Between everything else I’ve had going on (include falling behind on Animorphs books because I’m too tired to stay awake reading most nights), I read a book recommended to me on Cohost called Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant fame). The user who wrote the post held it up as part of an example of the great talks Beaton gives since she doesn’t just discuss the book at hand. In the talk that user shared, Beaton took the themes of the book as the starting point and talked further, focusing on the way that class impacts the arts and how a person’s conception of a place doesn’t necessarily reflect the place so much as it reflects the person. Even a person’s experience of a place can sometimes reflect them more than the place they’re at because if someone excepts a ruin, they will find a ruin. If they expect a garbage dumb, they’ll find a garbage dump. The Cohost user brought in some examples from their own life, mainly focusing on how they dislike the common depiction of gas station attendants as vapid wastrels with no prospects who are sometimes even depicted as being a waste of space. Those jobs need to be done and a lot of people doing them are more than just their job. There’s a lot more to people than their situation or the brief context in which you see them, for good or for ill, and one of the things that Beaton’s autobiographical graphic novel does is examine that idea through her experience working off her student debt via jobs in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.
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I Don’t Dislike Many Books, But I Definitely Don’t Like Dune
Due to a combination of luck, limited new book selection, and having trusted sources for new book recommendations, it has been a long time since I read a book and was left with the impression that it was, as a whole, a swing and a miss. I mean, I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow The Ninth, but I still enjoyed the book enough that I wouldn’t even call it a foul ball. It just wasn’t the home run I was expecting after reading the first book in the series. Pretty much everything else I’ve read over the last few years was a good choice, even if it gave me complex feelings, and I’m struggling to remember the last time I just did not like a book I’d picked up to read other than the notable exception of when I tried to force myself to read the Game of Thrones Series and literally threw one of the books away from me when I got to the Red Wedding bit because I was sick and tired of the constant “every decent person gets killed because ninety-nine percent of the world’s population are total bastards who will kill you given a chance and even the most pitiful motive.” I’m not a picky reader, by any means, nor do I restrict myself to only what I know I like, but I tend to wait for something to be recommended or look for certain signs in reviews before choosing to invest my time and that means I rarely spend my time on a book that I genuinely dislike.
Continue readingReading The Animorphs For The First Time: Part 2
I wrote previously about how I started reading The Animorphs in the year 2024, but that was over two months ago and we’re many books further into the series. I feel like we should be approaching the halfway point soon, but that’s still almost two full months away. Right now, even though I’m a week ahead (as of writing this, anyway–I’m on schedule as this gets posted since I’ll be taking a week away to focus on reading Dune for a different book club), I feel like we should be much further along considering all of the stuff that has already happened. The Animorphs have time travelled twice, we’ve gotten two (comparatively) massive stories about characters from the past, we’ve learned so much about the universe of this series, and our poor protagonists have been traumatized so many times that they’re turned into hardened veterans in a way that is equal parts fascinating and equal parts horrifying. In a Youth series! I genuinely don’t think I’ve seen a better portrayal of trauma and what it means to be a child soldier in any kind of fiction ever. Sure, I think the series would have benefited from some of the more modern knowledge about how trauma works and why it works that way, but I think this is still handling it all pretty well for a series largely created in the nineties.
Continue readingWatching Star Wars: The Clone Wars Grow Up Was A Nice Experience
I finished the original six season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars just the other day. I’ve been watching along as I listen to A More Civilized Age and I finally hit the point where, for a few years, this show had come to an end. It would eventually get a seventh season to help wrap up a show that absolutely should not have been cut off at the knees like this one was (the last few arcs of the show were some of the best Star Wars I’d ever seen and might have held the top position if not for Andor), but no one knew that at the time. This was just where the show ended, somewhat abruptly and in a bit of a lackluster manner. Now, I’ve yet to listen to the AMCA episodes covering the end of season 6, so I might change my mind once I hear someone else’s opinion on it, but I wasn’t super interested in the final Yoda arc. I feel like that time could have been better spent on wrapping up some other unanswered questions beyond “why did Yoda turn into a little, isolated gremlin on Dagobah” and “how did Yoda learn to become a Force Ghost,” which didn’t really need answers. Or at least I feel like they didn’t need answers. That said, this sort of lack-luster end to the show feels very “Clone Wars” as a whole, given its rather inconsistent quality and the more extreme peaks and valleys it developed in its later seasons. I’ve gotta give it point for consistency in that regard. And, you know, acknowledge that I don’t regret spending all this time watching five and a half full seasons of an increasingly well-made cartoon.
Continue readingGetting Emotional With Andor
One of my favorite parts of Andor, besides being able to watch it all in one sitting so that the only anxiety I had to deal with involved the actual episodes unfolding on my TV, is the range of emotion shown by all the characters. We get people who are angry, sad, happy, and so on. We get the whole range of human emotion. Which is remarkable because Star Wars typically isn’t interesting in the emotional lives of its characters beyond the broad arcs that’re involved in the stories being told and the few emotions allowed to them by their dark/light alignment. Anger for the dark side, giving way to fear on occasion with a few other moments mixed in throughout the whole series, and hope for the light side, occasionally giving way to sadness and a few other spikes that are quickly tamped down or moved past in the series at large. Sure, some of this can be chalked up to the time limit set by big films and the heroic or villainous depictions of the characters in the movies, but these limits extend to the shows as well. Even when we do see an unaligned emotion in most of the shows, it is usually something a character must overcome or some foreshadowing that a character is destined for the light or the dark. So, when we got to see all of the characters in Andor in their feelings, acting out because of their feelings, and existing outside of the usual dark/light feelings assignments, I couldn’t help but get caught up in them as well.
Continue readingI Watched All Of Andor In A Single Sitting
This past weekend, instead of playing a ton of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, I decided to bank some more episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, got wrecked by the end of the fifth season, realized the podcast I’m listening to as I watch along (as separate activities) pivots immediately after those episodes to watching Andor, and then wound up binging all of Andor until 1 in the morning on a work night. This was not a great choice, to be honest, but my “a couple episodes” turned into “I NEED to watch another episode” and that was pretty much it for me. My initial plan for an uninterrupted Sunday (since two players of my usual Sunday TTRPG were out, I cancelled our session) was to spend most of it making some advancements in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth so I’d have more to write about this week, but I got carried away by how amazing Andor is. This shouldn’t be news to most people, given how much everyone raved about it back in the fall of 2022 when it came out, but even I was surprised by how good it was and I had a front seat to everyone raving about it. I had high expectations going in, expectations that had been raised when I saw that A More Civilized Age (a podcast about Star Wars media that I’ve grown to love dearly) pivoted away from their plans to focus entirely on Andor, and they were exceeded in almost every single way.
Continue readingSpoiler-Filled Musings On The Locked Tomb Series By Tamsyn Muir
This post is going to be full of spoilers about the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, so you should probably avoid it if you plan to read those books or have been convinced to read them by any of my past reviews. I’m not going to be actively discussing spoilers or the plot specifically, just my overall thoughts on the series so far, but I realized while writing my review of Nona The Ninth that I couldn’t really talk about what happened in it, much less my thoughts about how it related to the previous books, without basically spoiling everything. So, now that you’ve been warned, I’m going to get to the good stuff.
Continue readingSpoiler-Free Thoughts About Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
I’ve finally read Nona the Ninth, thereby completing as much of the Locked Tomb series (by Tamsyn Muir) as has been released. This one was SO MUCH easier to read than the last one, Harrow the Ninth since it wasn’t in second-person almost the entire time. This one stayed with one very limited and skewed perspective, but it was consistent and easy enough to figure out as I read. While there were definitely points where I struggled, it had more to do with getting into the right frame of mind than about the craft of the novel. There were also a few points where I felt a bit confused, but they were all clearly a design choice by Muir, meant to reflect the state of the protagonist. The story did a great job of laying things out, avoiding the timeline foibles of Harrow as well as the second-person narration ones, and I probably enjoyed this one the most in the series thus far. I’m incredibly interested to see where things go in the next book, as the Locked Tomb series draws to what seems like the close of this once-trilogy, and as all the things set up in Nona and the previous volumes finally pay off. There’s so much that got expanded upon or accentuated in Nona that I’m feeling almost rabid for the next volume and find myself feeling incredibly grateful that I’ve only come upon the series during what is supposed to be the year of the fourth book’s release.
Continue readingDigging Deeply Into A More Civilized Age
While I might have started listening to Media Club Plus first thanks to what felt like a premise made specifically for me and my podcast listening time opening up right as it started posting, the podcast that actually got me to stop avoiding media discussion podcasts as a category was A More Civilized Age. I might not seem like it, but I’m a pretty ardent fan of Star Wars. I mostly avoid it because the online fandom is, perhaps, the most toxic and miserable fandom I’ve ever seen and not only do I want to avoid being associated with it in any way, shape, or form, I don’t want to ever catch its attention. The worst of them have way too much time on their hands and these miserable fucks have driven numerous people off the internet already, so I want to avoid them at all costs. Still, I love a good bit of Star Wars and while I might have some mixed feelings about the modern media landscape of the franchise (especially after all the books I’d read as a child and teen got launched into the uncaring and non-canonical oblivion that is “Star Wars Legends”), I figured that listening to some media-savvy folks discuss it might be a great way to push myself to finally sit down and watch some of the TV shows. I’d already tried and failed, after all, since I let myself get caught up in a bunch of online message boards that listed each episode in what was supposedly the “correct” timeline. I bounced off it pretty hard when I tried that method since none of it made any sense and it was a pain in the butt to cycle through seasons for the next episode I was supposed to watch. This podcast, though, declared that they were watching it in release order and, this January, when I ran out of other things to do, I resubscribed to Disney+ and started working my way through the show and the podcast in tandem.
Continue readingReading The Animorphs For The First Time: Part 1
One day last December, while incredibly bored at work, I stirred up some drama in a discord server I’m in by admitting that I had no idea what a “warrior cat” was and, as that started to die down, that I’d never read any of the Animorphs books. Since most of us grew up in or after the 90s, I discovered that I was one of the few who had never been exposed to either sprawling franchise and, since I wanted something fun to do, I suggested we do a book club centered around reading all of the animorphs books in a single year. Someone drew up a schedule, another person shared a link to a freely available PDF of the books (which had been shared during the early days of the pandemic, when everyone desperately needed something to do and parents struggled to occupy their children), and I briefly tried to get everyone to figure out if we were going to do a proper full book club or just post our reactions to things. Since we landed on just posting reactions, as I was apparently the only person who explicitly said they wanted to discuss the books as we read them, I’ve felt a lot less motivated to keep up with this largely solo experience. Despite that, I’ve managed to mostly keep up with the schedule (we’re reading book 8 this week, after having read the first seven and then the first “Megamorphs” book) and I’ve had disappointingly few conversations about what we’ve read so far.
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