
- I don’t know that this book actually had much to say about gender, for all it seems organised around that theme.

Del Toro is such an uneven director. People forget that, I think, in the rush to stan—which is itself a kind of uncomplicated relationship to desire with an artist, uninterested in and even antithetical to a fine perception of or deep engagement with their work (apologies to bandom, but I do think the narrow bandwidth of this relationship lends itself to a hyper focused appreciation of a few aspects of an artist’s work at the cost of a broader appreciation of that artist’s contexts and a nuanced valuation of their creative and presentational choices). It may be that del Toro’s successes are a precipitate of his failures. Perhaps he takes risks which sometimes pay off and sometimes do not. Perhaps he learns from his Ls. “Hellboy” is an interesting movie, but it also sucks, and the way things suck can itself be interesting.

Shooting events supposed to take place in America in Bristol and Bulgaria gives the production an odd, lurching visual quality. A UK council estate is not an American apartment building: it’s fairly architecturally distinct, so much so that I went and looked up the shooting location because I was almost certain of what I was looking at. Small details are similarly weird. Hellboy breaks into the mental health facility a work colleague has checked herself into with a case of Bud Light, then proceeds to act as though this is sharable gift rather than a cutting insult to someone already in crisis, really going through it. No one familiar with American beer could make such an error. Not even Budweiser: Bud Light.

This, naturally, is not the film’s key issue. I’d say that lies in how “part time” (“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, as mocked by Red Letter Media) everyone’s delivery is. No is shaken or excited by any of the film’s events. Perhaps the direction aimed at a sort of ‘Bruce Willis in “The Fifth Element”’ here-we-go-again quality, but instead it just feels like whole story is taking place in a DMV in Joliet. Everyone in this movie is vaguely tired, even when they’re getting disemboweled by Hitler’s Favourite Robot. I feel tired watching this movie. It’s camp, but camp as in ‘camping with your Uncle Jim, who is extremely divorced’. Not even the existence of a character who can indeed accurately be described as Hitler’s Favourite Robot juices up the atmosphere. It’s especially weird because if you look at the first collection of Hellboy comics, you can see that this pulls out a lot of those narrative strands in a way that does make sense, even delaying the father-figure’s death to add a bit of structure and tension. It’s the characterisation and texture of the piece that suck, more than anything. It doesn’t feel like del Toro has anything he particularly wants to say, here.

The film slumps to a stop, not concluding so much as running out of battery life. The villains’ endgame series of actions make little or no sense in terms of an effort to achieve their stated goals. The finale, featuring some Cthulhu, is totally lacklustre. The actual beast is just, idk, calamari? There’s nothing squamous here. It feels like it needs a contrasting element to keep it from being stodgy, maybe some lemon juice.

After all that, Hellboy smooches the sad girl who catches on fire too much while she’s on fire, and comes out unharmed. (Why? Eh.) Meanwhile, the sad white guy who’s been interested in the sad white girl for all of five minutes looks on in a way that indicates he’s resigning himself to a broken heart because he did not get the girl. But they went on all of one date, so why does he care? Why should I? Why am I still here? “Hellboy”, everybody.

Katy and I watched the del Toro “Pinocchio” (2022), and I can see why, despite the hype, I didn’t hear a lot about this movie after it came out. Sure, the stop motion is great. No qualms there! The pacing, however, is awkward, and the songs could be better. Some plot elements don’t quite make sense. The evil circus master who wants to use Pinocchio to make money already has a monkey with what seems to be a fully human level of intelligence, as well as considerable dexterity and capability. The ringmaster doesn’t capitalise on this obvious star attraction at all. He simply treats the monkey like shit, going after the bird in the bush. Okay? The father’s love for Pinocchio is also a vital plot driving mechanism, but the shape of the story ensures that by the time they're separated, Gepetto and Pinocchio have spent about two days together (during which they only got along a bit). The weight is off, there.

Also the story is very About Fascism now, and I’m not sure that decision actually yields the production much more than a muddled gravitas. The mixture of tones is jarring. (Why does a range of tones work in Dickens when it so rarely does elsewhere? Perhaps it’s down to the length of serial novels and Dickens’ commitment to their various moods at given moments.) Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” is scatological in a way that might appeal to small children, but then it turns to make jokes about Mussolini. Then, Pinocchio’s friend’s fash dad gets blown up by a plane. Basically, it’s hard to imagine this project’s intended audience. Maybe you can try a few ‘one for the dads’ gestures, but children still have to be engaged by poo jokes, then sit through the reheated Mussolini material, and then not get freaked out by a child’s father being blown up (in a fairly weighted fashion: this isn’t “Looney Tunes”). The story closes with a final word on the nature of mortality, just to round off the poo jokes, I guess. (And for some reason the cricket enjoys a special afterlife unique to himself, where he finally gets to do his song. Mazels.)

I was somehow unsurprised to learn that this was partly written by the “Over the Garden Wall” guy. You know I like “Over the Garden Wall”, but in this project Patrick McHale and del Toro’s sensibilities don’t entirely mesh. The stiltedness of “Pinocchio”’s plotting and dialogue make a lot of sense to me in terms of McHale, and reveal something interesting about pop-cultural time. I’d say that in 2015, McHale’s particular rhythm worked, and that it isn’t working here and now. Too much has happened, the mood of the room has changed. It reminded me of trying to watch the “Bee and Puppy Cat” show that finally got made. What had been fresh and engaging when I was in university now feels dull and off, a thousand years old and miles away.

Del Toro is an occasionally fabulous but very uneven director. Many of the risks he takes don’t pay off, and many of his projects don’t, ultimately, cohere. Praise of his oeuvre that misses this feels inattentive. “Pinocchio” is sort of in the room with his “Hellboy”, in that everything is delivered like Indiana Jones’ saying ‘part time’ in “Crystal Skull” (a lazily-used bad take made infamous by RLM).

Me, midway through the fascist summer camp arc: Whatever happened to that monkey?
Katy, flatly: He probably burned to death.

I watched the anime version of this when it came out, so thought I'd give the manga a try because I hear tell it is complete.

This is an odd IP for me in that I like the story fine, but I honestly cannot understand its vice-grip on the Japanese market right now. "Demon Slayer" is stylish and aesthetically mature, but some of the shonen elements are deeply clunky (the tsundere wolf 🐺 guy, Death Camp Pedagogy and the Problems of the Girl Pretending to Be Her Sister Who Loved Her Smile: hi, anime. Hi.). In places, the material is rather thin. Someone was trying to tell me about what an exciting universe "Demon Slayer" is in terms of the villains and worldbuilding, and its endless franchise potential!! It's... all right? This is just like, a cultivation story? Mechanically, it's that + five other animes that did well in the 90s and aughties (which you may not remember, or may be nostalgic about). You can smell "Inuyasha", "Mononoke", "Mushishi", "FMA", maybe even something like "Castlevania" or "Vampire Hunter D"--I wouldn’t stake my life on these coordinates, but I indisputably feel a considerable familiarity with the constituent pieces. The person I was speaking to compared "Demon Slayer" favourably to other financial juggernauts like "One Piece", "Naruto", and "Pokemon" in terms of plotting. Maybe so (and admittedly, I have no handle whatever on the mood of the Japanese market in terms of overall contemporary offerings), but several of those offered something novel and catchy, and/or made their offer to rather different audience brackets. So while I didn't dislike this anime's first series at all, thinking it well-executed if not engrossing, I find myself slightly side-eyeing its hype.

I wanted to reread the 'last time on' portion so that I could come to the train arc that's since come out re-oriented.

Some notes:

- Jfc, were there six children in this family? Too many children! (I mean, I guess this is a problem the narrative swiftly resolves.)

- He can SMELL MURDER!! (Or that a cat broke this pot, anyway.) (There is a big song in "Operation: Mincemeat" involving the line, ‘you can’t smell murder!!’.)

- Tanjiro isn’t really that characterised, is he? Fuck me, I didn't even remember his name. Nezuko is interesting, but you must admit she has older sister syndrome (the protagonist is older than her, but the other four seem younger) and then becomes the most fridged female character ever. She's got a horsebit in her mouth all show, you don't get more fridged than that. This anime glides along on a strong sense of generic cohesion, but in terms of its characters it’s pretty reliant on Types and the plot to carry the story. Very little happens because of who any particular person is, with perhaps the exception of Tanjiro's tendency to pacifism (but by now, that just feels Steven Universe/Izuku Midoriya/ten other guys rather than particular to this character and deeply considered).

- I wonder if it’s true that sideways katana usage can break the blade, and that you have to slash down rather than sideways as with a western sword? That degree of fragility sounds impractical (and as though it'd leave the bearer rather unguarded against stomach wounds, which can offer perhaps the nastiest possible sword-related deaths). But then you do use a caidao with a different motion than a cleaver if you’re doing it right (which I don't, because I haven't practiced knife skills for over a decade because I am lazy), so maybe that's just how it is.

- Here we are back at Child Death Mountain, and it’s still peak anime pedagogy. After "Food Wars" I don’t know that they’re doing All Right, over there. (What was that expulsion rate for? What a massive waste of resources and everyone's time!) This is yet another anime where no one involved should be running an organisation.

‘Our graduation exercise is DEATH FOR NO REASON!’
Why?
'Because swords: are expensive.'
...

Everyone in this world is this stupid, though. The lead villain: ‘Minions, you’re not performing well. Maybe MASS DEATH would improve our organisation’s ability to meet new challenges??’

I don’t QUITE know where we’re headed in terms of shape at the end of the first season of the anime. They try to open up the world a bit with these other demon slayers, and the pan shot parade is all rather QUIRKY ACTION FIGURE ROLL CALL!1 I'm simply too old for that shit. 'Why don't you just read older-pitched content then?' Gosh, are they going to make and distribute some, then? Wowee.

( Onegaishimasu )

Someone finally got the English rights to and translated “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (the book the Ghibli film is based on), only like, literal decades after the point where doing so would have been a smart and very natural business decision (say, any time after 1989). It’s a good thing they used all that extra time to—produce a somewhat careless and uninspiring translation. Ah. Whelp.

I’m discussing the 2020 version. This had previously been attempted in 2003 (with the fugliest Harry Potter knock-off cover imaginable), but the circulation and print-run seem to have been minuscule, with a library uptake on the same scale. It was nigh impossible to source a copy of the 2003 translation. And don’t get me wrong, this is serviceable. It’s hardly a Seven Seas scenario, where engaging with the book causes me both consumer rage and physical pain. The novel is, however, consistently clunky. There’s no way I’d listen to or read this book and ask myself, “oh, is this a translation?” That’s simply never the question, and the text gains nothing in particular from the friction. Reading this book feels like you’re trying to listen to a song but going ‘what is that?’, and realising that Youtube has somehow directed you to a cover where one significant instrument has been replaced by a kazoo. Like Miss Clavel, you are constantly aware that something is not right.

Someone who’s read the original in Japanese told me that the 1985 book was lovely, and specifically that it was charmingly written. We, however, read Kiki leaving on her grand flight to a chorus of townspeople shouting “congrats!”, which sounds—just a couple degrees off? I don’t actually care if the original version featured Japanese people using a truncated, casual way to wish people well: no one would say ‘congrats’ in this context (especially not people a couple generations up from Kiki, who, judging by the portable radio, is a child living in a ‘mid-century’ sort of era). Where is your loyalty sitting? It’s the target language that matters, here.

Like the Southwark Playhouse’s 2016 staging of this story (and unlike the 1989 film), the book mentions that witches are losing their power over time, on a generational scale. I’m not quite sure how to read this queer, melancholy element in the context of the text as a whole. There is, however, no particular sign in the book of one of the film’s most troubling elements—Jiji losing his ability to speak, and with it his human-level sentience. Generally, the film seems to have introduced far more conflict to the book’s material (notably in terms of Tombo, throughout). The book doesn’t really feature a tight arc, as such. It uses the thematics of the bildungsroman to give shape to its ‘slice of life’ events. The clock-tower thus plays a different role in the original novel, and the sequence involving it isn’t really the book’s climactic set-piece. The play, meanwhile, inextricably influenced by the film as well as the original source material it nominally adapted, chose to make this original, unblimped version of the clocktower sequence into more of a conflict.

- I don’t hate this show, I’m just mad that it wasted so much of my time and its own by squandering a lot of good ideas and talent. For me, this show epitomises both the issues with web novel composition and the pitfalls of an overly-faithful adaptation of a story composed in that form.

( The Rest! Of The Story )

- Lockwood & Co. is good, I just wish it weren’t about teens. I’m so sick of teens. There truly is no reason this show has to be about teens? It’s just Sapphire and Steel, with babies.

- The slowed-tech worldbuilding and cultural accoutrements are cool, like how all the 2000 AD merchandise shows it’s still popular in this universe. George liking it makes sense for his character. The funniest thing that could happen as a result of this show is a bunch of zoomers learning what 2000 AD is and getting really into that shit.

- Imagine caring as much about what other people working in your field are up to as these teens. “OoOo I see you’ve left the accounts receivable team. You will regret that, Tammy!!”

- After episode two, I theorised that Lockwood had locked his ghost parents in the land of Spare Oom. I mean it could just be like, a bedroom filled with cherished memories or some bullshit, but 'Ghost Parents' is more fun than baby photos.

- There are parts of this that feel very written—perhaps even over-written. Theatrical, rather. But the bulk of the script just feels like fairly generic tv show writing, which gives me a strange and uneven idea of the native register of this fictional universe.

- What is this Havisham-ass room nobody’s cleaned in the iron-monger’s castle? You have twelve hours of daylight to go 'round, get a Merry Maid in here, Jesus.

- This show does not understand what a jewellery hallmark is. Later, they also have an auction that doesn’t really look like a UK auction. It’s interesting that they didn’t think it had to: oops all vibes.

- Lucy's comment that a ghost feels like she’s ‘still alive’ makes me think that the problem was initially caused by an attempt to access eternal life (but instead of fetch happening, fetches happened). Later, the Kensal Green cemetery director has the same lyre motif lapel badge as Penelopy Fitz did at the funeral of her mother's colleague (if that even was her mother, rather than her before a supernatural facelift). We also saw this motif on the boxes that were removed from the iron mogul’s castle, and on said mogul's goggles. ‘The lyre represents the peace of Elysium, the paradise where heroes were sent after they were appointed immortality by the gods’. So there you have it, in terms of the arc plot.

It’s nice of the baddies to wear a big ‘I LOVE CAUSING THE PROBLEM!’ badge on their chests every day. “Ope, can’t leave the house without my ‘I absolutely did it’ sign!”

- The whole problem of this episode at the start of the Biggerstaff (lol) arc is that they have to do this work at night, i.e. the most dangerous time, because otherwise the council won’t be able to claim ‘type 2 removal’ funding from another part of the government, because there won’t be any visual proof—

This is the realest shit I’ve ever heard. A spot-on depiction of the UK reaction to real shit going down.

- ‘The problem’ is worldwide, so how are other countries responding? In some ways this is a straight-forward ‘cultivators subdue yao’ story, but with white people.

- Book of Dust was also a low-tech Modern Britain--what is this small-c conservative fantasy/aesthetic doing? It's not an aesthetic they really carry through with either, the seventies were way, way uglier.

- “Trust me!” Head in a jar, you are not the one.

- “London would be a lot safer with three less amateurs around!”
Me: Shouldn’t that be—
Katy: Yeah.

- Katy observed that this cemetery director has been sent over from Dickensian central casting, home of yer shamblers.

- We’re doing a bit of a Great God Pan here with this Victorian occultist’s experiments, but unfortunately that mostly serves to remind me that Arthur Machen was somewhat better at vibes.

- For the party Lockwood combs his hair in the stupidest way imaginable, into a kind of celebratory widow’s peak (a widow’s mountain range, honestly).

- The show consistently makes an interesting use of parts of the city that very much still exist (but which don’t get a lot of filmic or general attention) to create an ‘alternative’ version of the city: industrial docks, Kensal Green, weird corners of the Barbican and the QE2. The technique feels inflected by "Life on Mars" use of Manchester.

- The design of the auction sequence is pure Harry Potter movie. Meh.

- We go big on Found Famiwies UwU very fast, but these people have known one another all of a fortnight.

- Lockwood straight up got an ally killed, but thankfully the narrative retroactively rescues him from culpability.

- The writing slips in the last few episodes. Everything with the mudlark being possibly untrustworthy is an exercise in generating a kind of purposeless tension.

- You can tell this antagonist is seriously evil because of all the guyliner.

- The end game MacGuffin is just like, a bi disc with a mirror stuck in the middle. In the end, said mirror cracks from side to side. Guess they won’t be returning the whole jade disc to Zhao. The Victorian decoupage is accurately shit for the 1870s: dem bones in clear resin could easily be the stuff of a table top in a middle class household in Basingstoke.

- Me: A really strong showing for 1970s British ceramics throughout.
Katy: They haven’t made any new ceramics since the trouble began.

- Someone has paired this Victorian tiled washstand in the attic with an Ikea-esque mid-century modern cupboard, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

- I think the chapel they’re saying is in Kensal Green is actually the one in Highgate East? I think Kensal Green doesn’t have this pneumatic catacomb lift system (Highgate’s was for underground transportation across the road, to Highgate West—their catacombs are above ground, and much further back). I hope they filmed the real lift in action. They don’t run that for the tours, so it may be your only chance to see it in motion.

- Lockwood finally, bravely reveals that the locked room contains his dead parents’ extensive fur suit collection. Everyone is uncomfortable. Season ends.

- Finally watched "Green Knight". While the production values are great and the visuals, mood and melange of ambient themes are all poetic, I can't give a shit about this movie or imagine giving one. Deffo one for the Vibes lovers, but for me it was a very 'oh' experience, like "Koyaanisqatsi" Arthuriana. I wouldn't be quite so 'wtf?' if it hadn't been for the off-the-charts hype.

To be honest--and I don't wanna be like this, but--was this *as* hyped as it was because people were taking a culture wars good guys stand? Idk, is it for people who like Euro art house cinema and want their genre-blorbo to have a very serious treatment (and don't remember 1974's "Lancelot du Lac")?

I do think there are maybe just--people in this world who aren't me who don't find "Serial Experiments Lain" a disappointing mess of suggestion that can't commit to and articulate anything definitive about the material it wants to draw into the conversation. And if you like themes that you've thought and read about more deeply than this presented in a cursory and very expensive slideshow, okay. Like what new shit did this make anyone think about in a fresh way? And I don't think you can say, 'oh that's not the task this project is setting itself', I think it's absolutely what the critical conversation has centred on.

Some part of me is like, is the problem meeee, should I really try to connect and understand, but I don’t think I could come to any more definitive understanding of this text that would make me find it valuable. MAYBE you’re supposed to be responding to it more like a filmic poem?

It’s one of those adaptations that’s kind of for no one. Some adaptations demand you know a canon for their effect but then punish you for caring too much about that canon, very ‘it’s not FOR you, critics!!’ People who don’t know this body of work at all won’t know what’s going on half the time. Who the fuck is probably-Merlin? They never say. People who really know this canon and have read a lot about the Romance and masculinity with be like ‘yeah, and?’

Some notes while watching:

- Why is everyone clapping like this beheading was cool rather than uuuuh, dooming his own ass?

- 'Hope you don’t mind mate, we did a bit of a puppet show about your imminent death.'

- Totally fucking weird Irish guy in the woods. What’s the point of that? Just rob his shit, you don’t have to make such a thing of it. Good thing they left him his sword and his cool mustard yellow cape. (They don’t seem very good at robbing? I wouldn’t stroke mens' faces on the job. Keep that to yourself, this is a workplace.)

- 'So there I was, trying to enjoy a nap, and some bitch who CLEARLY had a head was like 'yooo, so do you have like. A swimming certificate?''

- Cdrama watching this like "FINALLY some good fuckin landscape shots."

- You don’t need to stone this fox, he’s just a guy hanging out

- Oh hey, it’s those guys from "Attack on Titan".

- Gawain’s experience of just waaaaaaiting in this chapel is also what happens when you call 111.

Wintersmith:

- Leave it to a guy writing YA to not make 'the spirit of winter becomes infatuated with a human girl' even a bit sexy. It's just not an idea that would have occurred to a woman handed that brief. Tiffany is a bit flattered by her swain's power and attention, but seduced she decidedly is not. That is just not on the table. A shame, because that would have added a compelling dimension to her moral issues, her Bildungsroman and the final conflict. (Katy also points out that it's odd to seed Tiffany transforming into summer, but then to hardly use that.)

- Katy found the opening weird, but thought it worked out somewhat in the end. I don't think it did much, honestly, other than undercut the pacing and emotional flow a bit.

- She also found the end, where Rob Anybody defeats the books, charming. She felt similarly about Annagramma's not-quite-reform arc and Miss Treason's sections, particularly those involving this book's treatment of D/death. (Katy has perviously observed that all Tiffany Aching books are about death.)

- She also finds the build-up here with Roland particularly annoying, because the subsequent book revokes its promise so severely.

- We both thought this was a pretty solid book.

Amo a mi mama:

- A very rudimentary bilingual Spanish/English children's book I read. I need to finish my backlogged German practice, get back to Spanish, and start reading a lot more thereof. I have my sights on more challenging dual-facing material after I get through a few more of these little ones (thanks to Hoopla/my US library card).

- The introduction of the Hiver is extremely “Dirk Gently” inflected.

- This book feels as though it ends ages before it does (slightly anti-climatically, when the Hiver is thrown out of Tiffany), and there are weird structural snarls. Ultimately Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax go camping for no reason, and while sure, sometimes all of us do pointless errands, that’s generally not considered narratively stage-worthy.

- The emotional flow of the scene where Tiffany’s friend sticks up for herself and Anna Grammer cowers is really all over the place. It’s very hard to draw a causal through-line, here. Character development in the scene keeps ping-pong reverting in a way that’s again, potentially slightly realistic but unusual and unsatisfying in a book. I think listening to this may make it more obvious? This needs a light edit (the previous issue needed a thornier, structural one).

- Granny Weatherwax complains about diaries with eyes on them. My listening memory is not as good as my reading memory, but I don’t believe she should know about these *to* do a call back? She wasn’t in the scene in the shop where these came up. I can think of a couple narratively built-in ways to justify this, but the text doesn’t gesture to any of these.

- I hate knowing anything about authors. I don’t want to be on the look out for signs of this or that, as if I’m reading a bedside chart rather than a book. I wish I didn’t know anything about this bloke who I never, to my knowledge, met. (UK SFF is teeny tiny so of course we shared friends, but the most famous people in those spaces tend to have circulated widely until they got annoying famous and then slid right out. Everyone older than you will have been their bestie and no one your age will have met them except maybe at a signing. The tiny quality is fairly hateful, because it makes ever doing crit exceptionally delicate, in a useless sort of way. “Oh don’t say Steve is a missing stair, I was best man at his wedding!” How interesting, and did he grope anyone there or did he hold off just the once on account of its being something of a special occasion?)

- This makes it sound like this wasn’t a good book, but there were many excellent prose moments, themes, etc. The general level of skill is what makes these snags feel weirder.

Listened to this audiobook with Katy on the way to and back from Wales to see Jon and Robin. (Robin's fibre-art has really come on, we checked it out in the gallery she does some work in and it looked fab! I kind of wanted to buy some of her seasonal stock, but the Christmas lot wasn't swapped in yet, so will try and remember to check back on that.)

I really liked this. There were a couple small snags. Pratchett slightly over-eggs Tiffany's specialness in Miss Tick's conversations with her un-familiar. There's a conversation between Tiffany and the Gonnagle where he's a bit shirty with her for rudeness out of nowhere, and you can feel the book trying to turn a lesson it's not deeply committed to there. That needed a little more flow. When they're escaping from the sea-dream, there's a slight repetitive hitch--two almost identical sentences about escape a couple paragraphs apart, not as a meaningful parallelism but more as an editorial accident. Was this very carefully looked to, or was Pratchett's reputation so strong by then that it wasn't? A disservice to him, if so. (These things were possibly more evident having listened to the book rather than read it, as well.)

More importantly, there's some beautiful writing around deep time and the Chalk that felt a bit Garner (appropriately enough, as he's really like, the contemporary British fantasy poet of the hyper-regional). Several bits of this felt productively in conversation with other writers in the genre. The red-sunned world the dream-blobs come from is a touch Charn, the use of the burial mounds is a bit Tolkienian. None of that felt cheap or paested on yay, more just--satisfyingly aware of the extant emotional and descriptive capacities of the field.

I felt unusually and interestingly Seen by the descriptions of Tiffany's relationship to feeling at certain points, which was all the more unexpected because it's not as though this is the type of character Pratchett often wrote, exactly. So what afforded him this insight into what I think of as a very gendered relationship to family and labour? I guess just general bumming around the world attentively long enough, but it worked notably well. Specifically, it felt modulated through certain therapy discourses, but not in the irksome 'every human psychological reality possible is encompassed by relatively well-off American 20 year olds' fandom way I've become so lamentably familiar with. This was more integrated and plausible than that. It's something you can put up with, in the way you accept that the sweets in this book have chemical additives for a joke. That's a realm of industrial modernity the rest of the story has little truck with. If mass-manufactured confectionary exists in the Discworld, it's still patently not the sort of sweet they'd eat in the Chalk's economic conditions. But if Pratchett wants to talk about contemporary Britain for a second, well, whatever, it's serving the story.

Today I read the short story “Outside the House”, which a friend described thus:

“I’ve been reading a collection called Women’s Weird 2—it’s the second volume of a series of early 20th century weird tales by women authors. I was really struck by the story I read yesterday evening. It was by a writer named Bessie Kyffin-Taylor, who’s fairly obscure and apparently wrote very little, and the title was “Outside the House.” I’ve never come across her other stories and don’t know whether they’re any good, but I’m convinced this one is a lost classic. It’s about a WWI veteran who is visiting his fiancée’s family for the first time and discovers they have very peculiar rules about never leaving the house, or even opening the windows facing the lawn, after 5 PM. From there things get gradually and unexpectedly apocalyptic in a House on the Borderland kind of way. Ultimately it’s about an upper-middle-class family whose fortunes are based on atrocities, and who’ve weaponized polite respectability in order to avoid acknowledging this under any circumstances, even as their ancestor’s victims lay siege to their home.”

For my own part, I want to add that it feels very reminiscent of Arthur Machen. It directly references “Angel of Mons”, but the overall treatment is also of that school. This does more with that set up and those themes, I think. The strongest aspect is probably the characters’ varied ways of handling this, how thoroughly they naturalise violence and even the pride they come to take in their ability to do so. The social mores of their responses and the parallels between this form of illicit acquisition of generational wealth and ‘legitimate’ forms that hinge on classism/colonialism, the unsustainably of the mental structures that enable atrocity and sugar-cost even the memory thereof, are well-observed and poignant.

"I Kill Giants": Everyone important in this move--everyone with so much as three lines to their name--is a girl. That's interesting, but it can't fully expunge the gendered expectations I myself bring to the text as a reader. It's a little hard not to find the protagonist of "I Kill Giants" frustrating for behaviour I don't think I'd be as inclined to judge a male character for. Said main character is the youngest of a set of siblings with dead (or, spoiler, still dying) parents. The older sister is stuck holding down a career, making dinner for her thankless younger siblings and doing care labour. Her younger sister, the protagonist, doesn't help her so much as wash the dishes: she just experiences her grief regarding their mother's illness via the metaphor of rushing around trying to fight supernatural beasts. All right, fine. When does her older sister get to experience her grief?

Their teen middle-brother is absolutely negligible and useless, but I guess I don't expect him to be anything but a hindrance. These character interactions are supposed to form a backdrop for an 80s film styled Bildungsroman for a character who, in the 80s movie version, would have been male. The fusion of this narrative shape with a more active focus on women is actively stressful. I can't help seeing the older sister, pointedly, in every scene where she takes up real estate: how bitterly unfair the shape of this story is to her, and how the narrative would need to fundamentally shift to change that.

This is one of those queer "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" style, Henry Jamesian transatlantic co-productions. Noel Clarke from "Doctor Who" is here in New England, for some reason. The main character says of her new dubcon best friend, "she dresses like she’s from a magazine, but she’s English, so it’s to be expected." I'm not sure this muddiness actually ever works rather than producing something for and of neither culture rather than about both (see "Sex Education"). The movie is also very, very similar in both vibe and plot matter to the English cancer fantasy book and film "A Monster Calls", and suffers by the comparison: the climax of "I Kill Giants" isn't as well managed because the integration of its fantasy element is more confused and less meaningful.

This is a mostly well-written movie, with a lot going for it. It takes an intriguing, purposive approach to its treatment of gender. It comes close to really working in a way I respect.

"Set It Up": Katy loves a romcom, and finds the post-90s dearth in western cinema frustrating. This semi-"Cyrano" has good dialogue, but it's kind of frustrating that Creepy Tim is the most fun character in the movie by a good margin.

Katy thought that the script needed a real polish, and that the film could have been funnier throughout. Most of the major players are quite normal, and it's difficult to say much of the two leads. She believed that early Richard Curtis would have done a better job with the gay flatmate, and that even in "Yesterday" he still manages that sort of character well.

Essentially, she thinks (and I agree) that the film has two key structural issues:

- The film is initially keen to parallel the two bosses and their assistants' relationships with them. It feels like the team decided halfway through the project that actually, Lucy Liu's character was going to be a substantially more sympathetic person. This doesn't carry through the whole storyline in a natural-feeling way. It no longer quite makes sense for Liu to have been a huge, ambivalent jerk about the blue jacket, for Harper to feel like she'll be fired if she can't get Liu's dinner to her (unless that's all in Harper's head: more on this later), for Liu to have turned down every personal event she's invited to by her loved ones (later we get a little more information on where Liu is coming from here, but it could be more cleanly delivered), and for Liu to be deeply nepotistic about university connections in a way that has material impact on the careers of people working for her.

It's hard to believe Liu when she says she rides Harper hard because she values her. In the moment, it's hard to know whether the film actually wants us to think that's true. It's especially hard to credit this when Liu hasn't really given Harper professional opportunities that we actually see. 'Preparing you for the real world' is mostly an excuse people who take advantage of you use to mitigate their own vague, useless sense of guilt regarding fucking you over. Making Harper work past midnight regularly in a way that is, according to each and every management study ever conducted, ultimately unproductive over long periods was "preparing her for the industry"? Sounds like perpetuating its most unreasonable demands. How about making Harper fetch her dinner when things were closed as a result of Liu's own poor planning? Was that, too, salutary?

There are script-level ways to make Lucy Liu difficult to live with which would have given us a more cohesive sense of her as a decent person with poor work-life boundaries and irritating traits. Liu isn't actually playing Streep in "Devil Wears Prada": decent people can be hell on each other. This ask is pound for pound doable in terms of room in the script, but fiddly to execute. Another, related question is, is Harper in danger of being fired simply because she believes she is? How complicit is Harper in taking on additional work to avoid writing (actually engaging with which threatens her whole sense of self) or to impress Liu? Is this in part a problem derived from Harper's own personality? Does Liu believe that Harper is another fellow workaholic with no boundaries because Harper is bad at articulating and enforcing boundaries? The script flirts with this material, but doesn't actually engage with the questions it starts to ask. It opens these doors, but won't then walk through them. I wouldn't even expect these things if the film hadn't hinted at an ability and willingness to deliver them.

In contrast, Taye Diggs' character's sins include a flat, sexist "women are gross if they don't get bikini waxes" moment, among other such. This is realistic enough, but it made the eventual reveal of his bigger, related moral issues feel overdue to Katy. (The movie does lampshade this: Lucy Liu is admirable, Diggs is just Some Guy.) She couldn't sustain her belief that Diggs might be annoying but all right until the crisis point, when the film wanted that to break and for the audience to be invested in the male lead's disillusionment.

- There's some confusion as to what kind of relationship the romantic leads have. Katy thought the male lead's best friend's early comment that "your girlfriend should be your best friend" resonant, and wanted to see that pay off more strongly than it did. The later introduction of "I love you despite" felt less successful to her.

What does the main couple have in common? They have some bants, and they like one anothers' friends. This is good! But in some ways this film suffers from heterosexism disease: the leads are together because they're members of the opposite sex who can stand one another. Bingo, baby. That's hot stuff.

The awkward corollary to this is Harper's relationship with Liu, which does revolve around meaningful common interests, respect and shared work. Is this ultimately the film's core relationship? If so--why isn't it the romantic focus?

- I chose to watch “Ghost Bride” because it was all of 6 episodes and seemed like a reasonably-sized investment.

- Apparently, per Yinharn, the Malaysian blogosphere had issues with this show due to the period-inappropriate Mandarin and general disinterest in its setting as such. Yinharn directed me to this piece on these limitations: https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/lifestyle-culture/article/3047751/dont-be-fooled-netflix-theres-more-chinese-diaspora . I do see the point that “Ghost Bride” is not interested in its setting’s fullness/diversity; this is functionally indistinguishable from a mainland-set show.

- It's 1890 and this lead girl’s friend has a bob haircut? Okay, I guess! I mean, I don't know what's happening in not-yet-officially-Malaysia.

- Gosh, a dress with a thigh-high slit? Seems unusual, but okay.

- It's interesting that the family's housekeeper is coming to this party with her employers.

- I thought it was odd that everyone at a big party was doing embroidery in a circle and wondered if etiquette was quite different, if it was a game pertaining to the occasion (Qixi), or if it was just an odd filmic choice. Helena thinks it’s probably a game.

- The characters are really keen on this peach dress for the female lead, but I don’t find it very flattering.

- Everyone pronounces the name “Isabel” in the most English fashion possible. It feels a little like the cast switches languages just to say this name? Rather odd.

- They do the paper-doll beating thing I’ve edited Yinharn’s translation of in “Purely By Accident”! I was happy to see it. ‘I understood that reference!’

- It’s not really successful as a murder mystery. The culprit felt rather random and plucked out of a hat.

- And why did the despised half-sister tolerate her half-brother on one of the nights leading up to his death during their joint trip to the casino? I don’t think we ever heard more about that.

- And will someone make provision for the surviving illegitimate son? If anyone is a good Ghost Bride candidate, surely it’s the servant the dead man already seduced and spurned, whose prospects may have been materially damaged and who must now provide for the rich family’s only surviving next-generation heir.

- The Ghost Husband is a bit hot, and eats the scenery in a satisfying way. A key reason I watched this was the thirsty premise! The set-up was more compelling than the delivery, here: this is not quite one for the Monsterfuckers, in that classic “Phantom of the Opera”, “Labyrinth” vein.

- The romance triangle (quadrangle?) is decent, and I did enjoy the fuckboi love interest even as I found the bevvy of sustained, narratively plausible choices a little odd, with two of the potential male leads making it through to the last 10 minutes of the series. It did feel slightly like the successful candidate was plucked out of a hat. The resultant ending was well-executed, but felt somewhat arbitrary.

- I was confused as to where the last half hour of this series was going in a way that I don't know I would have been with a medium I knew better. I think I might not have found the romance red herring successfully misleading if I were more familiar with the patterns of this type of drama.

- Mari says this is based on a book, and suggested that the climax is better handled therein.

I didn’t really like McKillip’s Kingfisher, which I started reading before the author died and finished after I’d heard about that. In general I’ve come to think that this author and I don’t jive well, and I don’t plan on reading more of her work. I held off writing this review for a few weeks because I suspected posting it might make people who enjoy her work unhappy, due to her recent loss. A bit of time’s passed now, but I’ve put it behind a cut so that you can with it engage only if you feel comfortable doing so.

***

( Kingfisher )

( Image-Heavy Review Here )

This very compact, stripped-down Diana Wynne Jones book is aimed at younger readers. This is almost a shame because the pro-active heroine makes for a very engaging set-up. She feels unusual in a general sense, and even within Jones' oeuvre--not a departure from Jones' general characterisations, but a canny, wilful enunciation of the pragmatic and adaptable capacities her child heroes often have. Earwig employs the kind of 'management' of people Jones was so ill at ease with even benign forms of in Black Maria.

Earwig quite enjoyed ruling over the orphanage she was left in as a child (by either her parents or a witch hunter, which is, kind of awkwardly, never cleared up or even revisited). People tend to do what Earwig wants--more because she's forceful, in an aboveboard way, and reads them well than due to any magical coercion. (And this is probably why Jones feels Earwig's brand of management plays sufficiently fair.) She believes in telling people what you expect out of a situation and striking your bargain early on. She tries to do this when adopted by a witch who wants a drudge, and to bargain for an apprenticeship. The witch agrees, but then proves a bad graduate advisor. Earwig takes the matter into her own hands, striking up a mutual assistance pact with the witch's familiar and playing the witch off their powerful, demon-controlling Mandrake housemate. The Mandrake is a bit more sympathetic to Earwig's practical needs than the witch is, but overall he's a force of benign neglect: leave him alone, and he'll do the same for you. This is about the best you can expect from a Diana Wynne Jones parental figure.

The end involves a highly unusual one-year time skip. Having garnered her apprenticeship, Earwig is coming along as a witch, attending school again and thus back in contact with her left-behind friend from the orphanage, has earned the affection of the Mandrake and even a limited ability to control his demonic familiars herself. The happy ending does feel pretty pat and abrupt--as though there could well have been more material here, to flesh out this engaging premise into a full novel, but Jones had more of an idea for a set-up than a plot. It's a very on-page satisfying ending for Earwig, who gets what she wants: a return to her 'rightful' place in her world, but a wider and more interesting world than her first one, that provides more scope for her talents.

( CW: some discussion of DV/homicide, as prompted by the text's discussion of gendered domestic violence )

- The library copy’s narrator was far too excited. I know she’s American, but there are limits. I had to go over to the Librivox recording (all Librivox recordings are in the public domain—).

- Per the Introduction, Baum has some interesting notions about children’s education being moral, for the first time in history, and on how he himsels if going to eschew morals in fantasy, for the first time in history. It’s really sad that he doesn’t have seem to have access to: history. Chicago had no library, I guess. (It’s not fully his fault: everyone says dumb shit when trying to opine about the state of kid lit. It is a sure provoker of Bad Takes.)

Baum also believes he’s not going to say anything too grim or scary in this series. Good luck with that.

- The tone of the dialogue and narration and the use of crying are at times reminiscent of chivalric romance. I wonder if that’s what Baum read before writing this? Some of my frustrations with the book changed shape when I started to think of it was a late entry into that genre rather than a George MacDonald competitor.

- These quest companions truly do nothing but demonstrate the qualities they claim not to have. I know that’s the whole conceit, but this lion is out here every day like ‘eh, let death come’.

- Baum isn’t that interested in dialogue, which is surprising in a novel that’s essentially character based.

- Oz presents himself in several guises, comfortably assuming different genders. This is interesting to note in re Ozma, later.

- A fairy tale reading instinct almost led me to believe that the slightly different wording of the contracts the party members made with the wizard might be important. Ultimately, it wasn’t.

- Wicked witch: *sends flock of evil crows*

Scarecrow: Honestly I’m shocked my skillset is going to come into play, but okay—

- I did not anticipate the flying monkeys being freelance contract employees who got out of there right after accomplishing their errand. ‘That’s the third task done, so we will never see you again, witch. Byeee.’

Absolute Teamsters energy.

‘This kid has the mark of the other witch, so we won't be touching her. We'll just drop her at your house.’

‘Could you just—’

‘No.'

- It’s interesting to have two big plot scenes of emancipation (from the two wicked witches) written when actual Emancipation was still very much in living memory. (Wizard of Oz came out in 1900.) On several occasions the book also described limited states of compulsion, like a fairy tale obligation to do favours, or being caught and forced to be a kitchen maid, as slavery. I suppose that’s not outright, technically wrong. Nevertheless, it’s demonstrative of a surprising readiness to evoke, or fixation on, the concept, which might be unique to the US in that period.

- Oz: Okay, you got me, I see it’s time to show you my amazing puppetry set up—

Dorothy: Isn’t this beast the spider from The Ocean at the End of the Lane production?

Oz: Saving on props, yeah.

- En route to find Glinda and beg a boon of her, the squad discovers a Great Wall literally made of china. The inhabitants and land beyond are all made of porcelain. The quest party hurts them just by existing in their land. Removing the people from the china country to put them on mantelpieces, as Dorothy proposes to one inhabitant, freezes their limbs and entombs them in living death. The lion destroyed a china church by accident as they left. This is a weirdly insistent, striking moment of imperial commentary. Not that Baum was necessarily trying to evoke that—it’s just that those preoccupations fairly inescapably haunt this section.

- Killing the giant spider while it’s asleep is a still-cowardly move, but no one calls the lion on it, so whatever, I guess.

- Right before entering Glinda’s domain, the squad is confronted with the fire gang from Labyrinth. Forced to chilly down.

- Book!Glinda is a redhead who employs seemingly exclusively female soldiers. Good for her.

- The Tin Man has entirely forgotten that chick he wanted to marry. Come on, dude. That was your whole motivation?

- Glinda and the narrative eventually emancipate the winged monkeys, which is good because that was somewhat uncomfortable.

- The silver shoes (also DBA ruby slippers) are more like proper seven-league boots in the book.

- The changes they made for the film are interesting, and honestly by and large good for both the medium shift and the creation of a tight, emotionally effective narrative. I think for arc reasons, they were right to skip almost everything after Oz’s premature evacuation. Yet in part I probably think this because the film is so iconic, and I know it well.

- This was fine, but I was at no point left thinking, ‘if only there were 14 additional books of this series, not counting authorised sequels!’

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Entries tagged with fantasy

Notes on Terry Pratchett’s ‘Equal Rites’

Review: del Toro's "Hellboy"

Review: del Toro's “Pinocchio” (2022)

Review: Demon Slayer, Volume 1

Review: "Hikaru no Go" (anime)

Review: "Kiki's Delivery Service" (novel; 2020 translation)

Review: "Who Rules the World?"

Review: "Lockwood & Co."

Notes on "The Green Knight"

Notes on "Wintersmith" (Discworld, #35; Tiffany Aching, #3) and "Amo a mi mama"

Notes on “Hat Full of Sky”

Review: "Wee Free Men"

Review: “Outside the House”

Review: "I Kill Giants"; "Set It Up"

Review: "Ghost Bride"

Review: "Kingfisher", by Patricia McKillip

Review: "Hellboy Omnibus, Volume 1"

Review: "Earwig and the Witch"

Notes on Diana Wynne Jone's "Black Maria"

Review: Baum's "The Wizard of Oz"