Recent Media: Family Feelings

[forestofglory]

Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare, Vol. 1 by Yuhki Kamatani -- Manga about a queer teen finding some queer community is very cute so far. Also I love the city that its set in and all the old houses on the hillside. (content note: suicidal thoughts)

To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction by Joanna Russ So Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing has been coming up in conversation a bunch lately and it made me curious about her other work, so I got this out of the library. Right now I’m about halfway through this. So far it's like very confusing time travel. This was published in 1995 but features a lot of essays from the 70s. It's a bit hard to wrap my head around how much about SFF and the SFF community has changed since then. Also I’m surprised at how much I disagree with Russ. She has one essay arguing that character doesn’t matter in science fiction, and another where she complains that Star Wars is addictive. However, her writing about female characters is still very on point. So this has been interesting but confusing reading so far.

The Unwell ep 1-2 When I work on a quilt I like to have something to listen to so I decided to check out some more fiction podcasts. This bills itself as Midwestern Gothic and has a creepy house which I think is an important component of a gothic. It’s also got a mother daughter relationship which takes center stage and is very well done. I’m definitely planning to listen to more.

EOS 10 ep 1 Another podcast I tried out while working on the quilt. I like the set up of this -- it takes place on space station hospital, but there was a lot of sexual harassment which made me pretty uncomforatble. However I asked a friend and they said that it gets better in that regard so I might try another episode.

To Your Eternity, tome 1-2 by Yoshitoki Oima -- This was interesting but I decided it was darker and had more bad things happening to children than I want to deal with right now.

Sleepless Vol. 1-2 by Sarah Vaughn, art by Leila del Duca This fantasy comic had was very pretty and had some interesting worldbuilding but I was never really drawn in to it.

The Untamed eps 9-23 This show is so swooshy -- I love it. I really like the aesthetics, people wear pretty robes, hang out in pretty places, and have swooshy fights with flying robes. (There are kinda a lot of stairs though, people’s legs must get tried.) The knives have started to come out now and things have been very angsty. There were a couple of bits I had to skip over because they were just too grim.

These episodes have had a lot of focus on some messy and complex sibling relationships, and I’ve really enjoyed that aspect of the show. They feed each other to show love! There was a cute flashback to when they were kids! I have at least as many feelings about the siblings and their drama as I do about the romance, especially since for a bunch of these episodes one of the two dudes wasn’t around so it was just a lot of sibling interaction. (This another Chinese drama based on source material with an m/m romance which because of censorship they can only imply on screen, but it's still extremely gay.)

Nirvana in Fire eps 19-24 This continues to be good, but I don’t have much to say about this particular bit that I haven’t said already. Lots of pretty costumes and plotting. I feel very bad for that one character. R and I are having trouble finding time together to watch this and its rather frustrating.

This Was Our Pact by Ryan Andrews This middle grade graphic novel was nice. It had some cute adventures and some very pretty night skies.

Comments

[frith_in_thorns]

Fiction podcast rec: have you tried Wolf 359? It's a sci-fi podcast and I absolutely love it -- it's a closed canon with 4 seasons. Starts off extremely silly -- the first few episodes are very short with quite OTT humour that didn't always work for me -- but then does a headlong fall into really delicious plot and absolutely fantastic characters. (It was my previous fandom obsession and I still love it to bits.)

[forestofglory]

I have not tried it! But that sounds really good. I've downloaded a couple of episodes to try soon. (I currently have more podcast than quilting left -- guess that means I'll have to start another project.)

[alchimie]

I have not read the Russ in a long time (do I say this in all my comments? Yes, probably.) but I recall finding that Star Wars essay very helpful for crystallising a certain emotional state that I found myself getting into around (if memory serves) the LotR movies at the time. I think it is dangerous to deride the pleasures of escapism, but I do think there is something in her argument about media that encourages the audience to engage with the experience it is depicting vs. media which encourages the audience to consume more media of the same type. But of course really it comes down to personal preference, rather than some overall laws as Russ would like.

[forestofglory]

I'm glad you found it helpful.

Honestly I was struggling with that essay for content reasons as well. Its just hard for me to image comparing Star Trek and Star Wars in world in which only TOS and A New Hope exist rather than the massive franchises we have today.

[alchimie]

I had entirely forgotten that the essay is contrasting Star Trek and Star Wars, but I remember it now; I think when I read it, it was just on the first wave of the franchise explosion, and even then I thought that while the addictive consumerism argument spoke to me in some ways, the idea that Star Trek was somehow inherently better didn't seem to hold as much water.

[forestofglory]

Yeah, I'm really not sure that some media properties are inherently more addictive than others, and Russ claimed in that essay.