It's been two weeks and I'm still a useless lump of human who's social battery refuses to charge beyond Awake.
To all the extroverts in possession of sb's with the stamina of the Energizer Bunny... share the love, I beg of you, because this crawling turtle needs some help!
And the worst part?
The part I detest the most?
I can't read with intensity.
...
Hyperbolic? Maybe. True? Undeniably.
Reading is the most serene part of any day I experience, whether it be when I wake up, whilst brushing my teeth, after dinner, at 2am under the covers with my special neck torch(highly recommend if you're a cocoon reader!), whenever, it's the time I'm at my happiest and relaxed.
Which is why I do it every damn day, and you'd think that during stressful times I'd want to fully escape into a different world, embroil myself in fantastical political intrigue, and soak up other people's drama instead of my own,
And it is, that's what I want, at least what I think I want, and I still always read, but my brain can't cope with anything beyond comforting, smushy, wonderfully uncomplicated stories.
It's the equivalent of eating jelly when you've got toothache instead crunching on salty pretzels like a pain-hooked maniac.
That's what I need in times of great stress: my jelly comfort reads.
And apparently, because I did exactly the same thing last year, Kristen Callihan'sDarkest London series is my go-to shut-my-brain-off-and-enjoy the supernatural bicker-flirting-and-gentle-steampunk-vibes-amidst-the-fog-laden-streets-of-Victorian-London read.
Here's why:
🕰️ The MCs always loathe each other but desperately want to fuck each other's brains out.
...
I'm a simple goblin, give me two protagonists with on point bicker-flirting skills and a powder keg's worth of sexual tension, and I'm a sincerely happy creature.
Throw in the Only One Bed trope (which Callihan did, and does with every book; bless her Forced Proximity heart) and I'm basically a pig in cuddly shit.
And these two outdid themselves.
They're perfect blend of petty, horny, and grudgingly besotted, all whilst not falling into the trap of being personality free - I may want squishy romance but also want characterisation!
Perfect, perfect, perfect.
🕰️ The steampunk Victorian setting is a vibe all in itself.
I'm a sucker for a good landscape, and London in the age ol' Vic herself is a particularly rich one, especially when the clicking gears of clockwork gadgets can be heard through the gloomy fog it's infamous for.
And normally I'm not a huge fan of the Steampunk genre; I love to watch it, it's visually feast-worthy when on screen, but in literature I find myself growing swiftly impatient with the amount of time dedicated to detailing the endless gilded gadgetry and outlandish flying contraptions in lieu of plot.
So, it's not a Fantasy sub-genre I gravitate easily towards, unless you do as Callihan does and simply line the edges of the story with enough gizmos and doohickeys to let the audience know this London isn't historically accurate, but not unrecognisable.
That's what I want, that's what my jelly brain needs in the time of my season social struggle, and Callihan crushes it.
🕰️ Life and death is a reasonably assured plot point.
...
I mean, how else will the MC's fall in love if not in constant danger of kicking the bucket from some paranormal malady/entity/bargain?
In the case of Soulbound, it's a veritable platter of deadly adversaries:
🩸 The fae
🩸 Demons
🩸 Ghosts
🩸 Death itself
🩸 The feels
If you can name it, it's probably after these two and forcing them into very close quarters in order to "stay alive", i.e. accidentally feel each other up in the name of survival.
Forced Proximity, it's just the best trope, right?
🕰️ Supernatural beings all over the place.
To me, there's no point in doing Steampunk if there isn't something supernatural to use all that shiny widgetry against.
Humans are fine, cleave like butter, excellent arterial spray, but they don't explode into puffs of glittery ash when a Bean Sidhe opens her mouth and does a Mariah.
...
Why go human when you could go ethereal, I say.
And luckily Callihan seems to agree because she inhabits her alternate London with all manner of critters, from beings in possession of clockwork hearts, lupine kings, swarthy vampires, various mercurial Fae, elementals, even angels.
It's a veritable menagerie of the occult.
Just how I like the Old Smoke.
🕰️ Happily Ever After, of course.
When one reads for comfort, one has no fucks to give for unhappy endings.
It's the law of endorphins.
Give the brain the squishy feels it demands > said grey matter will pilot the meat suit effectively
It's simple mathematics. Or biology. Or both? I dunno, the analogy's gotten away from me, but the result remains the same!
And I don't mind working hard for that ride off into the foggy Londinium sunset, I in fact prefer it, which is why yet again, the Darkest London series is the ideal setting because the MC have to trauchle from one dusty safe house to the next, doing their very best not to get offed by the pissed off paranormal, flirting terribly, and it's all so very fucking delightful.
And ultimately all those near death experiences and hormone-fulled declarations lead to an ending where everything comes up rosy, practically halcyon, really bloody satisfying.
The MC come together, and come together, defeat the evil, and scamper to be blissfully happy.
...
Tell me, what's better than that?
I would love to say this is as good a story as the rest of the series, but alas, I cannot.
Or rather, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much.
It's not bad by any means, it follows the script detailed above, the characters are lovable and infuriating, the story's full of intrigue and beckoning plot lines, the visuals it plants inside my head are rich and scritch all my senses to satisfaction, and the dialogue is top tier.
But for some reason, even though it got me through the festive season, it didn't grip me the same way the previous stories have.
Can I explain why?
Not really; perhaps it was my jelly brain not being capable of forming opaque thoughts, so Callihan's narrative simply shone brightly from one side of my brain to the other with no texture to cling to.
...
Yeah, it's probably that.
They should add Jelly Brain to the Oxford Medical Dictionary, because it's real, and it makes you very fucking stupid when you're just trying to enjoy your stories and escape the bedlam that is the C-word.
But there's only one book left in the series, and I need to enjoy the Steampunk crap out of it because Callihan only seems to be writing contemporary romances now (highly recommend her VIP series), and I don't have another SP-VIC-LON alternative and there's only so many times I can watch Penny Dreadful(that's a lie, I'll watch it 'til the end of time) to get my historical aesthetic switch turned on.
If anyone has any recommendations, I beg of you, javelin them directly into my grippy paws.
This was the first thing I watched in the New Year, and it was as funny, intelligent, nostalgic, bonkers, feminist, and poignant as I hoped it would be.
Also pink as fuck.
I knew Greta Gerwig was going to do something special, something unique and out there, but I wasn't expecting this, and how much it'd make me laugh, and reminisce, and rage, and have all the feels.
And I'm so fucking glad I got to watch Barbie now and not when I was a decade younger, and still ignorantly mired in patriarchal bullshit, rejecting everything "girly" - even the colour pink; colours don't have gender, wt-fucking-f, and would have absolutely watched this brilliant movie in secret and never told anyone.
I'm so fucking glad that girl, the one in desperate need of a hug and some reassurance, that being a woman is fucking awesome.
Barbie is awesome.
This movie is awesome.
Congrats-fucking-lations, Greta Gerwig, you might've been snubbed for the Oscar (but who cares about that panel of old white men judges) but you filled billions of us with stratospheric joy and acknowledgement.
The patriarchy can go fuck itself, Barbie for president!
I love illustrators, I really do, especially ones so in love with their fur children that free sketching time is dedicated to capturing their demon beauty.
Here are some more beloved voids for your viewing pleasure:
Cute, but they totally blew their wad in the trailer.
Which everyone seems to be doing now.
What's the deal? When did vague trailers that lure you in without giving away the entire plot stop being a thing?
When did the mystery abandon the trailer ship?!
Sigh.
If I hadn't been so thoroughly spoiled, I might've liked this more, because the kids were pretty great, Paul Rudd's always a delight, I've had a massive crush on Carrie Coon since The Leftovers(it's been just under a decade since I watched the first season and I'm still not ready) and Gone Girl(she was the perfect casting for Margo), and visually it hit many of the nostalgia notes of the original movies.
But I could've just watched the trailer to know that.
Alas, I'm still giving the movie five stars, though, for one very specific reason.
⬇⬇⬇
These little psychos, I love them so much.
Someone fetch me some air dry clay, I need to build a squishy, murderous army!
It is known that I am paralytically shark-phobic (aka. Galeophobia), if they appear on a screen I will shut my eyes no matter what I'm doing: slicing bread? Who needs fingers. Feeding my feral, asshole cat a treat? Again, who needs fingers. Ladling soup? Third degree burns, whatever.
The fear is that chronic, and I know they're necessary for the ocean's eco-system, so I wish them no ill, but goddammit, why they gotta be so fucking dead-eyed terrifying, and not adorable and chonky like Jeff?
I don't know how the original graphic novelholds up (it's a cult classic, so I'm guessing pretty well), but from the depths of my temporal anomaly loving heart...
Better story, better acting, better visuals, better kid in a yellow raincoat, better everything.
It set my brain on fire seven years ago and nothing's doused the heat since.
I don't care if you watch the dubbed version (original German is better, not gonna lie), just do it before Netflix ultimately devours itself or can only make limited mini-series and nothing else.
This isn't going to get a season two, I can feel it in my cancellation bones, and that just fucking sucks because there are no finer apocalypse goblins than this bunch of Aussie heathens.
It's iconic, I know the script by rote, and I have to stop everything I'm doing whenever Jesse Bradford appears on screen because his dumb face just does things to me:
Cliff Pantone, beating every other fictional boyfriend to a crooked smirked pulp since the millennium.
And for some unquantifiable reason, this fucked-ness is what a good rom-com makes.
The more fucked the better!
And we're, justly, a very PC generation, if we see any of the aforementioned fuckery out in the world, we'll call it out without hesitation.
So now all of our romantic contributions to Hollywood are overly sanitised, practically squeaky clean, Hallmark-esque you could say.
...
Nobody wants that!
I want Dean Proffitt kidnapping an amnesiac Joanna Stayton and manipulating her into being his servile wife and mother to his gremlin children all because she was a bitch-faced Yacht-y in fluffy pumps to him.
I don't want two people who don't like each other but high-key want to fuck it out, I want immoral romance thank you kindly!
Which is why (finally reaches a point), Mr. Right is such a good rom-com.
It's weird, it's funny, the main characters are bonkers, do terrible things, but are so lovable it borders on lunacy, and the story's good.
So good.
A hit-man and t-rex fall in love ← that shit right there is movie gold.
And with the sheer wealth of bloody fantastic romance novels out there, we should be getting more of this R-C movie magic on the regular.
Just hit up Tessa Bailey, her oeuvre of hot crazies would be enough to last us for at the least the next decade.
(The sixteen year old emo gremlin that lives inside me eternally will never not scream the shit out of songs like this and run epic movie-eque scenes in my head)
It's like Brideshead and Gormenghast had a late noughties baby, with stellar performances (Rosamund Pike, dear lord she's magnificent) and on point aesthetic, but no fucking soul and was entirely predictable.
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