"I am Sir October Daye, I am here on behalf of Queen Windermere in the Mists, and you are beginning to piss me off."
Do you ever read something and the only response you can elicit is:
Be it a three star banger, a four star faithful, or a five star game-changer, there's nothing in your brain but:
And that's actually... okay?
This is a very significant chapter in Toby's story, with her lineage as a changeling being threatened directly by a genocidal monarch (such a dick-weasel) hellbent on enacting war, a confrontation with a pesky and persistent enemy (the Regina George of Faerie but even more deranged), and the biochemical solution to a longstanding and life-threatening weapon used against the Fae (Walther, my man, whatever the Faerie equivalent of a Nobel is, you deserve seven. Teen!).
Plus an abundance of flirting - in the midst of averting war - with her new fiancé, the one and only Tybalt, King of Cats, the only man who knows where Toby's off switch is (inside the coffee tin).
All good and tremendous happenings that I, as per usual, enjoyed immensely (Seanan's a witch, she's gotta be, no one writes this consistently well without a little sorcery behind it), and Red-Rose Chain was actually a surprising deviation in landscape for the series. October Daye is predominantly Urban Fantasy, rooted firmly in the Californian climate of San Francisco, but alongside that urbanity are unseen doorways to Faerie which only open for those who know how to pass through. It's a rich and ethereal contrast to the cosmopolis of SF, one we're venturing more and more into as the series progresses. We, in fact, spend a tiny percentage of time outside of Faerie in Red-Rose Chain, swapping contemporary architecture and endless food vans (cereal covered doughnuts sound obscene and I want one), for a sprawling palace with formal dinners and impossible Fae couture.
Witnessing Toby navigate court politics whilst wearing intricate, gossamer gowns untainted by her usual buckets of blood (they don't stay clean for long, though, because Toby) was unarguably a shit-load of fun.
(I'm hoping she doesn't lose her roots and become entangled wholly by Faerie, though. The landscape of a long-running series will inevitably expand, but selfishly, I don't want to lose its UF-ness. If I want to read High Fantasy, I'll do that, but don't go changing too much on me, Toby. Nobody wants to live in a world sans Pop Tarts.)
And that's the crux of it: this book was hella fun.
With significant plot developments (ding, dong, the Mists-witch is... napping?), more time with my blorbos blorbo-ing (so soft, they're so fucking soft with each other), and a change of pace to keep it interesting (pretty conclusive ending, though; wicked intrigued to see where we go from here).
...
Thus, I know not what else to say, other than my initial non-verbal, double-raised phalange response still stands:
Stupidly, I got very excited about these two things.
...
My first mistake.
But come on, how did they get them this so wrong?
I'll admit that I'm kind of, pretty much, ninety-nine percent completely over the Star Wars franchise; it hasn't brought me any real joy since they rebooted it with The Force Awakens(which I liked but pales in comparison to the og three), but the remaining one percent holds some hope that the love can be revived.
And I thought a woman-led, prequel, origin story with Manny Jacinto wielding lightsaber nunchucks might've been the one to inspire it.
...
My second mistake.
Not Jacinto, he stole the entire show and managed to un-Jason himself in the process (Jason Mendoza is a precious babygirl himbo who I love dearly but I cannot take Jacinto seriously in any other role because all I see is his dopey face yelling "BORTLES!" when I look at him. It's a problem. The same kind I have with Donald Glover, who is Troy Barnes forever, there is no escaping, even if he did kill it in Mr & Mrs Smith. But Troymas Tree lives in infamy).
Long live the gun show.
(He is genuinely fantastic in this, arm porn or not)
But everything else and everyone else fell into the trap of "worthy".
There is nothing I hate more in fantasy than a complete lack of humour and emotional range. For the love all things speculative, don't deliver your lines with dead-eyed earnestness and expect me to give a single shit about your fictional problems.
Won't happen.
Never gonna happen.
And Star Wars used to be funny, right? Not in a "this is so goofy, hahahahaha, Jar Jar Binx" kinda way (fuck Jar Jar Binx), but in a smirk-happy Harrison Ford kinda way, where Carrie Fisher cuts him down the middle with the arch of an immaculate eyebrow and R2D2 manages to slay in the language of adorable beeps.
Where's that gone? Who decided no one was allowed to emote in space anymore? Why is everyone so fucking miserable?
Fine, okay, the "good" guys are being hounded by a tyrannical Galactic Empire and everything, but surely there's room for a snicker of levity here and there? At the very minimum a lightsaber-related dick joke?
(Or is that my British heritage gallows humour showing?)
And The Acolytehad so much potential! For the first time in the history of SW's male-dominated story, a female-led narrative written for the female fanbase (Rey doesn't count, imo) with a Black woman as the protagonist reached our orbit, and it wasn't steeped in the usual stereotypical storylines afforded to women in the SFF genre (chosen one, boss bitch, hot clutz), opting instead to explore the morally grey in George Lucas' good vs evil storytelling through a woman who's seen one side, found it lacking, and accepts the proffered hand of "evil" instead.
This is practically revolutionary in SW's stalwartly black & white universe: Jedi's are good, Sith's are bad, and never the twain shall meet.
Morally grey simply doesn't exist in Lucas' world, and frankly, it borders on aggressively boring and preachy.
What is interesting(and always will be) is exploring what "good" and "bad" actually mean by letting your characters scrutinise their own morality within the story and questioning who's right, who's wrong, is it side-dependent, do I have to pick a side, and who made these rules in the first place?
Which is what The Acolyte was trying to do, but poor storytelling and acting squashed any chance it had of being a success.
(Cancelled swiftly and mercilessly by Disney a month after it aired. Can we please let shows exist for a year minimum before these decisions get made? A few weeks isn't enough time to gather quality data to warrant cancellation; yet more evidence that corporations don't give a flying fuck about the viewership. The people who make their damn money. Dystopian fucks)
Actually, that's not true, because I truly don't know what happened here, not even a little bit.
A Furiosa prequel should've been a riotous explosion of a movie that force-fed us eponymous origins like it was snack time at the puppy sanctuary.
Greedily, deliciously, batshit-crazily.
We were all ready, all set for another amber-hued brain-slapping in George Miller's grimy, Aussie apocalypse; we'd waited years, in fact, gnawing at our knuckles for even a glimpse, and when it finally arrived?
A lacklustre mess that relied way too heavily on digital effects (why, Miller, whyyyyy?! Practical effects are what make the movie!), neglected the narrative (y'done Charlize dirty, Mister Miller. For shame), forgot that music is essential to the pacing and atmosphere (the eerie ambience was yawn-worthy when it should've been blood-pumping), and used way too little dialogue (the franchise has never been exactly loquacious, but this was monosyllabic to the point of muteness).
And that fucking hurts my Fury Road-adoring heart.
I love that movie, sat in thrilled awe in my cinema seat when it first came out, and the number of times I've watched it since borders on professional help-worthy.
It's a perfectly grotty monster of a movie that deserved so much better than Furiosa gave.
Which wasn't terrible, so not terrible, it was just fundamentally a tad pointless, and boring, and meh, three synonyms that in no way should ever be applied to the Mad Max-iverse.
Especially when Anya Taylor-Joy is your lead actor (love her, all the work for AT-Y), Chris Hemsworth's doing his best bogan fuck-face impression (the best scene in the whole movie is the final standoff between him and Taylor-Joy), and Tom Burke's just hanging around being taciturn and hot (more evidence that Athos is always a smoke-show).
So, so much, but he hadn't hatched yet (feels like he would incubate, right?) in the prequel timeline, guitar not yet clu in his pallid paws, drilling scales and bungee-cording around like the dystopian babygirl toddler that he is, and the franchise suffered his absence.
Hopefully, George Miller will sort that out with the next one.
The way I hysterically sighed "Sofffffffft" should've been embarrassing but that's the correct response to a Borzoi baby surrounded by Lucifer's flapping agents of hell, no?
I'll watch just about anything involving the greek myths because there are none so messy as those incestuous bunch of immortal crybabies, and the drama is always immaculate, truly spectacular, they make telenovelas look downright serene.
But I don't always expect it to be good, let alone delicious, delicious sustenance, which Kaos was and if there isn't a season two it'd be an actual hate crime against the gods.
I'd fully expect drama queen Zeus to rain electric hell down on Netflix simply for cancelling a show all about him, even if it did paint him in exactly the right shade of "fuck-sicle".
And what a beauteous fuck-sickle he was with Jeff Goldblum as his temporary vessel, who was equal parts poor little miaow miaow, homicidal toddler overlord, and petty little bitch.
Everything Zeus should be; and with Goldblum's jitterbug charm it's hard to imagine him ever being played by anyone else. He's perfect, and not the only one, the cast is bonkers:
(Is there anything as perfect and mischievous as a comedian playing a Fate?)
And that's just the old guard, there's a whole bunch of newbies to fall in love with in these mythic roles as well: Aurora Perrineau makes for a grumpily assertive Eurydice in place of her usual passive state; Killian Scott the perfect miaow miaow Orpheus; Misia Butler brings new, gentle life to a lesser known character to me, Caeneus; Leila Farzad blazes a furious trail as Ariadne; Mat Fraser, the softest Daedalus written into existence; Rakie Ayola is perfect in regal pink as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld; Daniel Lawrence Taylor will break your heart with his big-hearted Theseus; and of course, Nabhaan Rizwan as sweaterboy/absolute nightmare-hybrid Dionysus, the god of tits and wine.
...
Like I said: bonkers.
Look at all of them, just hanging out in a show about unhinged gods and the mortals who suffer them, being fucking amazing and stuff.
It's perfect, and funny, and weird, and isn't afraid to fuck around with the original myths, which is almost my favourite part.
The Greek myths are practically begging to be rewritten, for someone to subvert their dodgy morality, give the women the agency they deserve, and rewrite some wrongs. And what better way to do that than this?
But I would expect no less from the man who wrote for The End of the F***king World, a criminally underrated show that also appreciates the pleasing visual effect of a Hawaiian shirt.
With a score of five bitchy beetles, the goblin crown goes to milady Jean Smart and her portrayal of a caustic comedienne with not one ounce of PC-ness in her body.
(Think Joan Rivers but actually funny and not, entirely, a bigoted monster)
It's glorious to watch and I swear her laugh can cure seasonal depression.
Hacksyanked me unapologetically out of my High Fantasy stupor, slapped me on the ass and made me see vegas stars. It was just what I needed.
I cannot recommend this show enough, and at some point season three will reach Prime and I can commence yelling at my loved ones to watch it for the sole reason of commiserating our lack of personal drinking fountain in the kitchen.
In this glorious update of an Aussie show I've always had a stupid amount of affection for (I love Australian media: comedy, drama, horror, reality, etc. I love it all!), there's an abundance of goblin behaviour to sift through and find a champion worthy of the goblin fruit-flavoured lollipop crown.
Truly an unreasonable amount, but ultimately there can be only one who possesses the goblin strength to wear it, and that is Amerie Wadia (superbly played by Ayesha Madon), aka. Map Bitch.
I love this dirtbag so much.
She's a walking billboard for teenage narcissism who'll ruin your life and then ask for chip money.
Only three seasons of her is a goddamn crime against good tv, but that's the way the Netflix cookie crumbles, isn't it?
Everything's getting five stars, I realise this, but it can't be helped when the goblin energy is this intense, and Alexa Davies as a gutter-brained gamer with poor impulse control might usurp everyone to take the ultimate pixel crown as Goblin-iest of all goblins.
The tongues will make sense when you watch the show (which you should), but there is no question as to who the goblin star of this bucolic-Aussie-piss-take-small-town murder mystery is.
Her, it's always her:
Madeleine Sami's performance as Detective Eddie Radcliffe is an unhinged, grot-bag feast for the senses.
She's loud, she's hangry, she's crude, she's the Gollum of alternate SE Tasmania, and I'd throat punch the world for her.
Season two, get into my brainpan.
Ps. I would also throat punch the world for Kate Box, she is wifey.
The old idiom is "Don't judge a book by its cover", which, yes, absolutely; I wouldn't read ninety-percent of Urban Fantasy or Romance novels if it was based solely on their outer shells.
(I'd still be more attracted to them than the AI bullshit publishing houses are forcing down our throats, though. So ugly. So fucking criminal)
The insides are most definitely what count.
But a book cover is a thing of true beauty when done right and is literally used to draw you in, because what do you see first? The cover. The spine. The font. Not the blurb, no, that comes after your eyes have zoned in on whatever intriguing/pleasing/engaging image is emblazoned across the front and makes you need to know what's going on inside.
The artwork for literature matters, it's necessary; I've bought books before solely because of the cover with wavering hopes over the description, purchased a second edition of a not even beloved story simply because I liked the artwork better or equally so. Did I go out of my way to procure the American version of Allison Saft's A Dark and Drowning Tide because the UK version is not to my style and the US had an Audrey Benjaminsen illustration? *points to book-pile number twenty seven* There she sits in all her illustrated beauty, allow her vampy, folklorist lesbians to transfix you!
Art is a necessary part of my meal plan and it will never not apply to literature, so when an attractively decorated novel comes along, you can bet I'll gobble it up the same way I do handfuls of cereal at any given time of the day: feral and gleeful.
And I would buy every last one of Kelsey Bowman's redesigns; their grainy, retro shine with a wink of knowing irreverence is just to my taste.
(second use of this gif in one post. Time well spent)
The day Keanu rolling on his back, firing a gun into the sky whilst yelling his rage-fuelled heartbreak at the love of his surf-life's back as he leaves him in the dust to cradle his ankle ouchie, it'll be a sad, sad day.
It'll never come, though because Point Break's a classic for a reason and Keanu never fails us.
It's never slapped, per se, but I have an undue amount of affection for basically anything Cameron Crowe creates (Almost Famous is top billing, of course, closely followed by Say Anything..., Jerry Maguire, and Aloha) and this has always been a comfort watch for me.
The songs and their narrative timing, the way Andrew Garfield takes absolutely no emotional prisoners, or simply how lovingly the appreciation for such a special artist is shown on screen.
It's perfect. Genuinely. Watch it immediately. And then watch it again. Until you know all the words.
What happens to a genuinely funny, sweet, oddball, quintessentially British show with loveable characters and a gentle approach to mental health after one season on streaming?
(I will be singing this word in a facetiously chipper tone, feel free to do the same)
CAN-CEL-AAAAAA-TIONNNN!
...
We genuinely cannot have nice things.
Mulitple seasons of Emily in Paris? Why, of course, but something that isn't vapid trash?
Nahhhh.
(Don't normally yuck other people's yum but wow, that show's a waste of air, and pretty xenophobic)
Sigh.
So many sighs.
You'd think I'd've run out of them by now, what with the vast number of shows I've enjoyed getting unfairly cancelled, but no, my I'm not sad, I'm just disappointed exhale game remains tireless.
Residual childhood asthma's got nothing on my disenchantment with the tv industry, not even a chest hitch.
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