blacksquirrel

Comics

Absolute Superman: Last Dust of Krypton - Hi, I have a new favourite comic series. So, this is an alternate origin where an incredibly class stratified Krypton was destroyed when Kal-El was a teenager, and the Els are at the bottom of the heap. The S is the symbol of the working class, and when Kal gets to earth he starts finding mines amd farms and sweatshops that use slave labour or have abusive labour practices and protecting the workers. I didn't know how much I needed working classs hero Superman! Best enjoyed while blasting Springsteen!

Poison Ivy: Human Botany - I am still very much enjoying my other favourite comic series, where lesbianism continues to be the cause of, and the solution to, all of Ivy's problems.


Books

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling - We are in a low fantasy medieval castle under siege and on the verge of being starved out when the literal Gods of this world turn up to intercede. The gods are fairies, and maybe also bees? There is unrelatedly a monster living in a crack in the walls. There is a noble lady knight who cannot pass a wisdom check to save her life trying to protect people. There is a dispossessed noblewoman living in the walls waiting for a chance to get revenge on the knight. There is a madwoman in a tower who may be their only hope. All three of these women kind of want to fuck in various combinations.

It has a lot more cannibalism and mutilation than I usually like in my books.

It is the blood soaked fever dream of a mind clearly going through some stuff. I also kind of think it is hella good?

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab - The tagline for this book was The toxic lesbian vampires are coming and, like, yes, that is an accurate description of the book, but I also think it writes a check that the book can't quite cash, because even though it is shelved as adult it is very YA coded, like, there's a lot of sex and violence happening just off the page and what there is is very PG-13.

Like, it's good. It's very readable, the villain is delightfully awful, it does a good job of eliding how awful the supposedly sympathetic antihero is until the end, one of the characters is Scottish and I will always bump you up a letter grade for that. So, I did enjoy it, it was just a little more YA feeling than I was maybe hoping for.


Telly

Ironheart - I was not expecting to like this, it was filmed years ago before Disney pivoted away from the tv shows, and was clearly pushed out to die. I hadn't loved the character of Riri in Wakanda Forever, a movie I'd thought was already stuffed to bursting before she arrived. But on her own show, with her own supporting cast, she shone, they all did. It had that same thing that I'd really enjoyed with Ms. Marvel too, where the comic book shenanigans were rooted in a sense of a real place and and a real community.

But.

It was six episodes and it really should have been nine. It felt like they made the first two acts of a three act structure and then just...stopped.

Murderbot - I read the Murderbot novellas when they first came out, and kind of didn't see what all the fuss was about. Like, I enjoyed them as bits of fluff, and I could see they were objectively very good, but they just kind of skated off my brain without really going in. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this show, which was a whole hell of a lot. I thought it married the aesthetics of streaming era science fiction with the format of a zany workplace comedy, except that the workplace in question is that you are a horrifying murderbot.

I also watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the first of which was a perfectly serviceable conclusion to a cliffhanger, even if the Gorn will always be a bit 'we have xenomorphs at home', and the second of which made me say OH FUCK OFF out loud on three separate occasions.


Movies

Superman - I took the day off work the Friday Superman came out, so there I am, at the cinema at half past nine in the morning, in a Superman t-shirt, and the chick at the concession stand, in a fine display of deadpan comedy, goes 'What are you here to see?'

I told my buddy Cameron that I was using up some annual leave to see the movie and he was like, 'I thought this whole you being hyped about Superman thing was you doing a bit?' and I was like, 'NO, IT IS VERY EARNEST.' And then he was like, 'Was it always for real, or did it start as a bit and you talked yourself into it?' and I was like, 'I DON'T KNOW.'

After all that I am delighted to report that I thought the movie was wonderful. Like, it's not perfect, Hawk Girl doesn't get enough to do, and Eve Teschmacher is too good for Jimmy Olsen. But it's got this core of kindness, of earnestness, of all is not lost silliness that was exactly what I needed right now.

The Old Guard 2 - Oh no.

Not since Joker: Folie à Deux has a movie so fundamentally misunderstood what people liked about the first one - actually that's not true, Joker 2 got what people liked, it just made the very deliberate decision to call them dickheads. Old Guard 2 was worse, a film made by committee for an audience of no one.

One of my favourite podcasts has a phrase 'The Game is On' to describe movies that end with sequel bait for a next instalment that is never, ever, in a billion years going to happen, and, yup.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim - I missed this when it was in the cinema, and I kind of understand why. Like, how in the hell were they going to advertise this: it's a Lord of the Rings prequel, but it's also an anime, and it's kind of a girl power story, except it can't be really because there canonically wasn't a ruling queen of Rohan, and also we can't say 'girl power' because have you seen the state of the discourse!?

I really liked it, both because I found it delightful by its own merits, but also because I like a big swing, and if the future of the franchise is weird experiments like this or that Golum movie that I still think is a trick the internet is playing on me and not a real movie, I will take this every time!

Predator: Killer of Killers - Is it kind of weird that of all the big franchises Disney owns Predator is the one that seems to be on track and doing cool and interesting things? Sure, a bit. But also, MORE OF THIS KIND OF THINGS.