recognito

Made a extremely silly decision this past weekend, which was to break up our long drive to and from Philly by Exactly long enough to see one (one) show in NYC on the way down, and another on the way back. Literally put the car in a garage by the theater, went into the show, got the car out of the garage, and kept driving. And to make matters even sillier the show that we saw on the way down was Bad -- and we knew it was going to be! Or at least we had a reasonable suspicion! But were we not going to go out of our way to see Norm Lewis play Villefort in a Count of Monte Cristo musical? Of course we were. The path before us had simply been prepared.

Q: When you say it was bad, do you mean it was a bad musical as a musical, or a bad adaptation of Count of Monte Cristo?
A: Oh, both! Absolutely both.

Q: What made it a bad musical?
A: Well, the music. And the lyrics. They hit exactly every beat on the Musical Sheet while constantly feeling like less subtle knockoff versions of other songs you might know slightly better. The song you might know slightly better is not a subtle one, you say? Well, I guarantee you that songs such as "Dangerous Times," in which the full cast explain that they are living in dangerous times, and "How Did I Get So Far Away [From Me]," in which Mercedes sadly wonders how she has gotten so far away from herself, are less so. When the best you can say of a song is that it felt like pallid diet Frank Wildhorn -- as in, lacking the noted power and vibrancy of real Frank Wildhorn, composer of such deathless works as Death Note: The Musical -- then you know we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. And that's not even mentioning the frenetic stream of mediocre jokes.

Q: And what made it a bad adaptation?
A: I mean I know there are probably people in the past who have said that Edmond Dantès literally did nothing wrong but I want you to understand: in this show, Edmond Dantès literally does nothing wrong. His backstory takes up the entire first act, and by the time we hit intermission I was already like "huh, there's not going to be a lot of time in here for revenge schemes," but I didn't actually understand how dire the situation was going to be until ( this part of the Q&A gets into quite detailed plot spoilers )

Q: So do you regret your objectively silly decision to go out of your way to see this musical?
A: No I do not, not in the least, and I would have regretted missing it. There is something very nutritious in bad theater, I think. It forces you to consider what good theater might look like. Also, the surprise appearance of Lucrezia Borgia was one of the funniest things I experienced all weekend.

portico

Ngaio Marsh is considered one of the "queens of crime" of the golden age of detective fiction, but I've read very little of her. She, along with Josephine Tey, are the names I watch for in secondhand bookshops, but although this method has served me well with Tey, I've found comparably little of Marsh. And it's not because of her lack of books--she wrote 32 novels in her career, which spanned 50 years. That's just under half of Agatha Christie's output, but she's an outlier adn should not have been counted etc. Thus far I have encountered two of her books in the wild--Death in Ecstasy (1936) and Tied Up in Tinsel (1972). Death in Ecstasy (which she wrote immediately prior to Vintage Murder) is about a death in a cultish church and the present altar boys are very obviously queer actors and I found her detective, Roderick Alleyn's (all her books feature him), commentary about them so homophobic and off-putting that I quit it. I read a lot of golden age detective novels and have a pretty high tolerance for period-typical discrimination, so that should give you a sense of it. Tied Up in Tinsel was fun (fully half of it was written from the perspective of Alleyn's wife, acclaimed portraitist Agatha Troy), but also extremely 1972 (Santa appears in gold lamé), so I still felt like I hadn't had a solid golden age Marsh reading experience. I don't know if I'd say I'd had one yet with Vintage Murder, but this is such a rich text I have to talk about it.

Ngaio Marsh was born in Aotearoa (New Zealand), but her detective Roderick Alleyn was British and nearly all of her books are set in England. Vintage Murder, which is set in Aotearoa and sees Alleyn on vacation and falling in with a British traveling theatrical troupe, is not among them. Both of those elements immediately piqued my interest, because two things I know about Marsh are her Pākehāness and her absolute devotion to theater. It's her second book set in a theater, but her first in her homeland, and I suspect it was a pretty personal one.

Really enjoyed the various artists' interpretations of the murder.

The book begins on a train, where Alleyn has coincidentally ended up sitting with members of the theatrical troupe on an overnight ride. Alleyn is on vacation and determined to be incognito, although he is recognized by one of the actresses due to having met her during Enter a Murderer (1935), and he reveals himself to a few more after someone makes an attempt on the life of the troupe's owner. Once the troupe arrives at its destination, Alleyn is invited to join them for that evening's performance, which will be followed by a surprise birthday party for the troupe's leading lady and artistic director, who is married to the owner. The party takes place on the stage and involves the dropping down from the flies a large bottle of champagne. As you might guess, this goes awry and the troupe's owner is killed.

The birthday party is also where we meet the sole non-white character in this book, a local Māori doctor, Dr. Rangi Te Pokiha. Alleyn made the acquaintance of Dr. Te Pokiha earlier that day, when Alleyn buys a small green tiki figure from him. Dr. Te Pokiha explains at the party that if it was his figure, he wouldn't sell it, but as it already belonged to a Pākehā (white New Zealander) on whose behalf he was selling it, it was fine. This is but the first of many troubling statements about Māori people and culture in this book. Alleyn gives the tiki to the leading lady, and it begins its new life as a mcguffin.

Marsh is obviously trying to SAY something about the treatment of Māori people and culture, even having Dr. Te Pokiha make a disparaging remark about Pākehā who give their children Māori names (like Marsh herself received), and I think it was probably very progressive for the time. Marsh has cast Dr. Te Pokiha into the role of the good Māori. He has Alleyn over for dinner and they have a lovely little date. Alleyn apologizes on behalf of his companions for the way they treated the tiki (although he still refers to it as a little monster in a letter), and Dr. Te Pokiha talks about his determination to save his fellow Māoris from European diseases and vices.

But for all that Marsh can't get away from discussion of "savages." After the murder, the local constable comments of Dr. Te Pokiha: "The doctor's had an English college education-he's ninety per cent civilised. All the same, sir, there's the odd ten percent. It's there, no matter how civilised they are. See him when he goes into one of the back-country pas and you'll find a difference. See him when he goes crook! By gee, I did once, when he gave evidence on a case of-well, it was an unsavoury case and the doctor felt strongly about it. His eyes fairly flashed. He looked as if he might go off at the deep end and dance a haka in court." And if you're thinking to yourself, that sounds like a case of Chekov's savage imagery, I can tell you that I was thinking it too and we were both right. Near the end of the book, Dr. Te Pokiha's description of a character's movements becomes a crucial piece of evidence, the other character calls the doctor a liar, and he is understandably quite upset about it. And so we have the savage moment, when the doctor bares his teeth and Alleyn thinks "By Jove, the odd twenty percent of pure savage" and it all ends with the murderer calling Dr. Te Pokiha the n word. The man is bad, he's a murderer, and if Marsh made that choice to drive home his badness, then it DID work, but!!!! The chapter in which it occurs is called "Dr. Te Pokiha Plays to Type," so Marsh is NOT free from sin here. It's bad!!

I am reserving my harshest judgement for the audiobook publisher. I listened to it, an audiobook recorded (or at least released) in 2015, and a white British man says the n word. Now obviously the word has a very different cultural history in the US versus other countries, but by 2015 I thought it was pretty universally taboo. Granted, the version I found was ripped to youtube, so maybe the one on audible is censored? I didn't see comments mentioning it either way.

Marsh's prose is gorgeous in this book, particularly when she's describing the Aotearoa scenery. The mystery was good! I definitely understand her place among the detective fiction greats, and I am definitely interested in reading more of her work. But whew. This sure didn't age well nor did it reflect well on hachette audio.

blotthis

Well, I guess. March??? I haven't read anything other than Duncan the Tall getting his shit wrecked literally, sexually and metaphorically by various nobles for a like a week, which is because I Couldn't Read while I was trying to write about reading... Still not Ideal. May switch approaches for April/May. I have a few ideas, but. We'll see. The search for a sustainable and rewarding approach continues.

In the meantime, feel free to request thoughts on the following. Liked a lot of things last month better than I expected to.

( 10 books, 2 comics, 4+ albums, 1 tv show )

knave_of_swords

Okay look, I know that I'm still watching Shippuden, but on a whim I started reading Boruto: Two Blue Vortex since I have a WSJ subscription, and I'm actually... liking it??? I vaguely know what happened plot-wise before this from osmosis and various discussions, and I'm not having a lot of trouble following what's happening. As much as I say I hate Boruto the series because I feel like it shits on Sakura, especially with regards to her relationship with Sasuke... I kind of like it anyways and am having fun with it.

I love Eida's character design! It doesn't quite fit with the rest of the character designs tbh, but I like it anyways. I wanted to go and read some shipfic of her and Sarada but to my SHOCK they don't even have a ship tag on AO3???? What on earth. Smh at this fandom's yuri fans. At least Himawari/Chouchou is a tag that exists! ...with one single work that isn't to my tastes in it. Sigh. I'm going to have to catch up on Boruto properly, aren't I? So I can write the yuri fic that this fandom deserves! Or that I deserve, at least.

I think my plan is to finish watching Naruto Shippuden, or maybe just read the rest of the manga because the anime's pacing is truly awful, and then read the Boruto manga, and then watch the Boruto anime while skipping arcs I've already read unless I want to see certain fights or moments animated. I know the Boruto anime starts earlier than the manga does, I think, and I don't want to be impatiently waiting for Eida and Kawaki and the Otsutsuki plot stuff to happen, I want to enjoy the fun fluff arcs with the kids for what they are, so that's why I want to do it that way.

Speaking of Shippuden, though, I'm still on the Akatsuki Suppression Arc! Most of my TV watching lately has been minecraft youtube rather than anime, but I'm still chipping away at Shippuden. I'm increasingly tempted to just read the manga instead because of the anime's absolutely abysmal pacing, but I do really like seeing and hearing the characters in full color with animation and voice acting. Maybe I'll read the rest of this arc in the manga, and then switch to the anime for the Itachi arc(s) and the Pein arc, and then maybe go back to the manga for the rest of the main series, and then finish off the anime with the gaiden light novel stuff that it adapted that's set after the final battle?

Anyways if it's not obvious, I have a feeling that Naruto in general is a new forever fandom of mine. There's just so much to work with and I am loving it so dearly! In general I do tend to overestimate how long I'm going to stick with a fandom, but Naruto has been sticking for a while, and with all of the material it has that I'm still enjoying, I think it'll be a long while before I let go of it, and it seems unlikely that it won't ever be able to pull me back in again even if I do go into lull phases with it.

Also, something that I'm pretty sure is only of interest to me personally: I want MCYT and Naruto crossover fic that has Kakashi become Etho or something that parallels or uses the two of them as the same character, because in my head, they just are the same person. I've also started thinking of Bdubs as similar to Might Guy and I can't get that out of my head. KakaGai and Ethubs are the same ship to me, lol. I would love a fic where Kakashi has amnesia and becomes Etho, or where the Naruto characters are minecraft youtubers and Kakashi occupies a similar niche to Etho. Something like that.

blotthis

After the success of listening to Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies, I was genuinely hopeful that Sarah Beth Durst's The Spellshop (for door) would also serve. The premise is silly--a city librarian returns to her childhood home on an island with a bunch of spellbooks, starts a shop, falls in love. That's okay! That's fine! I'm ready to put a silly premise aside! I'm ready to accept the givens, in return for a well-told story!

Ah. A problem arises...

Well, first. The book opens on Kiela, literally sorting books as fantasy!Rome burns. She's dismayed when her assistant, Caz, a sentient, talking spider plant, sprints through the stacks to tell her the library is on fire. All the other librarians left days--or weeks--ago. Kiela has been filling crates of books and putting them on a boat, in case of disaster, but the disaster won't really come. The revolutionaries--she read this in the paper--wanted to bring the knowledge in the library--which contains all the spellbooks in the Empire--to the people! She'd vaguely thought that seemed nice and stopped worrying. How could they be burning the library? She throws as many books as she can into her open crate; she and Caz take the elevator through the burning building to the docks; Caz tries to convince her to leave the crate behind; Kiela refuses; they load it onto the boat; they sail away. (The empire is a collection of islands.)

Imagine me fist-pumping. Here we have a book-person whose obsession with books has not only made them self-obsessed and blind in a way that's decent Romantic Comedy Fodder for a new relationship, but whose blindness to others has gotten her entangled in a messy political situation! How fun. I wasn't overly hopeful that the political undercurrent of the book would be very subtle, but I hoped that it would do something with the thorny knot of intention versus execution.

I didn't expect it to basically disappear. More fool me. Fine! Fine. I gritted my teeth through Kiela finding her way to her parents' home; finding it basically habitable after 18 years or so, including furniture; finding her mom's clothes--also wearable--after same; Why didn't they sell or take these things?? shhh, shhh, you're the one who picked up a "cozy" novel, shhhh now; through Kiela meeting a baker who says something like anyone who likes butter is a friend of mine; through Kiela noticing the baker has no jam-based pastries; none???? no one makes jam on the WHOLE ISLAND? you've mentioned fruits a couple of ti--through Kiela deciding to open a jam shop/secret spell shop--ah; through Kiela making pounds and pounds of jam and not sealing them. Fine. The book doesn't make economic or culinary sense. Fine. From skimming reviews of other cozy novels, The Spellshop's chosen boutique shop niche was less ridiculous than others, and in either case, I was sincerely ready to let it slide.

I was also disappointed but not surprised by that I still don't know what Larran, Kiela's love interest, sees in her, even though they do have a shared background. They were children on the island at the same time, and Kiela helped save a seahorse he was tending when they were children... But 1) she didn't know he was tending the seahorse; 2) she wasn't particularly trying to save it; 3) she doesn't remember him at all, and she tells him all these things. Despite this, and despite Kiela being very rude to him for most of the book, he resolutely brings her cinnamon rolls, fixes her house, builds her bookshelves, and takes her out riding seahorses. How hot is this woman.

The straw that broke the camel's back, for me, was the sheer number of unforced errors. Kiela, in the library, sensibly articulates that if the revolutionaries have gotten to and started burning the library, 1) the empire has other problems; 2) no one will know; 3) she's saving treasures. Once she gets to the island, she's obsessed with that she's stolen the books and is going to be turned into a statue in punishment. Now, this is how anxious people think! This would be so easy to sell! All Durst would have to do is have Kiela reflect for a moment that well, maybe, she could convince people she'd been saving the books! If she then was like no one would ever believe me, the empire is sososo cruel, at least we would have acknowledged that at any point Kiela thought something else. But no. It's like that framing of taking the books disappears. To write a less-accurate version of anxiety?

THEN IT COMES BACK BUT IN THE SAME WAY. KIELA CONVINCES HERSELF SHE CAN DO MAGIC BECAUSE NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW. DOES SHE WORRY ABOUT HAVING STOLEN THE SPELLBOOKS AND BEING TURNED INTO A STATUE? SHE DOES NOT. what? what? what? what? simply do not worry about it. What Kiela thinks about her own life and situation is driven by what is plot-convenient.

To make matters more excruciating, Kiela is constantly rehashing her own thoughts. She does it with the above, multiple times a problem-arc, but also with anything she thinks about. To the extent. Sorry this one makes me insane. To the extent that after spending a minute or two, so at least a page or more of the book, ruminating on how she now feels at home on, and connected to the island, Kiela turns from one grove of trees to see a vista, or her house, or something, and is like "home! wait, when did she start thinking of the island as her home?" TWO PAGES AGO? TWO PAGES AGO. YOU WERE. LITERALLY. JUST TALKING ABOUT IT------------------

I called these unforced errors, but I am afraid that they were added on purpose. Without any direct proof, I suspect that this book is suffering from the same malady as many contemporary TV scripts, where the writers are being asked to repeat themselves so that people who are cooking, or calling their friends, or listening at 2x speed, or whatever, can follow the story without paying attention. Fine. The unfortunate side effect, of course, is that if you do it the courtesy of paying attention you end up wanting to scrape out somebody's eyes with a spoon.

The book's plot is. Fine. A person shows up, says she's a magic inquisitor from the empire. Will she catch Kiela? Is she an inquisitor? Will Larran like her better? Who could say!

I enjoyed more of the book than this makes clear; it's about a 3.5 stars, if I had to rate it. Some parts of it are cute. I just can't recommend it for more than a skim read, whatever a skim read might look like for you.

shati

I got really overwhelmed with life and forgot how to post. It will happen again, etc. I enjoy

osprey_archer's Wednesday Reading Meme posts so I'm stealing the headers, even though it's now Thursday.

( Thursday Wednesday Reading Meme )

knave_of_swords

I have now finished watching Gem's Hermitcraft season 10! On to Bdubs! He's so much fun to watch, and I love his beautiful builds and his cinematic video editing. I think I'll skim through Scar's season 10 after this-- I want to see him build his zoo, but I'm less interested in the permit/po po/exile shenanigans. I also think I'll skim through Tango's season 10-- I already got a lot of what he was doing in general by watching Pearl, and I'm kind of but not super interested in the building of Hungry Hermits and The Tangler (more in the playing of them).

But I loved Gem's base for season 10! The nautical stuff was super fun, and I loved the semi-modern village that she built with horror-inspired lore. Season 10 was so great in general for so many reasons, it makes me a little sad that I missed out on it in real time.

I also started playing Minecraft on creative mode! I still need to figure out how to add mods so I can get World Edit, so it's just entirely vanilla creative. I think maybe I started too big with trying to build a magic ivory wizard tower, it's frustrating to have it not come out like it does in my head. I have a lot to learn about building in Minecraft, I guess, even after all the MCYT building videos I've watched. I think I need more exaggeration and depth with the shapes. I think I'm going to wait on getting World Edit figured out before finishing the tower, and then switch gears and try building some sort of regular starter house in the world.

I'm also playing on some SMPs! Mainly one of the hermit patreon servers, and the server that my dad has set up for my siblings and I. It reminds me how much I hate the early early game... it's rough trying to walk across the map to meet up with where my youngest brother's base is when I have like. Nothing. For my next survival world I think I'm just going to hunker down and make a cave/mineshaft base and spend all my time mining lol.

blotthis

April second, no problem. Ok. Diana Wynne Jones's Dogsbody, for

pauraque and door. I had vague intentions of writing this up before I listened to the Eight Days episode about it, but time very obviously intervened. So, for a deep dive into the book's Actual Summary, as well as its reflections on sex, the Troubles, and Welsh myth, among other terrific insights, check that out.

Things I thought about Dogsbody:

Wow, death enters this book early. It technically enters at the beginning, as Sirius is on trial for murder, sticks around, obviously, in the deaths of Kathleen's dad and in the Actual Literal Figure of Death (probably), but it's the puppy drowning that sticks with you. By you I mean me. It strongly seems that for DWJ, cruelty to animals is one of the real unforgivables, which is born out throughout the book, but it's the closeness of the experience that shocked me and interests me as an introduction to Sirius's life-as-a-dog. Actual thoughts about how the closeness of this experience is or is not born out throughout the book? How it relates to book openings or books for children? Not in this post!
I really need to read the Mabinogion... I liked the figure of death/the hunted and his rolling hills, but even though I could identify him as a death-figure, it was clear to me there was Something Else Going On, and I want to know what it is. Was. Might've been. I could have spent much more time with him, although it would have pulled the book out of shape----
On that note, there's a lot of being stuck in close, dark spaces in this book. I don't know where, if anywhere, this takes one, but from the sack thrown in the river, the fox den, and death's abode, they're there, and they're at key points, and they don't all feel the same. One could certainly say something about wombs, but I'm not sure I would.

And now, obsession time. Give me a DWJ book, and I will examine it looking for an example of a loving-Other situation. It shows up a lot, in DWJ, from Spellcoats to Eight Days of Luke, and it shows up again here, between Sirius and Kathleen. I'm fascinated by this thread. I'm fascinated by how DWJ returns to it like an old scab/fountain. I've talked about it before at length when I wrote up Luke, but I am about to talk about it again---

Not true voice: There's something in the end of Dogsbody that is the end of Howl, stretched thin. Powerful and emotional supernatural man is taken care of by a practical young woman who loves him. Dogsbody isn't Howl, of course. It's not a romance; it's not half as funny, and it doesn't mean to be. Its project is both more earthy and empyrean than that, although Sirius certainly hopes it's Howl. But there's something in this particular shape that DWJ comes back to, time and again. Sometimes it's semi-tragic, as here, and sometimes it's triumphant...

Unfortunately, I don't think this comparison particularly illuminates either book. I'm mostly just adding them to my red string board about loving-Other in DWJ. I think the most interesting thing to come out of this instance of rumination is this comment Becca made when we were chatting about the book at the time: "I do think she believes in her heart that loving things unlike yourself is a lifeline when what you have known is not designed to teach you how to love. If you can't love yourself then where do you go from there. Well--"

I think this is true, and I think it's such a good lens through which to view Dogsbody... Obviously, this applies to Sirius. But I'm honestly most interested in how it applies to Kathleen. How does Kathleen learn how to love, because of the events of Dogsbody? How does the experience of having loved and lost shape her? This is the most hopeful I've been that Kathleen won't become Sirius's Companion. She's already learned from you, sir, and lost the Other that could not stay. Maybe. Crossing my fingers.

None of this more than obliquely answers pauraque's question about what it was like to encounter this book for the first time as an adult. Interesting! I read it in a day; I enjoyed it; the workplace comedy, close-up depiction of abuse, and extended rumination on death as haunting/present/inescapable/pursued by living didn't quite hang together for me as an adult, although I like them separately, and I think Jones thematically makes a good case for their coexistence. I didn't really care for the MacGuffin... Dogs are not my animals, so I don't know if I'd have attached desperately to this book as a child, but it's also impossible to say. I could see myself having gone apeshit for the under the earth Death scene.

blotthis

I also thought I'd like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (for several) and then felt something rather different about it. I did quite like parts of the novel, but not at all in the way I expected.

It's possible that reading several versions of the Scottish border ballad beforehand didn't set up the read fairly. I found the ballad surprisingly short and unexpectedly punchy. And Dean's novel is ... not that.

Tam Lin is set at a fictional Minnesotan liberal arts college in the 1970s. Our protagonist, Janet Margaret Carter (Dean: did you see I used both extant names used for this character in the ballads, O, the cleverness of me), is the daughter of an English professor and starting her first year of undergrad. Wow! I thought. Wow! Starting your book in September when the fairy procession happens on Halloween! Wow! What a choice! It's all going to happen in two months! Wow!

No.

( How the hell is this book structured. Spoilers! )

skygiants

I have a stack of library books and used bookstore buys looking at me accusingly but instead I have been lured into doing a massive McCaffrey read. I know. I don't respect my choices either.

My other problem is that once I am embarked on a Text I have a hard time stopping it, so when all the library offered me in ebook was an omnibus of Dragonflight - Dragonquest - The White Dragon I was always going to be reading all three. And, you know, it did start out quite well! Rereading Dragonflight a very funny experience because it's like

Dragonflight: and here's where Lessa washes her hair
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: I LOVE LESSA I LOVE IT WHEN SHE GETS TO WASH HER HAIR 🥹
Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: who's F'lar

But actually with very few actual memories and a lot of informed knowledge from the twenty years since the last time I read these books I truly expected F'lar and the central romance plot in general to be ... worse? Like yes it's 1968 and yes there's the dubcon dragonsex of it all and yes F'lar's whole mission in life is to convince the world that you Cannot stop feeding the military-industrial complex even after four hundred years of peace or you Will be eaten by mindless alien hordes [On Which More Later]. But the thing that the dubcon dragonsex actually does, narratively speaking, is it fully displaces the emphasis of the romance away from 'when are they going to have sex' to 'when are these two assholes who trust themselves very much going to learn to trust each other.' They're having sex all through it; the dragons have taken care of that, so the sex is no longer the point. The partnership and the problem-solving is the point, and it is fun to watch them solve problems and increasingly know which problems they can rely on the other to solve. Which I think is interesting and purposeful and honestly pretty bold, for 1968! I'd like to see more romances do that now! Also the problem-solving is satisfying, and haunted mission back in time plot that I had completely forgotten is quite effectively creepy. I ended Dragonflight like 'you know what, as Of Its Time as it is, in many ways this book actually does really work. Maybe ... Pern is good?

Then on to Dragonquest and The White Dragon and it turns out Pern unfortunately is not good, although both of these books are real would-be-good-if-they-were-good situations.

Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
me: Dragonquest what do you think about this
Dragonquest: what haunted mission

No, Dragonflight is kind of a mess of a book but what I do think is interesting about it, thematically speaking -- to come back to the military-industrial complex of it all -- is that the end of Dragonflight is a lot of people going 'to be manly and heroic is to fight forever on a cool dragon, we've reached peacetime and it's dull so we're going forward in time so we can continue fighting forever on a cool dragon' and the beginning of Dragonquest is like 'actually I have reconsidered my thinking about this and it turns out fighting forever is perhaps bad for you, psychologically? maybe instead of heroic forever war we can look at some alternate pursuits that are also heroic and manly but less lethal and traumatizing. Like space exploration! Did anyone watch the Moon Landing? Wasn't that pretty cool?' (

genarti when I was talking with her about this also pointed out that at the time Dragonquest came out we were also several more years into Vietnam.) Obviously McCaffrey is all in on the Pioneer Spirit and the wistful terra nullius of it all but I appreciate that she's actively revising her thoughts on the military and its relationship to the populace it theoretically protects as she's writing it, and it's interesting to see the evolution. Really really funny to see F'lar go from the 'SEND TITHES LIKE YOU DID IN THE DAYS OF YORE' guy to the 'I'm your progressive candidate for Weyrleader and I think this military appropriationism has gotten a bit out of hand' guy. I love the end of the book where it's like 'well we've actually solved the problem of Thread but unfortunately our solution is not cool and sexy, so we need a dragonrider to do something that is cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless to get everyone else to buy into it.'

(E who dragged me into this: plausible reading that the grubs are a feminised solution. we must put our hands into mother earth and urgh it's all moist and gooey
me: i love that you went there because my first thought is that the solution is lower class. the humblest tillers of the land
E, determined: thread is being absorbed by a planetary vagina dentata which also has life-generating properties)

Anyway, F'nor does some spaceflight, in a cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless way, which is making up I suppose for the other cool and sexy thing that F'nor absolutely does not get to do which is challenge dragon biological essentialism. F'nor/Brekke is not a particularly successful or interesting romance plot but nonetheless I truly was on the edge of my seat for this -- I remembered that Brekke's mating flight ends in Tragedy but I thought F'nor might at least like succeed a little bit in proving that it's hypothetically possible for a brown dragon to mate with a queen? But no! he doesn't even get to try! Having raised the question of 'what does dragon gender really mean and how much does it bind us' Anne cannot bring herself to answer it. Have you instead considered that spaceflight is cool and sexy.

And The White Dragon is even more a book of 'having raised the question, Anne cannot bring herself to answer it.' Not much actually happens in The White Dragon, we're making a number of mountains out of molehills, but it's all whirling around the central anxiety point of 'if my soulbonded dragon falls out of standard dragon color/gender categories and moreover is definitely ace then what does that make me?' And the book's answer is '....a guy. A manly guy who successfully achieves all of his society's standards of masculinity. Do not worry about it.' Well, I wouldn't have been worrying about it, Anne, if you hadn't been telling me to worry about it, and then you gave me the most boring answer possible.

There is more to say about The White Dragon -- not least the way that every woman in the book seems to have gotten a hefty splash from the misogyny fountain -- but I am running out of time so we'll call it here. Am I done? No! I am now halfway through Dragonsdawn. More on that anon.

blotthis

We're going to try our best, sport. CMAT's Euro-Country for

littlerhymes and Rosalía's Lux, for same and

recognito .

Both these albums are full of incredible musical hybrid vigor. That's not a fair use of the term, as plenty of genre mashups are bad. These are not. These are so, so good. I'm grateful for the chance to talk about both, because I love them. I haven't done much research into their making, or even CMAT and Rosalía themselves, and I know next to nothing about music theory so my understanding of both albums is limited, I just really like them.

I really like all of Euro-Country, but I think it might be easiest to talk it via two of my favorite songs on the album, "When A Good Man Cries," and "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station." "Good Man" is a country song. It starts out with a country fiddle. It has a swing on it. Thompson croons twangily while taking herself to task for making a guy cry. And then, in the last third of the song, as the production thickens, she starts wailing, against her own voice in descant, Kyrie Eleison! It about knocked me out of my seat. In a country song? In a COUNTRY song? And it sounds absolutely at home. Even with the descant, which is pulled straight from Catholic mass, it sounds at home. It makes me crazy. What a fucking bridge. What a fucking ending.

"The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" is formed much in the same way, in that it builds from a clear thesis (she was at the Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, and god she hates him, but okay, don't be a bitch, the man's got kids and he wouldn't like this) to an inescapable musical explosion that blows my head off. But through all this she's doing crazy little things with rhythm--the FEAR and the FREEdom of BEing RE/leasedagain to FEEl svnTEEnagin--and also being really lyrically and logically hard to follow. She's got this incredibly clear thesis in the chorus, and then she keeps saying things like "Let me explain though," and "This is making no sense to the average listener," and "I'm still not explaining myself very well at all, let me try, let me try, let me try," and the whole thing's build suddenly is not about having a mantra about not being a bitch for no reason, it's about needing one, about feeling like you're flying apart at the seams where there aren't seams, and that's what the drums are doing. It rules.

The whole album slides in and out of this kind of legibility to self and listener and illegibility to self and listener, and most of them are doing more than one thing at once. I really really want to see her live, if I can.

Rosalía, however, I've probably lost my chance. I could theoretically see her in a stadium sometime, but I don't really care for stadiums, so. Alas. This is a very tortured transition. Anyway!

God I love Lux. The first time I listened to it, I stopped what I was doing by like the seventh song to just lie on my bed and cry due to being Artistically Moved. I looked up several publications' best albums of 2025, and I was shocked that it wasn't in almost anyone's top 10. I still don't know how that's possible. I can't listen to Lux and do other things because (Jenny Slate voice) it makes me too crazy.

Much has been made of the number of languages featured on Lux, (Rosalía sings in 13), but it's not just the languages. It's the styles. (puts face in hands and screams) Sorry. Sorry. I'm trying to be normal, I just keep listening to the tracks to have something clear to say and it's not actually helping----god. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. The range of this fucking album. It's got house music. It's got flamenco. It's got Italian arias. It's got Wagner. It's got spoken word. "Berghain," the one that Bjork is on, is the first track I heard and an incredible example. It comes right after the Italian aria and starts with an orchestra, like being slapped in the face. Then we get the Wagnerian chorus sung by an actual chorus, chanting in German that his fear is my fear, his rage is my rage. Like being slapped in the face. Then Rosalía comes on in possibly the highest soprano we've heard from her, and her descant is another slap. Bjork and Yves Tumor's entrances to the song are no less shocking and no less successful. It is an incredible feat of operatic maximalism and it is still somehow in conversation with a pop song. And it's not even my favorite song on the album!!!!

I also love "La Perla," the slower, somehow-playful breakup ballad that follows "Berghain" and which is such a change of tempo and performance it's like what the FUCK; "Reliqia," a sparkling, somehow triumphant-sounding piece about losing pieces of yourself and becoming a holy relic; "Mio Christo Piange Diamanti," the aforementioned Italian aria she wrote at least in part for her classical-music-loving Grandmother, and in which she uses her ability to span trembling pianissimo to firm vibrato; "Dios Es Un Stalker," a chamber-pop-salsa depiction of love from the divine's watching eye... It's a good album, Brent.

knave_of_swords

Akane-banashi #200: Not the jerkass dude!! I forget his name. I know Akane is going to wow the audience anyways, though. I do still think Kaisei will still outperform her, but he'll also acknowledge her talent and give her a crumb. I'm looking forward to her story!

Alien Headbutt #8: This one is still good! I like the wrestling approach to the fight scenes with the aliens. I'm enjoying the life and death stakes, though of course we know the protagonist will succeed. The potential addition of a second alien parasite fighter is a bit unexpected to me, but I don't think it's a bad turn to take. I guess we'll see how it goes.

Hima-Ten! #84: And Kanna gets officially shot down. I think everyone knew this was coming-- it was always going to be between Honoka and Himari. She was a good rival, though, and a good character! I liked her calculating approach while still being absolutely genuine in her feelings. Honestly this manga feels like it should have been a visual novel or dating game, with different routes for each character, a harem route, and a secret throuple route.

Kagurabachi #116: More backstory! I like seeing how this all happened, and I especially enjoy the tension knowing what happens in the future, that it all goes wrong. I suspect that the going wrong will happen because of Chiaki being hesitant to misinterpret something, causing her to be cast out? I guess I'll see. I love the world that this manga has built, I love seeing the history of it.

blotthis

As March slips from my fingers, it's Hunter x Hunter, for recognito!

Since the end of February, I've read two and a half more volumes, putting me mid volume 13, so I'm just going to consider them along with the volumes I read before Feb.

Hunter x Hunter has been ... an interesting reading experience. As a known shounen-enjoyer, I, and I think everyone else, assumed I'd like it. And I have liked it. Parts of it. But I haven't loved it, and I expected to, which did make me have a kind of hormone-driven breakdown mid-this month. Normal!

Under the cut, I'll talk about what I've liked and not liked, and what I've found interesting and what escapes me entirely; most of this, I admit, is me trying to figure out what I think, and I discuss violence quite a bit. I'm also rather free with spoilers, so, careful, if you mind spoilers for a 20-year-old manga.

( This ended up so long. I'm sorry )

I haven't yet started Greed Island, the next arc. Part of me is dreading it, because I'm afraid it's going to be another Yorknew or Hunter Exam, where I don't really care for it until I reach the end of the arc. Another part of me is interested. When HxH is chewy, it's chewy. And maybe I'll learn about plot????

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