Things I Liked – Xmas 2020

Posted on December 28, 2020 by Alexis Hall

Wow, so I haven’t done one of these in a while. It’s almost like there’s been some gigantic global event that disrupted everyone’s normal patterns of behaviour. Anyway, looking back over the year, I was a bit sad to realise I hadn’t really blogged very much at all. I mean, I know it’s an obsolete form of social media internet but it’s my obsolete form of social media, dammit. So, yeah, basically hoping to blog more in 2021, and bring back Things I Liked (spoilers: I may also bring back reviewing Star Trek episodes by bobbins-ness, but please don’t hold me to that because, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m extremely flaky).

In the spirit of Liking Things again, here are some Things I Liked from the holiday period.

Thousand Year Old Vampire

Due warning: this is a solo RPG, a genre of game guaranteed to be alienating both to non-gamers (for whom the term RPG either means Rocket Propelled Grenade or that someone has forgotten the late Justice Ginsburg’s middle name) and to gamers (for whom an RPG means murdering orcs with your friends, not writing a little journal about your feelings). Although I should that when I played this game with my partner, we journaled probably far less than we were meant to. Preferring instead to, well, bullet point. So I suppose we bullet journaled.

Superficially, TYOV resembles a Choose Your Own Adventure (although that’s actually a brand-name and apparently companies that make CYOA-style books mostly prefer the term Choosable Path Adventure) or Fighting Fantasy novel, but it’s actually nothing like one. What it’s actually like is … well … a solo roleplaying game. In that you create a character, and most of the entertainment value comes from describing what that character does and (if you’re massively less self-conscious than I am) pretending to be this fictional person you’ve made up.

That person, in Thousand Year Old Vampire, being—and stop me if you’ve already worked this out—a thousand year old vampire. Or, I suppose, initially a zero year old vampire who eventually gets older and vampireyer until they get destroyed somehow.

The way  the game works is that you define your character by giving them a list of skills, resources, and supporting characters, and then writing down your character’s Experiences (this is a game mechanical term) as a series of Memories (this is also a game mechanical term). As your character grows older they will forget things, keep Vampire-Diaries style Diaries, and generally do a lot of random murder.

The actual gameplay consists of reading little prompts like “you lose control and kill someone you care about” or in one memorable case that came up in both of our playthroughs “the way mortals transport goods has changed” and deciding how your vampire reacts to them. You write down what your vampire actually does as an Experience within a thematically coherent Memory (one memory is three experiences) but the twist is that you’re only allowed five memories at once, so you gradually forget stuff as you age. Prompts also tell you to either gain or lose skills, gain or lose resources or “check” a skill (which means “you do the thing that the skill is about in a relevant way in this situation) and if you’re told to do one of these things and you can’t, your vampire dies.

And it was that last rule that made our first playthrough so unintentionally hilarious. Deciding to take the game Very Seriously (well, as seriously as you can take a solo RPG you’re playing at stupid o’clock in the morning on Xmas Eve) we elected a play a former gladiator, based loosely on the criminally underrated Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand (known in our household as Spartacus: Blood and Sandals – seriously, though, watch it, it’s great). Because our character was inspired by a Starz series, one of his defining skills was being very good at sex (because I’d also been watching early TNG recently, the skill was named “Multiple Pleasuring Techniques”). But, for some reason, in our Very Serious Vampire adventure, being really good at doing the sex with ladies was never really a practical solution to the situation at hand. Unfortunately, because of the rule that says that once you’ve checked a skill, you can only check it once, and because the game is designed to destroy you eventually (so you gain quite a lot of skills and resources in the first half and lose a lot in the second) we experienced the gradually dawning realisation that whatever our next major  problem was we’d have to fuck it.

The problem turned out to be an Italian scholar (named Giovanni, after a dancer from Strictly) had found one our abandoned journals and was now attempted to blackmail us into turning him a vampire. So we seduced him to stop this happening, then—in our very next encounter—were called upon to check another skill. Having no such skills, we were left with no other option but to walk into the sun.

Basically, our character who had been resolutely heterosexual for more than a thousand years (he just kinda had that vibe) had one gay experience. Then immediately died. It was like the series finale of Supernatural up in here.

In an effort to avoid this happening again, we decided our next character would be a lesbian nun from the 13th century, to whom we gave the skill “Gay As Fuck” – and used it at the first opportunity. Perhaps because we weren’t constantly dancing around the “oh my God, we’re going to have to shag it” issue, she wound up having a much more serious and satisfying story, involving a crisis of space, a war on the divine, murdering an angel and eventually using the industrial revolution to build a stairway to heaven where she was imprisoned for eternity.

10/10 would vampire again.

If you’re interested in trying this out for yourself—and I do recommend it, although I do find its rhetoric of edgy psychodrama and staring into the dark abyss of your own soul a little bit not to my taste—you can find it here.

Dark Nights with Poe and Munro

On the subject of things that self-define as dark, and have a strong Choose Your Own Adventure angle, Dark Nights with Poe and Munro is the latest FMV game from the people who made The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker and The Shapeshifting Detective, both of which I have reviewed on this blog and both of which—to get the difficult bit out of the way first—I liked a lot better. In The Shapeshifting Detective the player often listens to a local radio station, hosted by, well, Poe and Munroe. You interact with them in the second act of the game and there’s a reasonable chance you might get Munro killed which is why, spoiler, this game is a prequel.

There’s a lot I like about D’avekki Studios, although you might read a fair amount into the fact I’m starting my comments on this game by saying “well, I like the company that made it.” And one of the things I like about them is that, of the three games they’ve made so far, each has had a very distinct style, both aesthetically and mechanically. In Dr Dekker you play a psychiatrist interviewing people in a single claustrophobic set that’s basically just one sofa. In Detective you explore the village of August and grill people for information by using your mysterious supernatural powers to impersonate other villagers.

Poe and Munro changes up the formula again by being an anthology series. Each of its six episodes is relatively self-contained (I think there are a couple of call backs but choices from one episode don’t seem to affect another) and, I understand, although I obviously didn’t see this in a single playthrough, branch quite significantly. But in a way that’s not the biggest change the game makes. The thing I found hardest to adjust to with Poe and Munro, and the perhaps the reason I had less of a good time with it than I did with Dekker or Detective, is that “you” aren’t a character. In each of the first two games, you are a person interacting with other people, mostly by asking them questions. In P&M you are … sort of a viewer? Prodding a TV show in different directions by clicking on things that are momentarily highlighted and which don’t necessarily make it clear what choice you’re being asked to make. And once you get used to that it’s … fine? I guess. But it does mean you always feel like you’re watching a TV show in a slightly inefficient way. And I know FMV games occupy a weird space between game and movie, but this is very, very movie. And what I liked about the other two games was that they managed to be quite cinematic within the constraints of their budget (they’re all very competently filmed and acted, which I appreciate is kind of faint praise, but they’re clearly made on no money and ‘competently filmed and acted’ isn’t the sort of thing you can take for granted with an FMV game) but still very much felt like games.

And from the reading around the game I’ve done, it is clear that not giving the player any strong sense of what their choices actually meant was a deliberate creative choice. It’s just, well, I don’t understand why that creative choice was made?  Some comments seem to suggest that it’s intended as part of the mystery but that feels … tenuous is a strong word, but that feels tenuous to me? If nothing else, I really thought chooseable-path-adventure media had got over having the players make totally uninformed choices back around the days of Deathtrap Dungeon.  And I suppose you could argue that P&M isn’t intended as a game per se so much as a non-linear storytelling experience (like that one episode of Black Mirror I can’t be arsed to watch) except I’m not sure that was totally successful. Of course, I’m on thin ice here as a creative professional who has made a number of choices in my time that I’m sure a lot of people are profoundly questionable but I do think that  “well, it was meant to be like that” doesn’t really address something that feels subjectively dissatisfying to a particular consumer.

But this is supposed to be a Things I Liked, so I will say that there’s still lots of really good stuff in Poe and Munro. Like most anthologies it’s a bit hit or miss, but there’s some nice individually creepy stories, the two stars have genuine chemistry, even though (and, again, I’m sure this is personal taste) she seems, like, way too good for him. Like, way, way too good for him. It’s partly that she’s noticeably extremely conventionally attractive whereas—and I don’t mean this in an insulting way—he looks like the guy who used to run your Vampire: The Masquerade game. By which I mean, she looks kind of like a film star. And he looks kind of like someone you might know in real life. There’s also the fact that he’s explicitly cheating on his wife and they sort of try to make this better in later episodes by revealing that his wife cheated on him first. But that just feels like a deliberate attempt to shift the blame. Especially because they’re constantly flirting live on radio to the point that episode 2 (or possibly 3) is them trying to raise money for the station by doing a live 24-hr webcast from bed?! With her in a skimpy nightie and, now I come to think of it, him fully dressed, which is weird. All of which mean, I really really felt bad for Poe’s wife. And spent of most my playthrough yelling “kick him to the kerb, girlfriend” and taking every opportunity to leave him for dead.

So this is a much more tentative recommendation and I’d say to only check it out if you’ve already checked out and enjoyed Dr Dekker and The Shapeshifting Detective.

Tesco Salted Caramel Chocolate & Peanut Pretzel Mix

These are amazing but disgusting but amazing.

It’s the salt and the sweet and the Tesconess.

Unfortunately, they’ve stopped doing them. I think it was just an Xmas thing.

Also, even more weirdly, I can’t find pictures of them on the internet so maybe it’s some kind of Xmas ghost story and they were never really there, or they were actually made by a factory that burned down in 1864 and I’ve been eating ghost pretzels for the last month.

Christmas at Pemberley Manor

The only thing I love more than a cheesy Xmas movie, is a cheesy Xmas movie with a spurious Austen connection, and the only thing I love more than cheesy Xmas movie with an Austen so shallow it doesn’t not even rise to the level of spuriousness.

In Christmas at Pemberley Manor, Elizabeth Bennet (a woman with no sisters, no pressing need to money and a perfectly reasonable career in which she is successful) is an event-planner who goes back to her hometown for Christmas (because this is a Hallmark Christmas movie and they’re only allowed one plot) in order to event-plan their extremely locally important but extremely shit Christmas festival. It’s supposed to be held in the town square but the town square collapses due to a burst water main (you’ll notice this cleverly parallels the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Netherfield Hall … um is let? At last?) and so she has to find a suitable local venue. That venue being the “grounds” of “Pemberley Manor.” Pemberley Manor is just a slightly big house in this woman’s town with a garden just large enough to hold a slightly shit Christmas market.

Pemberley Manor is, of course, owned by the dark and brooding William Darcy who, um, is going to sell it for condos? Again, cleverly paralleling the way in which Regency gentlemen would not give a toss about preserving their family’s estates and would regularly flog them off to appease their Board of Directors (also why does Darcy Inc have a Board of Directors? It’s a family business. Also this house used to belong to his aunt and uncle – why is it also the property of his father’s mega-corporation?).

Sidebar: I’m sure it also tells us something about late stage capitalism that the setup for the conflict in this movie is that the Bad People want to sell the Big Empty Rich Person House That Nobody Actually Lives In so it can be used to be build apartments that people might actually use.

Anyway, Darcy is very briefly reluctant to have the front lawn of the property he’s selling turned into the venue for a rubbish civic event, citing perfectly legitimate liability concerns. But Elizabeth pranks the buyers into worrying about a lack of community goodwill so they lean to let them have the Christmas festival in the “grounds” of “Pemberley Manor.” The remainder of the conflict is him not particularly wanting to have his photograph taken? Once again, cleverly paralleling that plotline in Pride and Prejudice where Darcy doesn’t want to take credit for forcing Wickham to marry Lydia, and Elizabeth convinces him to announce it in a local newspaper.

Also, in another incredibly subtle allusion to the source material, the groundskeeper at “Pemberley Manor” is literally Santa Claus.

Look, this movie is terrible. But I heartily recommend it. It’s even safe to watch with Austen scholars because it has so little to do with Pride and Prejudice that they cannot possibly be bothered by it.

The Goes Wrong Show

As anyone who has read my books will know, I have an incredibly juvenile sense of humour. You can take all the satire, wordplay, and sharp observational comedy in the world. But nothing will be as funny as someone falling off a high thing through a thing that breaks while somebody else tries to pretend it isn’t happening.

The Goes Wrong Show is that. Constantly. For two Xmas specials and one and a bit seasons. The evolution of the show is actually really interesting. It started out on stage as The Show That Goes Wrong which I never saw but understand was well-received. A couple of years ago they did an Xmas version of the show called Peter Pan Goes Wrong which was broadcast on the BBC and which you can buy along with their next year’s production A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong for ten quid off Amazon. I really liked Peter Pan Goes Wrong—I thought it was a perfect illustration of how clever you have to be to be stupid sometimes. You can see almost all the jokes coming a mile away but that doesn’t make them any less funny. And they’d obviously put a lot of thought into telling what amounted to two parallel stories, one of which was about this hopeless amateur dramatic group trying to put on a play, and the other of which was—obviously—Peter Pan. They seem to have tried to have build on this in Christmas Carol but it didn’t work quite as well for me. They were on a full-on costume drama set rather than a stage and that meant it lost some of its theatricality and the attempt to keep what you might call the “underplot” about the actual personal relationships between the cast felt a little forced.

But when they made the transition to a short-format series it forced/enabled them to double-down on the core gag. Which is “this is supposed to be a serious play but it’s going wrong in hilarious ways.” There’s no longer space for subplots about actual relationships between the cast members but they aren’t particularly missed and the groundwork that was done in establishing those characters means that the actors in the shows do feel meaningfully differentiated in a way that is consistent between productions. So there’s the pompous director who’s always taking it far too seriously. The “principal actor” who thinks acting means shouting. The guy who is just not taking it seriously at all. The one who cannot remember lines for love nor money. And the one who, beleaguered by technical failures, just can’t get on the set. Sadly, now I come to lay it out, I notice that the women are slightly less differentiated: I think one of them is supposed to be trying too hard to be sultry but they don’t have obvious gimmicks the same way the male cast members do.

On the subject of obvious gimmicks, the other advantage of the half-hour format over the feature length is that it lets them steer into big one episode jokes that would wear out their welcome over a longer production. For example, the last episode of the first series is called “90 Degrees” which, as the Director explains in his introduction, is intended as an allusion to the sweltering heat of the play’s Tennessee setting. But which has led to a portion of the set being constructed with the flaw you would expect from a show with that title.

I just find it endlessly enjoyable. And it probably says something about society or maybe just about me that it feels like a harmless flavour of humour, even though it specifically involves laughing at people doing something stressful and hurting themselves. I think it’s because it’s the kind of humour that invites empathy—you laugh at it because you know it could so easily be you and are very, very glad it isn’t. With the exception of a Christmas Carol it’s filmed in front a live audience and whenever a character is horribly injured or has to do something slightly disgusting to maintain the flow of the scene the laughter is always tinged with a real undercurrent of regret. Which is, honestly, how I like my comedy.

tl;dr: it’s a group of people putting way more thought than seems necessary into an incredibly lowbrow premise. I’ve seen quite a lot of this kind of theatre in my time and The Goes Wrong Show is the sort of thing that could easily be funny for ten minutes and then incredibly wearing and self-indulgent for the rest of its runtime. And the reason it works is because the team behind it have clearly realised that the making something madcap and anarchic work long term ironically requires a tremendous amount of artistry, foresight and discipline

Don’t Starve

This game is eight years old but it’s been supported continuously since release (although it’s now it’s sort of been superseded by its multiplayer sequel because everything has to be multiplayer these days, thank you Fall Guys and Among Us) and I grabbed it as part of a bundle in the Steam sale. It’s an excellently crafted survival sim in which you play one of a range of characters all of whose names begin with W in a beautifully rendered 2D world that is definitely trying to kill you.

Things that have killed me so far:

  • Starvation
  • Dogs
  • Starvation
  • Giant chickens
  • Giant spiders
  • Starvation
  • Angry cows
  • Angry trees
  • A forest fire I started
  • Starvation

It’s one of those theoretically simple, actually incredibly complex games where you start out cutting down trees and picking berries so you don’t die and you end up capturing fireflies to make a miner’s helmet so you can descend into caves to look for gears to make machines to build teleportation platforms. I think I’ve played it for about six hours so far and I totally suck.

A Muppets’ Christmas Carol

Indubitably the best Christmas movie of all time, even if you count Die Hard.

 silliness 16 Comments

pawn to yass queen four

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Alexis Hall

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. It’s almost like there’s been a pandemic or something, although I am hoping to get back into it the moment things stop being so completely fucking terrible everywhere all the time.

Anyway. I’ve roused myself from my blogging slumber to deliver a lukewarm-at-best take on something that everybody’s already talked about. Which, now I think about it, is very on brand for me.

So yes. The Queen’s Gambit. It’s good. Tune in next month for more amazing insights from Alexis Hall.

To say very slightly more than “it’s good”, The Queen’s Gambit is one of those shows that seems to have caught people’s imaginations in a slightly unusual way. It’s about chess which, let’s face it, is not a sexy subject—nor one most people understand or have much interest in. But, somehow, for the space of seven hours it makes you completely forget this fact and believe instead that you actually have a deep and abiding love of the game of kings.

Although perhaps the weirdest thing about The Queen’s Gambit is that it isn’t based on a true story.

Of course, that’s not actually weird at all. But what’s weird is that it seems that quite a lot of people went through the exact process I did when I started watching the show, which was to hear the name of the main character, assume she was an actual chess grandmaster I’d just never heard of, Google her, and find that the top three hits are articles called something along the lines of “for some reason lots of people seem to think Beth Harmon was a real person, but she wasn’t.”

And it was shortly after reading these articles that I started thinking about gender shit and so the rest of this post will be me talking about stuff that’s totally out of my lane as usual. Because I don’t know if it’s more sexist to expect The Queen’s Gambit to be true story or not to. Or if I’m just getting stuck in my own head and it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

On the “not sexist” side of the scale, I do wonder if it’s just that people who pay attention to that kind of thing are quite aware of the fact that highly successful female pioneers tend to get a bit ignored by history so the notion that there could be a female grandmaster who was big in chess in the 1960s and yet completely passed you by isn’t totally outlandish. Although, when you think about it, it is a bit outlandish because there are some really big names in chess from that era and it’s not like people were ignoring the women’s movement in the sixties. So if there had been a female world chess champion that would probably be something that got referenced somewhere. Like at the very least she’d be in that bit in that song in Chess where they do the reprise of the song about Budapest and they list all the world chess champions since Steinitz.

On the “actually probably sexist” side of the scale I also wonder if part of the reason it seems so likely to be a true story is just that, well, people don’t make up stories about women succeeding at high levels in competitive fields that often. Or rather, when they are it’s normally to tell quite a different story. I mean, Ally McBeal is about a woman succeeding at a high level in a competitive field but it’s sort not really about that, is it?  And usually when  you get that very kind of spotlighty drama that’s specifically about the details of someone’s life and career, and that person is a woman, there’s almost an unconscious expectation that its An Inspirational True Story For Girls. What you very seldom get, even in things that aren’t based on books from the 1980s, is the very masculine maverick genius archetype just straight up re-imagined with a female protagonist for its own sake.

So. Yes. Potted summary. The Queen’s Gambit is about a fictional chess player called Beth Harmon who is very talented from a young age, has a complex and difficult life, and beats a lot of people at chess. Which, I know, doesn’t make it sound great but it’s actually really compelling when you watch it. And I think part of what makes it compelling is the notable omission from that admittedly glib summary. Which is to say, Beth Harmon spends a lot of time dealing with being an orphan, having a serious drug problem, being Just Too Genius For This Fragile World, and being unable to relate to people / allow herself to be loved by them because she is Just Too Genius. And very very little time dealing with overt sexism.

And, obviously, I cannot speak to the realism of this. Nor I can speak to what women want to see in stories about competitive chess. But I did find it really refreshing that she was allowed arcs that weren’t just the You Can’t Do That Because You’re A Girl arc that is kind of the only story fictional woman in traditionally masculine fields (or for that matter fictional men in traditionally feminine fields—see Billy Elliott) are allowed to have. I’m not saying there’s no sexism in the show, or that it presents a weird utopia of perfect gender equality, but it’s mostly subtle. While people react to Beth differently because she’s a woman, the chess is always just about the chess, and when she beats people at chess they genuinely respect her for it. Instead of having a crisis because they can’t cope with the idea of a world in which a woman is better than them at something. Or standing up and going “I will do misogyny at you now because it is the past.”

Of course, this is difficult. Because you don’t have to look very far for evidence that we still don’t live in a world where men are just generally okay for women to be better than them at stuff. But the more we tell that story, the more normalised it becomes. About halfway through the series I realised I was subconsciously waiting for the point where of the quite large number of men who she beats and who afterwards become supportive of her career flipped out and was all “how dare you be better than me, womanz” and it never happened. Which I personally thought was cool. Because it freed up the narrative to be about other stuff.

That other stuff being mostly chess. A little bit about emotional development. But mostly chess.

And it’s worth taking a moment to talk about how good the chess is in this because not only is it good it is—and this is the highest standard to which anything should be held—better than it needs to be. Disclaimer: everything I’m going to talk about for the next two and a bit paragraphs I have culled from third parties sources because I don’t actually know anything about chess at all. It’s just watching The Queen’s Gambit made me forget that so I’m acting like I do. It’s basically like watching Bake Off and being all “oh, that custard’ll never set in time” when I’ve never made a custard in my fucking life.

So anyway. The chess. Most of it is based on real historical games, although not actually from the period the show is set in. A lot of them are from the 80s and early 2000s. What’s really interesting is that, according to people who know way more about this shit than me, is that not only do the chess games roughly match the level of skill that Beth and her opponents should be at in the episode she’s in but some of them have actually been modified in order to have Beth play them better than they were originally played. As far as I can tell, actual chess people seem to feel that towards the end she plays genuinely mind-blowingly beautiful chess.

In case you’re wondering how a bunch of Netflix writers achieved this, they … um … hired Kasparov? Which is still pretty serious commitment to getting the details right.

As well as the actual matches being based on historical games, Beth Harmon is kind of based on a historical figure. It’s just that the historical figure she’s based on is a dude. And, again, I think it’s worth taking a moment to consider (and I do think this can be called either way) how subversive this is. Because it should be completely fine for fictional women to be based on real men and the only reason you wouldn’t do that is if it was genuinely totally impossible or if you, on some level, thought that the only arc women were allowed was the overcoming sexism arc.

So Beth is actually inspired in large part by Bobby Fischer, who is notable for a couple of things. Partly, and this is a bit awkward, for having a massive falling out with the USA, going into exile I think possibly in Russia and (here comes the awkward bit) I think actively celebrating 9/11 and denying the Holocaust (he was one of the arsehole geniuses). And partly, of course, he’s famous for being the guy The American is based on in the musical Chess. And it is really fascinating to compare those arcs with each other. By which I mean, the arc in Chess and the arc in The Queen’s Gambit. I’m not going to say any more about the real life arc of Bobby Fischer because that just got really, really bad.

Time for another yet another potted summary—this time of Chess the Musical (which I’m very fond of because I’ve seen a couple of surprisingly good amateur productions). American chess player is an arsehole. Russian chess player is sort of less of an arsehole. They are rivals. How it ends depends on which country you’re watching it in. And for the purposes of this discussion who wins doesn’t really matter and, actually, which of the two chess players you’re talking about doesn’t really matter either because The American (who goes by the now somewhat connotation-laden name of Trumper), The Russian (Sergievsky) and Beth Harmon all have variants on the traditionally masculine genius arc of “I am torn between my obsessive desire to pursue the thing I’m a genius at” versus “I kind of want my life to not be shit and to have some people in it.”

And this is where I get back to talking about gender stuff, but also where I do sort of have some experience insofar as writing a book in which you consciously flip a gendered archetype and apply it to the opposite sex is something I’ve done a fair amount. And a tiny detail I found really interesting in The Queen’s Gambit is that it actually broke one of the rules I tend to stick by when I’m doing that kind of thing. That being the “don’t reverse too many things at once” rule.

To unpack. The “don’t reverse too many things at once” rule (which probably really needs a snazzier name) basically says that if you’re going re-gender a traditional archetype you probably shouldn’t also challenge commonly accepted features of that traditional archetype. This is because usually the commonly accepted features of an archetype involve over-looking things about it that would actually suck. And if you take a masculine archetype that would suck in real life but is usually presented in a positive and try to subvert that archetype by simultaneously highlighting how much it would suck and also making the character a woman you end up huge issues.

I know bringing everything back to your own work is kind of wanky (or rather I feel it is, although I suppose maybe some people come to an author’s blog expecting them to talk about their books more than never) but since I’m already talking about my own rules here I thought I’d give an illustration. People who’ve read the Kate Kane series (if you haven’t, then you can buy it from links available on this website, and also probably like, share and subscribe if you want to) will know that all of Kate’s romantic interests are women except for the dickhead vampire that she dated when she was seventeen. And the reason he’s a dude is, well, the “don’t reverse too many things at once” rule. I really wanted Kate to have had the “teen girl has a relationship with a vampire” backstory but I also really wanted to highlight how fucked up the “teen girl has a relationship with a vampire” backstory would actually be by the time you were looking back at it from your thirties (I think there’s a reason teen girls in relationships with vampires die or become immortal very quickly – they literally can’t be allowed to grow up). But because that relationship is not normally portrayed critically I didn’t really want Kate’s first lesbian experience to have been with a creepy abusive bloodsucker. That just had really bad LGBTQ+ rep vibes for me.

But I think The Queen’s Gambit is a rare example of the “don’t reverse too many things at once” rule not applying.

The things being reversed here are a) the genius character is a man and b) the genius character’s genius is in tension with the genius character’s ability to live a happy and fulfilling life. And this is complex on all its axes. Because from a certain perspective, gender flipping the genius and also defying the “genius is the opposite of happiness” convention problematically plays into the “having it all” trope that … again I’m not super  well placed to comment on. Except actually I think I am sort of at least okay placed to comment on it precisely because it’s more bilaterally gendered than I think people realise. Obviously the notion that women cannot be emotionally fulfilled unless they have something that broadly fits the patterns of a conventional family life, even if they also have a successful career is toxic horseshit. But, to an extent, the notion that men can’t find fulfilment in balancing those things and sort of have to just go all career all the time or else become feminised beta male cuck is kind of toxic horseshit as well. And I think what I found interesting about the ending (sort of spoilers if you consider the protagonist winds up in an emotionally healthy space to be a spoiler) of The Queen’s Gambit is that it felt to me that by giving the story a female protagonist it permitted the otherwise unquestionable dichotomy between genius and happiness to be questioned.

The American and The Russian in Chess both have to choose between chess and the people they care about. Which they choose varies from production to production but the choice itself is taken as axiomatic. In The Queen’s Gambit, by contrast, Beth is allowed to build a network of friends, supporters and lovers through the thing she’s good at. And, yes, it’s sort of difficult in that—from a very meta level—maybe the only reason she can do that is because the problematic double-standards to which we still hold female protagonists mean that she can’t choose chess over people without becoming an unsympathetic, overambitious harridan in the eyes of the assumed audience. But she can’t choose people over chess without becoming an anti-feminist gender traitor in the eyes of the same audience.

Except, for once, this does actually give her a stronger and more meaningful ending. And, again, I have zero standing to say what gender tropes are harmful and when they are effectively subverted and when they do or do not apply. But, to me, from my very flawed perspective, the reason “having it all” trope is so harmful (apart from the fact it excludes people who don’t want one or the other) is that it puts pressure on women to essentially excel in two completely distinct fields both of which are intensely time-consuming and therefore, even if they aren’t in conflict, at least draw on the same resource pool. By contrast, the happiness/genius dichotomy is just … wrong? There is absolutely no reason why anybody, male or female, cannot be a world leader in their field and also have meaningful relationships anywhere within the 3D graph space of sex, friendship and romance that are actively supported by their talents. It is, when you think about it, completely absurd that we so often convince ourselves that “being really really good at / into something lots of other people really care about” makes it harder to connect with people, rather than the reverse.

If nothing else, we should probably stop telling stories about how being a genius makes you an arsehole. Because it leads so many people to think being an arsehole makes them a genius.

Anyway: The Queen’s Gambit. Very good show. Surprisingly accurate chess. You’ve probably already watched it.

 watching
, 12 Comments

jumping the shark

Posted on May 22, 2020 by Alexis Hall

So I’m behind on everything – and I’m aware I haven’t done a Things I Liked post for a while. Because, while I have continued to Like things, despite the pandemic, it’s been hard to keep track of time and that’s made maintaining a monthly schedule a little bit awkward.

What I have done, however, is suddenly get addicted to shark movies. I think it started as a Moby Dick (for those who aren’t on Twitter, I’m currently a chapter a day of Moby Dick and then vaguely Tweeting about it under the hashtag #quarantinemeishmael) inspired fixation with the sea colliding with a nostalgia-inspired desire to watch Jurassic Park and, from there, anything else that involved big things with teeth eating people.

Therefore, I present in ascending order of badness of, if you prefer, descending order of goodness the almost half-dozen shark movies I watched over about a weekend at some point in the recent past. Like I say, time has gone wobbly.

The Shallows

I was not expecting much from this because it seemed like its main selling point was Blake Lively in a bikini (although, to be fair, that is quite a selling point). But this was just … genuinely quite a good film. Possibly even by the standards of films, rather than by the somewhat distorted standards of films about sharks.

I think what I liked about it, apart from Blake Lively getting to do that range thing that actors are into, was that it was all really small scale. And, for a shark movie, mostly quite plausible. The basic premise is that Blake Lively has lost her way a bit after her mother died of cancer and has decided that she’s going to drop out of medical school and go surfing on an emotionally significant beach in Mexico. Despite the beach being basically normal and perfectly safe, a whale carcass washes up in it, which attracts a shark, and Blake Lively becomes trapped on a tiny rock within sight of land.

What makes The Shallows different from the many other shark movies I watched is the really intense focus on basic survival stuff. The core structural challenge of a shark movie is much like the core structural challenge of a haunted house story. You’ve got a central deadly threat that is very specifically restricted to a location that you have no particular reason to go into and can often leave at any point. In The Shallows, however, Blake is specifically stuck on a rock, the shark is specifically between her and the beach, and she’s already been bitten once. So although it does ultimately devolve into a fairly standard “kill the evil fish” scene the core conflict of the film isn’t so much “how do you destroy the bad killer shark” it’s “how do you get back to the beach before you dehydrate or the tide comes in.”

It’s also just really nice to see Blake Lively doing some quite hardcore survival shit, often in interestingly feminine-coded ways. She sutures her own wounds with her earrings and things, and there’s always something satisfying about seeing that “primordial will to survive” trope manifest through a female character (especially one who isn’t protecting a child). And there’s just enough context with Blake’s family and background to give the film a bit of heart as well as, y’know, shark.

I give this film four and a half out of five casual dismemberments.

The Meg

Once again, I was not expecting much from The Meg. But I unironically really liked it. It’s a solid action movie but, and perhaps this is because I happened to be re-watching Community at the time, what it kept weirdly reminding me of was that the episode where the gang’s all telling ghost stories and Abed’s story ends with the guy and the girl standing back-to-back in the middle of the cabin holding knives.

Basically, what I really liked about The Meg was that at no point did anyone do anything monumentally incompetent purely to advance the plot. And this was so consistent that it was almost jarring because you kept waiting for the moment when someone would refuse to take advice or pointlessly poke a mega-shark or say something like “well, let’s capture the shark and sell it to the army instead of trying to kill it.” There was even a bit about halfway through where I felt myself thinking, hey what happened to the woman on the original sub who got injured or the biologist lady’s daughter and then was I was like, oh yeah, they were removed to a safe distance at the first opportunity.

What’s interesting about this is that it does make the cadence of deaths in The Meg very different from what you normally get in this kind of movie. In your standard big toothy creature feature you get people picked off fairly regularly as they needlessly split up, take unnecessary risks or, occasionally, just seem to honestly forget that the monster exists. In The Meg, however, everyone just acts really sensibly but they occasionally get blindsided by changes of circumstances or things they legitimately had no way of knowing about.

I think what sums up The Meg as an action flick that seriously respects its characters is the point early on when the deep trench exploration sub has gone missing and the biologist lady gets into her own single person vessel thing to try and rescue them. And then the more qualified rescue guy shows up and is like “hey, you can’t do this, you’ve got to leave it to me” and she’s like, “well, actually I’m an expert in this field so I think I can be useful” and then her sub gets slightly damaged (again, purely because they don’t know there’s a mega-shark down there) so she pulls out immediately because trying to carry on would just get someone killed.

There’s also surprisingly sweet but not at all foregrounded lovestory between biologist lady and rescue guy that doesn’t diminish either of them or stop either of them from being competent.

So, yeah, if you want to watch a movie about a giant killer monster shark that is way better than it needs to be you could do a lot worse than The Meg.

I give this film four and a half out of five ominous fins.

In The Heart of the Sea

This one isn’t about a shark, but it was the first sea-themed movie I watched because it was specifically supposed to be about the secret true story behind Moby Dick. Although it could probably have been more accurately described as the sort of true story that was quite well known at the time Moby Dick was written and is explicitly referenced in Chapter 45 (The Affidavit). The content of this story, essentially being “there was a whale and it hit a ship and the survivors had to do cannibalism (spoiler)”.

Basically, my problem with this film was “not enough whale and too much cannibalism”. It’s a perfectly decent, well-constructed, well-acted movie but I think the desire to play up the Moby Dick connection really harms it. There’s this whole framing device where Ben Whishaw, playing Herman Melville, is being told the whole story by Mad Eye Moody (who is married to Catelyn Stark) and Mad Eye is reluctant to tell him everything that happened because he’s so deeply ashamed of the cannibalism thing and it ends with Melville promising to tell the story but it’ll be a fictionalised version where the cannibalism is left out. Whereas the character Mad Eye Moody is playing in real life wrote his own memoir of the events, with the cannibalism stuff  definitely left in, which was published long before Melville wrote Moby Dick.

And an awful lot of the film feels like it suffers because of this desire to fit a Hollywood framework with twists, emotional beats, a tie to a literary classic, and an evil whaling conspiracy into a historical context that had none of these things. Even the bit where they eat each other wasn’t as much of a big deal as the film makes it out to be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it wasn’t considered nice, but part of the reason the crew were so up for drawing lots to see who gets eaten is that it was kind of an established naval convention.

Then there’s the, well, the whale thing? As far as I understand it, it is true that the wreck of the Essex was one of the stories that inspired Moby Dick (again, it’s literally mentioned in the book) but the film seems to want to make it a more direct inspiration than it actually was. From my limited, and largely Wikipedia-based research, the Essex was stove by a whale (which sometimes happens because whales are big and strong and don’t massively like having spikes stuck in them) and sunk, but the whale didn’t spookily follow anyone around and no-one developed a lifelong obsession with hunting it, so it’s really a story about a shipwreck in which a whale happens to feature. Which means having the whale constantly show up and do this weird nemesis thing with one of the Hemsworths is … just very odd. Especially since in the movie it’s entirely his fault that the whale sinks in the ship in the first place.

The thing is, it’s probably … an okay movie? It’s just I really wanted more whale and less sad men with beards eating crabs and/or each other.

I give this film three out of five suspiciously gnawed bones.

Deep Blue Sea

Okay, so you know how I started the first two of these saying “I unironically like this film”. Well, we’ve come to the end of that. Deep Blue Sea is famously so bad it’s good. And … mostly I agree. Although it sometimes dips into so bad it’s okay.

The whole premise of genetically engineering super-intelligent sharks to cure Alzheimer’s is the kind of crap I’m usually really into, and the film sort of owns its nonsense in a way that is sometimes fabulous. I think my favourite sequence is the bit where they’ve tranquilised the super-shark and successfully extracted protein from its brain, and Obviously Doomed Scientist Guy is leaning down next to it in exactly the kind of way that I was really pleased that people in The Meg didn’t, and then it bites his arm off, and then they have to take him to, like, the hospital deck but he gets … like … grabbed by the shark in transit, and then later on, they’re on an observation platform underwater and the shark throws him at their glass viewing window and he’s kind of just there, with a shark behind him, and the grass cracking. And it’s like, fair play, shark, fair play. Also there’s a really famous bit where Samuel L Jackson gets nommed halfway through making a really inspirational speech which is kind of great.

But I think, weirdly, I’d have liked this film more if I hadn’t Googled it and discovered that they made a lot of changes following test screenings, some of which were probably good (like not killing off LL Cool J) but which also includes randomly having the lady scientist pointlessly feed herself to the shark for no reason in the final scene, just because test audiences wanted her to die. And, oh my God, so much to unpack here.

To go off on a tangent, because I love going on off on tangents, I was recently listening to a podcast about The Phantom of the Opera, in which the podcasters were talking about a production they went to recently which had a black Carlotta and how that massively changes the optics of the show. Because, suddenly, your secondary antagonist is a black lady who you need to make shut up so you can replace her with a skinny white woman. And I think the audience reaction to scientist lady in Deep Blue Sea has a similar issue because what you have is a fairly well-established trope that is usually applied to non-marginalised Group A that gets incredibly problematic when you apply it to marginalised Group B.

Because, the thing is, I do see that being destroyed by your own creation is very much the deal in this kind of monster movie. John Hammond gets away with it in Jurassic Park but a) not in the book and b) I don’t think you could kill Richard Attenborough and c) pretty much everybody else who is directly involved in creating the park does get killed. But the scientist lady in Deep Blue Sea just comes across, to me at least, as profoundly sympathetic. And maybe it’s just because I find Alzheimer’s profoundly terrifying, but I think “wants to cure Alzheimer’s” is such an understandable motivation that I don’t feel “accidentally breeding hyper-intelligent super sharks” is the kind of hubristic act that deserves a karmic punishment. It’s not like she’s doing it for money, or the lulz, or (like in about 90% of monster movies) for a very poorly defined military application. And, obviously, when you’re applying karmic hubris punishment to female characters it’s really hard to look at that without seeing it through the lens of a society that just kind of likes to punish successful women in general.

It doesn’t help that it’s so obviously crowbarred in. Karmic deaths should ideally be one of two things. Either they are something you pointedly bring upon yourself by demonstrating the kind of personality flaw you’re being punished for (like when the guy who created the monster confidently insists that he’s definitely able to control—argghhh) or else it’s a redemptive self-sacrifice–an “I made this thing, therefore I must take responsibility for dealing with it.” But what happens at the end of Deep Blue Sea is they’re trying to blow up the super shark but it’s too far away so scientist lady cuts herself and jumps into the water to lure the shark back, so that Action Dude can shoot it. Except then Action Dude basically refuses to shoot it because, essentially, he didn’t like her plan and, therefore, won’t follow through with it, even though it’s now kind of irreversible. So you wind with his difficult thing where not only  was this change to made to satisfy test audiences who specifically wanted the smart woman to die horribly, but it’s implemented in a way that makes it even clearer that she’s being arbitrarily punished for trying to do things her own way.

The thing is, I can cope with a story element supporting ideas I think are shitty and I can cope it with being forced. What I cannot cope with is it being forced in order to support ideas I think are shitty.

I give this film two out of five unnecessary fridgings.

Jurassic Shark

Oh dear. So, you probably know what mockbusters are. Just in case you don’t (they’re a popular beat combo, m’lud) there’s this thing when a big blockbuster movie comes out where smaller studios will put out incredibly cheap knock-offs as a way of riding the hype train or, possibly, trying to actively trick people who are looking for the bigger budget and better film.

Jurassic Shark seems to be that for The Meg.

I’m sort of glad I watched it. I’m very glad I didn’t pay for it. I’m not even sure it’s so bad it’s funny. It might just be so bad it’s … nothing?

For what it’s worth, according to its Wikipedia page, it was once the 11th worst rated movie on IMDB. And I think it earned that distinction.

So this is clearly filmed by a lake somewhere in Canada, but everyone keeps loudly insisting it’s a beach in the hope that if they say the word beach enough we’ll somehow forget we’re looking at overgrown mud next to brown water. The basic premise is that illegal drilling unleashes a megalodon into the lake and a journalism student and her friends are going to investigate the illegal drilling and get trapped on the lake by the megalodon. Also some art thieves are hiding out at the lake and they’ve dropped the art they stole in the lake and they want to force the students to get the art back from the lake for them.

It is really noticeable how little of this shark movie involves actually interacting with the shark. The first couple of times it eats people it very clearly exists only in mime. When we finally see it, it’s very clearly stock footage. And when there’s no way to avoid having the actors and the shark on the screen at the same time it has apparently been CGI-ed in with MS Paint.

There is basically nothing good about this movie, yet I will still talk about it at great length. We learn about the illegal drilling thing from exposition between two vaguely scientist-ey characters that takes place on a staircase that looks like it was probably shot in the director’s flat. When the one surviving scientist goes to sacrifice himself to the shark for not reason, he takes off his lab coat to reveal a T-shirt advertising a specific brand of beer. The shark flies at one point. There’s a really long sequence of people just walking. Not talking or doing anything. Just walking. Like the writers had one of those 3am drunken conversations where they were like, hey, isn’t unrealistic how, like, in movies people go a bunch of places but you never see them, like, actually going there. All the dialogue has that thing where there’s a noticeable pause between the end of one character’s line and the start of next character’s line, even if the second character is supposed to be interrupting the first character. Honestly, I’ve seen better production values in FMV games.

Oh, also, the main plot ends with the two supervising students deciding that they have to kill the shark in case it gets out and kills someone else. I will remind you, that it is in. A. Lake.

And, finally, the shit cherry on the poo cake, is that the movie ends with two guys sitting by a fishing hole with one of them giving a long speech about how weird it is that the other guy’s daughter (who is right in front of them) is moderately attractive, given that his wife is, like, really fat and ugly, I mean really fat and ugly, like Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe how fat and ugly this guy’s wife is. And then the guy with the fat ugly wife is like, “Well, you know what they say, even big ugly monsters can have offspring”. At which point an awful CGI shark leaps out the water and swallows them.

And, like, I get that you’re doing the trad monster movie “the end question mark” thing. But you basically had a really jarring, more than slightly misogynistic rant about some guy’s wife just to set up an incredibly forced feed line that doesn’t even quite fit either of the contexts it’s supposed to come in.

And finally, finally finally, in this scene they’re really obviously drinking the same brand of beer that’s on the scientist’s T-shirt.

I give this film zero out of five—you know what, I can’t even be bothered.

 watching
7 Comments

Love is … on Netflix

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Alexis Hall

So this was originally going to be the last entry on my recent “things I liked” post but the more I thought about it the less comfortable I was describing the show as something I actually liked. Which is to say it’s watchable as fuck, but I felt a little bit bad for watching it. And the thing is, I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures. I’ll sometimes get asked the “what’s your guilty pleasure” question in interviews, and I really won’t know how to answer it because what I understand people tend to mean when they say “guilty pleasure” is “thing I like but am embarrassed about liking”. And maybe I’m just way too British about these things but that’s not what guilty means to me. I don’t feel guilty about liking cheesy music or lowbrow humour or terrible movies. I like what I like and I don’t see the sense in feeling bad about the fact that given the choice, most evenings I’d rather stay home on the sofa and watch Avengers Endgame on Amazon than get dressed up, hoi into London and watch Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Old Vic.

Having said all of which, what I do consider “guilty pleasures” are things that I enjoy but suspect might actually be harmful to people. And some (but not all) reality TV slips into that category for me. Some of it I think is broadly fine—like whatever you think of the Got Talent series, these days it’s mostly professional performers who go into it with their eyes wide open as a way of advertising their shows—but some of it, well, some of it seems to genuinely mislead and exploit people. And obviously one of the things that makes reality TV harmful and exploitative in the first place is that it’s so easy for TV audiences to forget that the people on it are real human beings, and to take it on myself to decide whether the contestants on Love is Blind were misled or exploited would be to commit the same error. So … yeah. Take all of this with a giant flashing “this is just my personal reaction” over the top.

Let’s start with the least important but most annoying thing. When the fuck did we decide that we were going to start pretending reality TV shows were “social experiments” again? Like, you could get away with it in 1997 when it was all Big Brother and supposedly serious documentaries about airports. But it’s a genre now, a well-established entertainment genre, and we know that it’s just fucking made-up. If you sincerely wanted to test the hypothesis “is love blind” you’d need to define your fucking terms, set up a randomised controlled fucking trial, and most importantly not do it on national fucking television. Love is Blind is not a social experiment. It’s a reality TV show about a bunch of conventionally attractive people dating. It’s like a more conservative Love Island.

I think what makes the show watchable (and also arguably what makes it utter bollocks as an “experiment”) is that it switches up its format very very quickly. It’s much like The Voice, which is sold entirely on the premise that contestants are judged only by what they sound like and not what they look like, but then for most of the series the judges can see them and the audience always can. Love Is Blind has about two episodes where its contestants are in pods and are supposed to be forming “deep emotional connections” sight unseen, and then a further … I want to say six-to-eight episodes where they’re just hanging out like normal with a wedding at the end of it. And, yes, technically you only get to progress to the bit where you have a cool holiday or the bit where you meet the family if you’ve already proposed marriage in the pods but, like, it’s a reality TV show? The contestants know how it works. Saying will you marry me in the context of the show really is just code for will you go through to the next stage of this totally artificial process with me, on the understanding that we can both pull out at any time, right up to the moment of the actual wedding. It’s no more meaningful than “coupling up” on Love Island. Hell, sometimes the contestants even call each other out on this very fact (one contestant explicitly accuses her “fiancé” of only being in it for the holiday). And the show presents the question of whether the couples will go through with the weddings at the end of the series as a big will-they-won’t-they moment which surely, surely highlights what bullshit the “proposals” in the pods are. When was the last time you went to a wedding in real life and there was any actual tension about whether either of them would say “I do” when the time came? If your wedding vows are an actual cliffhanger, you’re doing relationships wrong.

Of the many, many things that bugged me about Love Is Blind, I think the largest sub-category is unexamined assumptions about relationships. We’ll gloss over for now the fact that all the couples are opposite-sex because, fair enough, there are arguably logistical issues in that, if you had a mixture of sexualities you’d have to keep your exclusively gay people sort of segregated from your exclusively heterosexual people with your bi and pan people ping-ponging in-between both groups in a way that would not exactly avoid reinforcing stereotypes about bi and pan people. And we’ll almost completely gloss over the fact it was taken so much for granted that the men would be doing the proposals that when one woman wanted to do the proposal she had to wait for the guy to do the proposal first so she could tell him to stop in order that she could do it and then they called back to it in the reunion episode like the entirety of society had been shaken to its core by the notion that a woman could technically sort of ask a man to marry her as long as he got to do it first. I mean, for fuck’s sake, it is 2020. We live in the fucking future. I own multiple devices that are like things from Star Trek and we are presenting a slight deviation from gender norms circa 1957 as this massive watercooler moment. Actually what the actual fuck actually. I’m even going to gloss over the way the show in no way challenges (and, if my suspicions about how these things work behind the scenes are correct, somewhat reinforces) the idea that one of the contestants having a history of dating both sexes is a gigantic terrible relationship-wrecking secret. I mean, yes, he should probably have mentioned it before he proposed because he clearly knew it was going to be an issue for the woman he’d chosen. But also if you offered to bet me fifty dollars that nobody working behind the scenes had encouraged him to play it the way he played it I would take that bet. If you wanted to bet met a thousand dollars that they hadn’t known about his dating history in casting and consciously chosen to put him on the show because they knew it would introduce drama I’d take that bet in a fucking heartbeat.

Okay that’s a lot of glossing and I’m not even onto the thing I actually want to talk about. And, for what it’s worth, part of the reason I’ve glossed over the things I’ve glossed over, is that I suspect other people have talked about them in much more detail. The thing I do want to talk about and which maybe hasn’t been quite as beaten to death is the assumption the show makes about the relative value of emotional and physical connections. Because yes, it is broadly true  (although overwhelming less true than it was twenty years ago) that most people start a relationship with a physical attraction and build an emotional bond from there. But people talk about this like it’s some great revelation about a deep flaw in society when, to me, it’s more just sort of … a biological quirk. And I don’t me that in a bio-truther way, I mean it in a … okay it’s time for an AJH patented spurious analogy. One of my favourite linguistic observations is that “smelly” means “smells bad” and “tasty” means “tastes good.” And I have no proof of this but my strong suspicion is that the reason for that particular language quirk is that you have far more control over what you taste than what you smell. The majority of notable scents are unpleasant because it’s easier to make a bad smell than a good smell and you don’t get to control which ones go up your nose. Of course, it’s easier to make a bad taste than a good taste too, but you do get to control what goes in your mouth. So notable smells are things you can’t help smelling, notable tastes are things you choose to taste. Hence smelly is bad, tasty is good.

To me, that’s the kind of biological quirk that I think the physical/emotional thing comes down to. We absorb data from images by looking at them far more easily than we absorb data from words by reading or listening to them (for what it’s worth, this is also why learner styles are bullshit – everybody’s a visual learner). If you’re looking for someone to marry, or date, or fuck then that person should ideally (and, obviously, values vary here) be someone to whom you have both an emotional and a physical connection. And obviously if you’re just looking for a hook-up in a nightclub toilet you can pay far less attention to the emotional stuff and if it’s 1802 and your family’s estate is entailed away from the female line you could pay no attention to either and just look for someone with five thousand a year. But the point is, for most people looking for relationship, you want both and the physical stuff is a lot easier to work out quickly as a first filter. There is no point trying to build a deep emotional connection with someone who you just don’t fancy. And yes, this is slightly more complicated than I’m making out, because although I have, ironically, fallen into much the same emotional/physical reductionist binary that the show talks about, this stuff is actually incredibly messy and subjective and you absolutely can develop a physical attraction based on more abstract concepts. And you can fancy people because they’re kind of cool or charismatic in a way that doesn’t necessarily come across just from looking at them (I mean, Boris Johnson apparently gets laid, like, all the time). But the point is that the show takes as axiomatic that doing the emotional connection first is somehow better or purer or more laudable. And it, well, isn’t. It’s just the other way round from the way it’s usually easiest to do it (and, increasingly, not so much—like loads of people meet online through entirely text-based media, this is a thing, I’ve written a fucking romance novel about it).

To draw another spurious analogy because I do love them. If I want to decide where to eat then I will usually make that decision in the following way: I will decide what kind of food I want, I will check what places are near me, and then I will look at reviews. Which is to say, I will deal with the simple, instinctive, intuitive factors first and then move on to the more complicated questions that require me to pay attention to things. The way people chose their partners on Love Is Blind was basically the equivalent of me choosing a restaurant to have dinner at by reading reviews first without knowing what kind of food is being served or where the restaurant is. And, sure, maybe that means that I’ve developed a deeper insight into a wider a range of restaurants, and I might even be encouraged to try a restaurant that I might have otherwise overlooked. But it could also mean that I’ve wasted a tonne of time learning a bunch of information about restaurants in Scotland. Or that I’m going to turn up to eat, and find they only serve food I don’t like or am allergic to.

And to some extent this wouldn’t bother me (that’s a lie, it would totally bother me, I’m very easily bothered) except for how it actually played out on the show. Because, as you might expect (given that plenty of people fall in love sight unseen—like the internet is a thing, people falling in love with people they haven’t seen in person is only marginally more shocking than, well, a woman proposing to a man or pansexuals existing) for some couples it worked fine. Because some people hit the jackpot and it turned out the person they’d been forming a deep emotional bond with was also objectively a smoking hottie. And some people got the runner up prize of developing a physical attraction to someone with whom they’d already formed an emotional bond. But some people just legit seemed not to fancy the person they were suddenly engaged to. And even that that would be fine, if the whole premise of the show didn’t revolve around telling those people that they were shallow and wrong.

In a sense this comes back to my earliest complaint about the show constantly billing itself as an “experiment”. One of the absolute rules of an experiment (albeit one that real scientists break with problematic regularity) is that your goal should be to test a hypothesis not to prove a conclusion. The reunion show ends with the hosts asking the contestants if they think that “love is blind” and they unanimously say yes even though the actual results of the alleged experiment prove otherwise. From what I saw (again, I’ll point you to that big flashing sign) there were at least two contestants on the show who just plain did not find their fiancé physically attractive and that was in fact a dealbreaker. But the show consistently framed those contestant’s unwillingness to lie back and think of England for the sake of the “experiment” and their “deep emotional connection” as a flaw in those contestant’s thinking, not a flaw in the premise of the show.

I should say I’m going to stray out my lane here, which is not exactly an unusual position for me, because the people I felt bore the brunt of the “it’s not okay to not fancy this person” issue the strongest were Jessica and Kelly—both of whom, as the names suggest, were women. And I do think there was a difficult gendered aspect to the framing of their stories. As a side note I find it interesting that there’s this taken-for-granted assumption that women are more attracted to words and ideas and emotions, while men are more attracted to bodies, but the show’s two clearest examples of being put off your partner because you just didn’t fancy them when you saw them in real life came from female contestants. Of course, I do also wonder if that was partly because (and I should stress these things are subjective, and I’m not trying to be judgemental) the women did seem to have been chosen with more of an eye to their hotness than the men were. Like, I could not imagine anybody being disappointed to come out of the pods and see basically any of the women, including many of the women who nobody connected with. I couldn’t really say the same about a lot of the blokes—I mean some of them were genuinely hot but there were still (and this is problematic language that I am falling back on for the sake of a brevity I have since sacrificed with this parenthetical) a lot of 6s and 7s on the boys’ side, versus a lot of 8s and 9s on the girls’.

Anyway, I digress. Jessica and Kelly both, to me, (and I should stress that I am neither of these people, I live in neither of their heads, I’m aware they’re real human beings, and that all I know about them was presented to me through the inherently distorting medium of reality television) seemed to straight up not fancy the guys they were engaged to. And they also seemed to have got the idea from somewhere (spoiler: that somewhere was the entire fucking premise of the show) that not fancying this person was very much a flaw in their characters. And that … honestly creeps me out. There’s an episode about midway through where Jessica gets very very drunk and tells another contestant how into her (that is, the other contestant’s) fiancé she still is. This makes A+ TV but it also feels like incredibly irresponsible TV. One of the things I like to do on reality TV shows is to spot little things that give away the behind-the-scenes secrets that you know have to be there. Like, on The Apprentice I enjoy spotting the bits that show the candidates are picking ideas off lists and having to pretend they’ve come up with them themselves. More darkly, whenever alcohol appears on a reality show I always take a moment to remind myself that it came from somewhere and that behind the scenes there’s a whole chain of command in which somebody decided they’d get better footage if the contestants were drunk. So when on the reunion of Love is Blind, Jessica refers to that night where she got very, very drunk and made kind of a fool of herself, and she specifically uses the phrase “I was served whiskey” I immediately find myself asking “oh really, by whom exactly?”.

And … I mean … maybe the production company absolutely didn’t deliberately get her drunk, knowing she was desperately unhappy because she was kind of being pressured to have sex with a man who, however nice he was and however much he adored her, she wasn’t attracted to. Maybe it never occurred to anybody that it would be pretty cool if she had an excruciating conversation with the woman who was now engaged to the guy she was almost engaged to and clearly found more attractive than her own fiancé. Maybe it was just a complete coincidence that the set of circumstances that produced the most dramatic televisual moment, irrespective of how good they might be for the contestant’s mental health, just unfolded naturally. Maybe.

(Side note, from what I’ve picked up from reading around the show, it seems that Jessica did have sex with her fiancé at least once despite not wanting to and … that’s very much something that should never happen to anybody in any circumstances but especially not for the sake of a “social experiment” on a reality show).

Point is, she shouldn’t have been in that situation. Because, in any sensible world, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to marry and/or fuck a guy you don’t fancy just because you both have a golden retriever. Again, I’m going to stray outside my lane here, but one of the things just really troubled me about the show was that it seemed very inclined to judge the ways in which women go about choosing partners. And, obviously, half the contestants were men but they all wound up with people who looked like fucking models. There were guys who were uncertain about their choice, there were guys who didn’t feel compelled to propose to anybody, there was one guy who didn’t go through with the wedding at the end. But the men were never presented as failing to live up to a standard in a way that I personally felt Jessica and Kelly were. Notably, of the three couples who made it to the altar but didn’t go through with the wedding, Jessica and Kelly both strongly took responsibility on themselves for not being “ready” while Damien (the one man to call it off) put the blame squarely on his fiancée.

I should also mention that I’ve said a whole lot about Jessica here and not much about Kelly. This is partly, I think, because Kelly seems to have been largely edited out of the show. And I suspect (again, just suspicion, again speculation, and again outside my lane) that there was something more going on with Kelly that the producers really hoped would come out in a Big Dramatic Moment but it never did. There’s a bit about halfway through the series where she has a talk with her fiancé Kenny (yes it was Kenny and Kelly you can’t make this stuff up) about how she’s held off on having sex with him because in previous relationships she’s … then it gets a bit unclear … something about having always had trouble building a physical connection? And not wanting that to happen here? Looking at it through the LGBTQ+ filter it sounded a lot to me like she was basically saying she was ace or demi but that she didn’t have the language to articulate that. Then again, what we saw on TV was quite truncated so she could also have been describing a whole bunch of other things. She was also, interestingly, pretty much the only contestant whose friends seemed actively enthusiastic about the idea of her marrying a person that she’d met less than six weeks earlier on a television show. And I’m not sure what precisely I read into that, but I certainly read something.

All of which is to say, I sort of enjoyed watching Love is Blind in spite of myself, but the more I look back at it the more bothered I am by how much it reinforced ideas that I rather naively thought had gone out of fashion in the 1950s. Taking a step back, everybody on the show is an adult, and I’m sure they can take care of themselves (Kenny in particular seems to have gone on to be fine, although I was mostly just pleased that in the reunion show he attributed the success of his new relationship to “not doing it on television”), but the assumptions in which it is based are so jarringly alien to me that I couldn’t help feeling deeply uncomfortable by the end of the series.

And most importantly: it wasn’t a fucking experiment.

 watching
, , 14 Comments

Things I Liked – February 2020

Posted on March 8, 2020 by Alexis Hall

Yikes. Somehow it’s February. Well, technically March because I write these posts at the end of the month. Either way, time has happened.

Anyway, here are some things I Liked.

Next in Fashion

It’s a Netflix Tan France vehicle: how was I not going to Like this? As far as I can tell, this is sort of like Project Runway, except presented by two British people, and with a much more international cast. And, also, like Masterchef the Professionals or The Great British Menu, the people they have on it are already quite well established in the industry. Just not as well-known as, well, anybody who hasn’t been on TV.

I think the thing about this kind of show is that it has to go one way or the other, professionalism-wise. Bake Off is cute because it’s so adorably amateurish—it’s all people who cook at home in their kitchens, cooking the kind of thing they could cook at home in the kitchens (at least it’s supposed to be, despite the occasional over-reaching challenge). And The Great British Menu is sort of fascinating because it’s (adjusting for the usual TV-hype and lies) chefs who are genuinely at the top of their game (like, a lot of them have actual Michelin stars) doing weird stuff with edible ash that symbolises the post-industrial landscape of the north east. And as much as I love reality TV, I do sometimes worry about the effect it has on people who aren’t industry professionals who are used that level of scrutiny. I mean, Bake Off is about as gentle as you can make this kind of thing and even it has its causalities: John from, I think, Season 3 has spoken quite publicly about the depression he went through after the series ended (although he seems in a good place) and I think both Ruby and Candice have discussed the difficulties of being an attractive woman in a competitive environment where people will assume you’re getting by on your looks.

ANYWAY! Next In Fashion is in my sweetspot for level of professionalism and also makes the surprisingly simple but surprisingly genius call of having the designers compete in pairs for the first half of the show, which means instead of having to keep track of twenty different people, you’re having to keep track of ten different teams. And because most of the teams, especially the ones that tended to be successful, are people with an existing relationship it’s a genuinely fascinating insight into how people work together, albeit in a totally artificial environment.

For example, one of my favourite teams was Charles and Angelo, and you can sort of tell everything about them just from their names. Basically, Angelo was this adorable ball of creative floof and Charles was the guy who actually made the clothes—and every time the camera cut to them, Charles was busy sewing or cutting something like eighty gazillion miles of fabric, and Angelo would be flying a kite or staring at a balloon. Well, not literally. But the sartorial equivalent. And the moment the teams split up they went out in consecutive episodes, Angelo because he lacked the technical skills and time management, and Charles because he lacked that creative, kite-flying, floofy edge.

Conversely, you sometimes had teams who’d got together just for the sake of the show and who would quickly discover that this did not work at all. Like Hayley and Julian, Hayley being this very straightforward, down-to-earth Glaswegian woman who favoured muted colours and austere designs, and Julian being extra as fuck. Sometimes their entirely incompatible visions came together by some kind of accidental alchemy into something genuinely quite good (there’s an episode where Julian sort of forces Hayley to make a dress out of fabric she hates, and the result is actually completely amazing because it’s this very tailored style in an outrageous print) but mostly that … is not what happens. Like, pretty much my favourite moment in the entire show is when Hayley runs out the pale blue fabric she is using to line a jacket and Julian runs over with a roll of gold sequins.

This has also, at least in Casa de Hall, led a new vocabulary for talking about relationships because we now completely understand what somebody means if they say “Are you being the Angelo in this situation” or “Stop Julianing me.”

So yes: highly recommended if you like that sort of thing.

Lindt Raspberry Intense

So I’m not the biggest fan of, well, chocolate. Which I appreciate is one of the few #unpopularopinions that is genuinely unpopular. And, obviously, preferring dark chocolate just makes me a giant fucking hipster pseud.

Except … I do kind of prefer dark chocolate?

And I prefer it even more when it’s got intense raspberry in it.

So. Yeah. Lindt Raspberry Intense does exactly what it says on the tin.

(I also recommend the sea salt from the same range for other giant fucking hipster pseuds who don’t like milk chocolate).

Melodicka Brothers

This was a random YouTube recommendation that I probably received because the algorithm realised that I love listening to self-consciously quirky covers of things. And, having run out of bits of Post Modern Jukebox, and people who used to be on Post Modern Jukebox, and Google Translate Sings (now rather tragically re-named Translator Fails, which is a much worse name), it finally threw me these guys.

They are two nerdy Italians who do tonally inappropriate covers of popular songs. Examples include: Creep (But Way Too Happy), Barbie Girl (But Way Too Sad), and Somewhere Over the Rainbow (But Way Too Angry).

Did I mention I’m a giant fucking hipster pseud? But, anyway, these charm the hell out of me.

Tubbz Cosplaying Ducks

Ducky made me put this one in. They’re ducks, right, who are cosplaying. Examples include, Sauron Duck, Joker Duck, Chun Li Duck, Egon Spengler Duck, and Fallout T-51 Power Armour Duck.

Needless to say, these are adorable and probably slightly too expensive.

Highly recommended for the demanding duckchild in your life.

Diablo 3

So this is an old game and a game that nobody liked for and that most people still don’t like. But, guess what, I kinda like it.

Partly, I think I like Diablo 3 as a reaction against people who complain that it’s not as “dark” or “mature” as Diablo 2. Which, dudes, it was an early 2000s game with pixel graphics and red pointy demons. Yes, there were pentagrams in some places but that’s only “mature” in the sense that it would have pissed off some conservative groups in the 1980s.

And I will admit that Diablo 3 at launch, well, it wasn’t a hot mess. But it also wasn’t not a hot mess. The big issue with Diablo 3 at launch was that the story was bleh (although, it’s a fucking action-RPG, their stories are always bleh, the story of original Diablo was bleh) and it had this thing called the real money auction house. The real money auction was a way you could sell in-game items to other players for mostly negligibly small sums of real cash, the idea being that this would provide Blizzard with a way to continue monetising the game after launch. The problem is, this created a massive perverse incentive for the designers. The core gameplay loop of an action RPG is that you kill shit to get loot to get stronger to kill nastier shit to get better loot to get stronger to get nastier shit. The moment the designers given themselves a revenue stream that depends on it being more convenient to buy loot for real money from other players instead of generating it yourself naturally in-game they will a) do that and b) wreck their game in the process.

When Diablo 3 first launched, most stuff that dropped for your character wouldn’t be stuff your character could use, the expectation being that you would sell it on the RMAH. So suddenly instead of playing a game for fun you’re doing unskilled sub-minimum wage work for a multi-national corporation. In your leisure time.

This was fixed around the time the game’s first, and only, full expansion released. They upgraded to the so-called “loot 2.0” system which introduced such revolutionary concepts as “giving you more stuff” and “giving stuff that was actually useful to your character”. This makes the game a lot more fun.

There was still the problem, though, that the only real gameplay you had was doing the campaign over and over again on harder difficulties (and, somewhat unfairly, people complained about this, despite it being how Diablo always fucking worked). They fixed this by adding end-game progression content in the form of “rifts” (random dungeons that you go into and kill increasingly tough monsters) and by introducing the concept of seasonal play. A seasonal character has to start from level 1, along with everybody else that season, and all their stuff is kept separate from your other characters until the season ends. This, on its own, was a little bit refreshing. Then they hit on the idea of giving each season a powerful thematic buff that makes you feel awesome in a way you’ve never felt awesome in the game before (“gold falls out the sky when you kill monsters” “you need 1 less item to complete your gear sets” “those goblin things that drop all the cool loot? There’s hundreds of them now!”) and this just makes it incredibly compelling.

A season of Diablo 3 is just … a dopamine delivery system. It’s drugs for people who don’t want to take drugs. You do a thing, you get a reward, you do the same thing again, you get a slightly different reward. Literally forever.

And I was going to add Love is Blind to the end of this—but the more I thought about it, and the more I wrote, the longer it was making this post, and the more I realised it didn’t quite belong in a list of things I “Liked” (though I won’t deny, it’s compelling viewing).

So I’m going to wrap this up here. Look out for my long rambling thoughts on LIB. And tell me what you’re enjoying this month. Or don’t. It’s a free world.

 thinking
21 Comments

Things I Liked – January 2020

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Alexis Hall

Oh my God I can’t believe it’s 2020. Like, I’m old enough to remember when politicians used ‘by 2020’ as a conveniently distant future date against which to set themselves targets they could never be held accountable for.

I Liked a reasonable number of things this month and over the holiday, but I’m going to talk about two things which I Liked, but which also made me very, very sad. Those things being The Good Place and BoJack Horseman, both of which finished this month. They have a sort of nutrimatic machine relationship in that they’re almost but not quite totally unlike each other but, perhaps because I watched their finales on the same day, I can’t help comparing the two of them.

They’re both what you might call products of late-stage golden age of television—though I’m honestly not sure the golden stage of television means very much—in that they’re both shows which almost certainly couldn’t have been made 5 years earlier and probably couldn’t be made today. I admit I might be talking completely out my arse here but my feeling is that modern-day Netflix would have cancelled BoJack at the end of it first season (because it was far from an instant hit) and I’m honestly not sure how The Good Place ever got made in the first place. I mean, who the hell gives a 13-episode order to a show whose pitch is, “a sitcom about moral philosophy set in the afterlife.”

I’m sort of still debating with myself about whether I want to talk about these shows separately or in parallel because doing it separately will probably let me talk about them both more coherently and in more detail, but talking about them in parallel is very much where my head is at right now. Oh, also: spoilers for both The Good Place and for BoJack Horseman more or less at random, and throughout.

Let’s start at the beginning. If I wanted to be mega glib, and let’s face it, I always want to be mega glib, I’d say that, at its heart, The Good Place is about a terrible person who gets better and BoJack Horseman is about a terrible person who doesn’t. They’re both set against a self-consciously surreal backdrop, be it the anthropomorphic Hollywoo (although I suppose it’s  technically Hollywoob now) excess of BoJack, or the absurdist cosmological plasticity of The Good Place. They both balance coherent, self-contained seasons against a stronger through-line. And they’re both about things that TV shows normally aren’t about.

Actually, check that. Because, in some ways, BoJack is about the same thing that TV has been about for the last twenty years. It’s about a middle-aged man being a dick and asking us to sympathise with him (cf Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men). But I think what makes BoJack different is that it seems, at some point early enough in its run that it matters but not so early that you can’t see the transition if you squint, to realise that it could, and probably should, be about something else. Most of the first season of BoJack is basically arsehole porn which, now I see it written down, looks like it means something very different. But, in this context, I’m using it to mean that it’s a show where you watch a character who you know is an arsehole acting like an arsehole but you’ve got permission to enjoy it because you know he’s supposed to be an arsehole. And this is … fine? And it’s certainly better than the type of the TV show where you watch an arsehole acting like an arsehole and you’re mostly enjoying it except every twenty minutes the show stops and goes “ahhh, but aren’t you complicit now” sometimes in exactly those words.

A really good example of this is the second episode, ‘BoJack Hates The Troops’, where we see BoJack just being a total jerk to everyone for no reason, but also see him making a coherent but culturally taboo argument that the social pressure to unthinkingly valorise war veterans leads to an institutional complacency which justifies protracted involvement in unnecessary conflicts and, paradoxically, risks the lives of the very people we’re praising. And don’t get me wrong, the episode is okay, but looking at with a certain detachment it’s uncomfortably close to the kind of comedy that I have real problems with when it’s from a right wing political perspective: it’s basically about a cantankerous misanthropic figure who’s willing to tell it like it is no matter what the, y’know, man / hidebound conservative society / the politically correct liberal elite (delete as applicable) thinks. It has an element of South Park to it without the mitigating circumstance of having been created in the 90s.  And this is true, to some extent, for most of the first season of BoJack Horseman. Now hold that thought because I’m about to talk about a completely different TV show.

While the first season of BoJack, like its protagonist, staggers somewhat drunkenly from topic to topic, gradually developing a sense of self-awareness, The Good Place hits the ground with a  clear, sharply defined sense of what it’s going to do. It even has that thing that I normally hate (and which BoJack will ironically satirise in season five with Philbert) where it labels all of its episodes as ‘chapters’ like it’s a novel, and for once I think it’s almost warranted. In a certain superficial way, the appeal of Eleanor’s escapades in the early episodes of The Good Place resemble the appeal of watching BoJack’s escapades in the early episodes of BoJack Horseman. There’s a strong element of ‘what outrageous thing is this character going to do next’ – although the outrageous thing in Eleanor’s case is usually something like “eat a lot of shrimp” or “problematically objectify Tahani” whereas the outrageous things in BoJack tend to be more along the lines of “take a tonne of drugs and then have sex with somebody who you first met when she was six and she was playing your daughter on a TV show”. But The Good Place commits to its high concept very very quickly, addressing its central ethical themes so directly that the main character specifically starts taking lessons in moral philosophy and the the entire meta-narrative (arguably at least) is framed against the distinction between consequentialist and deontological ethics. While the first season of BoJack Horseman is flirting with the question “why is BoJack such a shitheel?”, The Good Place is asking “if Eleanor tries to become a better person from fear of extrinsic punishment rather than intrinsic motivation does it still count?”

And, so yeah, let’s get back to BoJack. In S1E8, ‘The Telescope’, we finally meet BoJack’s former-friend-who-he-totally-screwed-over Herb Kazzaz. Herb, it turns out, was the creator of “very famous TVs show” in which BoJack starred “back in the 90s” (I’m putting these in quotation marks because the theme song opens with the line, “back in the 90s, I was in a very famous TVs show”). He and BoJack had met when they’d both been (slightly failing) stand-up comedians together on what I assume is the LA club circuit except I have no idea how stand-up works in America. But when he got his big break, he’d made certain to bring his best friend, BoJack, with him. Spoilers: this ends badly. At some point, a few seasons into Horsin’ Around, Herb is outed as gay and as it’s a family show the network wants to get rid of him and BoJack entirely fails to stand up for him. Herb goes on to do other things, and have a very rich and fulfilling life, but in ‘The Telescope’ we discover he’s also dying of cancer, and that he never forgave BoJack not for letting him be fired but for not being there for him afterwards. The advice I usually give people about BoJack Horseman is that if you’re not sure whether you’ll be into the show or not, give it until ‘The Telescope’ and see how you feel after that. Because this is the episode where it becomes clear the show is doing slightly more than just arsehole porn (although it hasn’t quite shaken its South Parkisms – Herb is specifically dying of rectal cancer and, obviously, that’s a real caner but they still went with the butt one for cheap laughs). Herb’s relationship with BoJack feels real and you get a strong sense that BoJack has irreparably harmed him but not defined him. And that’s a more nuanced approach to that kind of character than you usually get and one that the series will steer more heavily into over time. It’s also the first example of willing the show is to, well, go there (and, having made several South Park comparisons the thing I respect about BoJack and respect less about that subgenre of shock, gross-out TV is that most of those shows will happily ‘go there’ when it’s safe shock value like Saddam Hussein holding a severed penis but not so much when involves genuine emotion and actually thinking about things that matter). At the end of the episode (I did say there were going to be spoilers) BoJack—who, it becomes evident, has been carrying a huge weight of guilt and shame about this for decades—returns to Herb’s house to apologise or having abandoned him all those years ago. At which point Herb, in no uncertain terms, says it’s not okay and he’ll never forgive him.

The next time we hear about Herb Kazzaz, he’s dead (although, ironically, not from cancer).

And this is … devastating. Because you can completely understand why BoJack did what he did and sympathise with him because he obviously he hates himself for it. But what BoJack Horseman does that I feel shows other shows don’t do is confront you with the fact that no matter how understandable and relatable BoJack’s actions might be, and no matter how much he suffers for him, Herb doesn’t owe him shit.

On the subject of what we know owe to each other, pretty much the entire arc of The Good Place is framed around Thomas M. Scanlon’s book: What We Owe To Each Other. And it’s sort of fascinating that The Good Place and BoJack both wind up addressing quite complicated moral questions, but from completely opposite perspectives. BoJack approaches its questions of personal morality from the inside out—we start out with BoJack and who BoJack is, and in a way, particularly in the early series, that focus is almost an impediment to the show analysing his actions clearly. For example, and I’ll come back to this, it takes them a little bit longer than it perhaps should have to treat Sarah Lynn as a real person, rather than a slightly mean-spirited Lindsay Lohan / Britney Spears parody. Whereas The Good Place is grounded in incredibly abstract philosophical questions. Scanlon himself was interviewed about the show in 2019 and one of the things he mentioned was that while he had no formal connection to it one of his students was a consultant on the show and she’d been specifically hired because she was a lecturer in philosophy and had written a paper on whether you could become a good person by trying to be a good person. Hell, in the bluntest possible sense, it’s not an accident that The Good Place is named after a numinous cosmological concept that the characters in the show are striving towards but can only reach after first realising that they haven’t already. And BoJack Horseman is named after, well, BoJack Horseman.

As both series progress, they shake up their formulae to different degrees. In the case of The Good Place this feels like the execution of an intentional plan. I’m not totally sold on the premise of season 3 where the protagonists get sent back to earth but, having now seen the whole thing, I can understand how it fits together, and I suspect on a re-watch I’d appreciate it more than I did at the time. This a trite comparison but there’s a sort of Divine Comedy vibe to it where the characters start off in a hell-they-think-is-heaven then gradually work their way out through the actual hell to a sort of purgatory, back to earth, and finally to the real good place and beyond. BoJack, however, handles its escalation rather differently. Because its aforementioned willingness to go there, BoJack naturally builds up an enormous back catalogue of shitty things he has done that come back and bite him in the arse—although never hard enough that it quite inspires him to make any meaningful changes in his life (at least not any that stick). The seasons feel thematically distinct (although, if I’m honest, 3 and 4 blur into each other a bit) but because the premise of the show is BoJack trying to change and failing there’s always a little bit of a soft reset, at least in terms of his personality. In a strange way, BoJack feels like it has more of a through-line than it does. While we learn more about BoJack, or his world, or the supporting cast in most episodes because the series is, at least in part, a character study and in part a satire a lot of episodes (even good ones) are either reaffirming things we already know about a character we understand quite well or else satirising something topical. ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ (the episode in which one of Princess Carolyn’s movies has to cut a large number of its scenes because of a mass shooting: “you hear about it happening to other people’s movies, you never think it’ll happen to yours”) and ‘Fish Out of Water’ (definitely just a parody of Lost in Translation, albeit a really excellent, utterly heartbreaking one) are good examples of this: they’re two of my favourite episodes but you could cut them both without really losing anything from the overall narrative. Whereas removing any of The Good Place’s 52 episodes would make it collapse it like, appropriately enough, a house of cards (I mean, appropriately because there’s 52 episodes and 52 cards in a deck, not because of anything to do with the cancelled Netflix show, House of Cards).

I think what gives BoJack it’s sense of growth despite BoJack’s consistent failure to, well, grow is that it often feels (and I may well be projecting here although I’ve seen interviews which at least semi-reinforce this interpretation) as though the show itself is developing the self-awareness that BoJack never does. At the beginning, you get the impression that you are kind of supposed to think BoJack is a bit cool and to, if not give him a pass for his shittier actions, at least sympathise with the fact that whatever he does it’s explained by his crappy, crappy life. But as the show goes on, it becomes increasingly interested in its supporting cast and seems to become more and more aware of how problematic it is to ask your audience to sympathise with a protagonist who consistently worsens the lives of other characters you are also asking them to sympathise with—and with whom they might, in fact, have more in common, either for reasons of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or, y’know, not being a famous, millionaire TV star.

Sarah Lynn is kind of the poster-child for this. When she’s first introduced in S1E3, ‘Prickly Muffin’, she’s played almost entirely for laughs. And this one of those really difficult satire things. Because the machinery of fame does, in fact, chew up and spit out vulnerable young people, especially vulnerable young women, simultaneously over-sexualising them and holding them to ridiculous standards of moral purity, while getting them hooked on hard drugs and stealing all their money. And this, as an exploitative system, is worth critiquing. But that critique needs to be more sophisticated than “it’s funny because she used to be a kid and now she’s on drugs” and it probably shouldn’t end with the protagonist banging her, even if one character does point out that he’s kind of taking advantage (especially if that character is sometimes framed as having a tendency to over-react to minor things). And to give the writers their due, they do seem to have realised that they did Sarah Lynn dirty—that they treated what was clearly her very real cycle of despair and self-destruction as a comedy beat in the otherwise very serious cycle of despair and self-destruction of their male protagonist. They acknowledge in later series that BoJack had at least some moral responsibility towards to her that he failed to live up to, and do a better job addressing the question of what being Sarah Lynn was like for Sarah Lynn.

You can see a similar process happening with the rest of the supporting cast. BoJack’s agent, Princes Carolyn, is also kind of a joke character at the start. Partly a satire on the greed and superficiality of Hollywoo’s culture, the show doesn’t give much thought to the fact that she’s dedicated to her whole life to the career of this ungrateful arsehole who will inevitably fuck up every opportunity she finds for him. It reminds me a bit of Parks and Rec where, in the first season, the idea that Lesley Knope cares about and is good at her job is seen as both comic and a little bit contemptible. Which, by series two, the writers seem to have realised was not quite the position they wanted to be taking on women in public service.  Similarly, by about midway through the second series of BoJack Horseman, while Princess Carolyn continues to be a sharkish Hollywoo type, they’re really engaging with what it means to be that committed to your career and to be constantly undermined by one jerk. Increasingly, the focus of the series changes and it seems to become a lot less interested in the question of why BoJack Horseman is the way he is and if there’s anything he can do about it, and a lot more in the question of how his behaviour affects the people around him.

In its final season, for all its commitment to the ephemeral questions of philosophy, The Good Place ultimately affirms a position that could be summarised as “heaven is other people”. The four plucky humans from the original neighbourhood finally fix the universe, design a more just afterlife, overcome their personal failings and finally arrive at the good place of the title. As its last twist (I did say there would be spoilers) our heroes discover that everybody in the good place is, well not exactly miserable, but worn down from an excess of contentment because eternal joy is simply not sustainable. Their solution to this is to create a door within the good place through which, at a time of your choosing, you can leave it to an unknowable but peaceful future. After fifty two episodes of questioning, the show defines a good place as one filled with people you care about, who try their best to be good to each other, and who can, in the end, move on when they want to.

Moving on is also the theme of BoJack’s final episodes (although I should say the internet at large somewhat disagrees with me about this) but it takes a far darker turn. Because, speaking wholly personally, the message I take away from the final season of BoJack Horseman is that there are some people you need out of your life. Or, to put it less less bleakly, there are some people you grow beyond. In the last couple of episodes of the season, I found myself trying to predict whether BoJack was going to die at the end because I couldn’t work out how they’d get an ending to the show otherwise. The problem is that, in some ways, every season has had a similar formula: BoJack is awful, he is presented with the opportunity to get better, he almost does, but then he fails. And especially for a show that is, at least in part, about addiction it would be a little disingenuous for BoJack Horseman to end in a way that signals that BoJack is definitely fixed now. Because that’s just not how it works. Having him drown in a pool, as the title sequence has always vaguely hinted he might, is the only real way to resolve his narrative with any sense of finality.

What the show does instead is more interesting: it resolves BoJack’s story by resolving everyone else’s. Diane moves away to Chicago and then Houston, ultimately going on anti-depressants, marrying a nice bison, and writing teen adventure stories about a girl detective. Princess Carolyn adopts a baby porcupine, marries her devoted assistant, Judah, and formally ditches BoJack as a client. Todd gets an asexual girlfriend who seems to get his quirky style and they move into together. Hollyhock cuts BoJack completely out her life in a letter whose contents we, devastatingly, never get to see. Even character actress Margot Martindale finally breaks free of her life of crime, going back to her career as a successful character actress. Only Mr Peanutbutter is still where he started the series but he’s a Labrador.

And a lot of people do interpret the ending, where BoJack and Diane sit on a roof as they did in the first episode, and have a heartfelt conversation about where they are and where they’re going, as signalling hope for BoJack, because the possibility of change is always there. And I don’t totally disagree—after all, The Good Place has just spent four seasons telling me that even the worst people can change, and all you have to do is try (and possibly also spend a subjective eternity trapped in an endlessly looping series of moral thought experiments)—but, for me, what’s crucial is that BoJack at the end of series 6 really has no more hope than BoJack at the end of series 1. His shitty behaviour has caught up with him more comprehensively but it’s caught up with him before and it hasn’t stopped him behaving shittily (moreover the moment Princess Carolyn suggests Hollywoob is ready to take him back, he starts immediately trying to re-secure her services as his manager). I suppose people that take the “hope” reading interpret the bit where BoJack says to Diane “wouldn’t it be funny if this was the last time we ever spoke to each other” and she clearly knows it will be as him tacitly admitting he knows it will be too. Whereas I see it as him still not quite getting it—because, like the show when it first started, he has never quite believed in the reality of anyone who is not named BoJack Horseman.

There’s also a bit where, attempting to evoke a friendship that was always based in mutual cynicism, BoJack reminds Diane of the old joke that life’s a bitch and then you die. Diane responds by telling him that sometimes, life’s a bitch and then you go on living. Again, some people seem to see this as her encouraging him to keep going and perhaps one day find a measure of peace. To me, it’s an acknowledgement that, like the inhabitants of the good place before it falls under new management, BoJack is a stuck in a world that will deny him nothing, but will never satisfy him, and even if he can change he probably won’t.

A final weirdly fascinating parallel between the series is that they both ultimately portray death (and obviously everyone’s been dead from the beginning in The Good Place but bear with me here) as a doorway on the other side of which there is nothing, or at least nothing knowable. But while, in BoJack Horseman, this is a terrifying statement of existential nihilism—in the penultimate episode as BoJack lies drowning, Herb Kabazzaz tells him that beyond the door there is nothing, and that this is all there is—in The Good Place it’s seen as a necessary component to a meaningful life or afterlife. BoJack, from fear of the empty door, has spent the last twenty years trying to be something, anything, always before it’s too late. For the characters of The Good Place knowing the door is there is what makes everything else matter.

And, in a way, it’s a bit weird that the most life-affirming show is the one where the main characters all start off dead and, in the last episode, walk one-at-time willingly into oblivion.

So. Um. What’s been making you sad this month? Let me know in the comments. Or don’t.

 watching
, , 15 Comments

It’s not me, it’s You

Posted on January 25, 2020 by Alexis Hall

So I finally got around to watching You having heard the usual controversies about how it glamorises / fearlessly confronts toxic masculinity / incel culture / abusive relationships / whatever the reviewer wanted to read into it. I think my big takeaway, which is my takeaway from most prestige TV series, is that it could have been half the length and stopped at one season.

I should probably say, I quite enjoyed Season 1. It’s definitely binge-worthy in a not unproblematic “well, I’m interested to see how he ends up murdering this woman” way. Season 2 sort of lost me at two episodes because it felt like it was re-treading old ground with an undertone “oh help we have to escalate” and there was clearly only one way it could possibly go and Dexter already went there eighty million years ago.

But I think what bothers me about You—and let’s be clear, there a lot of things that bother people about You and they are all things it is legitimate to be bothered by—is that the show, and a reasonable number of critics, seem to feel that it’s deconstructing the harmful tropes of genre romance and romantic comedy in particular. There’s even a quote from the showrunner in a article, the title of which explicitly states that these how ‘exposes and subverts romcom misogyny’ that reads like this:

We re-watched all the great romantic comedies when we were making this show; the most famous TV episodes, and then certainly all of the great ’80s and ’90s movies. I grew up watching those and they are deep, deep in my psyche. Generally speaking, the men in those stories cross lines that would be considered unhealthy – if not illegal – in real life, and [viewers] romanticise that. Part of what makes a romantic hero in our kinda collective watcher mind is that he’s persistent; he sees beyond what [the female character] says, into what she feels. He doesn’t necessarily take no for an answer, and he might slay the beast for her. I don’t have a problem with people having a fantasy life, it just seems that this is such a promiscuous archetype for us that it does actually confuse us in real life.

And, obviously, I’m on shaky ground here because this is very much out of my lane but I kind of really, really want to know what these films they watched were in which the hero “cross lines that would be considered unhealthy – if not illegal – in real life” because I honestly can’t thing of a single example, at least not within the genre I would consider to be “romantic comedy.” I should probably also say before I go on that I’m going to be using some deeply gendered language here, which is a bit messed up for someone who writes LGBTQ+ romance. But because You is a series that takes a very gendered approach to a very gendered narrative it’s hard not to. So when I’m talking about heroines and heroes, and women and men, what I’m mostly talking about You’s perception of those archetypes in the context of its response to what it thinks the romance genre is. I’m not making broad generalisation about women and men in real life, and I’m not reducing the romance genre to books about heterosexual relationships. And finally I should probably add that, as an author of kissing books, I have a non-zero number of horses in this race, and tend to get slightly peeved when people rag on the genre for traits its assumed to have but often doesn’t.

The thing is, I just don’t think the elements You thinks its critiquing are elements of the things it think they’re elements of. I suspect part of the problem here is that I understand (and by ‘understand’ I mean ‘read on Wikipedia’) that the original book was intended as a critique on social media, which is spectacularly not worth doing in a post Black Mirror world. So the showrunners clearly felt they had to find something else to critique and they seem to have made the (and I’m going to be saying not unproblematic a lot in this article) not unproblematic decision to turn the series into a critique of a genre that everyone assumes they know everything about but few people actually pay much attention to.

So anyway (spoilers ho) the central premise here is that Lonely Boy from Gossip Girl has grown up to be a bookseller in New York City. While bookselling he meets Guinevere Beck (Beck to her friends) who he fancies and immediately starts stalking. Stalking that is facilitated, by the way, not so much by social media as by the fact, like a lot of people on this kind of TV show, she never closes her curtains, turns around or locks her doors. Via stalking, he quickly leans she’s an aspiring writer with bad taste in men and similarly poor taste in friends, and sets about inserting himself into her life by any means possible, many of them murderous.

I think the single biggest gap to me between the narrative presented in You and the narrative presented in the genres it seems to think it’s deconstructing is that, by and large, the heroine of a romance or a romantic comedy is attracted to the hero from the start. Even if it’s an enemies-to-lovers or friends-to-lovers situation there’s always an undertone of mutual desire: it’s just been subsumed into the enmity or friendship, delete as applicable. The dynamic in You isn’t as much from genre romance (in dead tree or moving celluloid format) as it is from 80s teen comedies pitched at a primarily male audience or 90s skater-punk songs about how unjust it is that hot girls don’t like alternative guys. And, in a sense, that’s kind of a pissy nitpick because it’s not like those things don’t really exist and aren’t worth deconstructing but I find it, well, telling is a loaded word, but at least interesting that those aren’t the comparisons everyone goes to, even though they’re (I would argue) the most applicable ones.

I mean, hell you can make a reasonable case that Lonely Boy’s worldview, if it’s grounded in any cinematic genre, is grounded in action movies. The way the events of the series are presented, the idea that he and Beck have a “meet-cute” when he manages to save her from falling onto a subway track while he’s stalking her and then he does a number of “romantic gestures” in order to construct a “love story” certainly superficially resemble genre romance.  But, from another point of view (and I would not totally objectively argue a more accurate one) you can frame it as him saving her life, killing a bunch of people, and then getting the girl. That’s not a Hugh Grant movie, that’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

To put it another way, and I’m conscious I’m yet further out of my lane here, the thing that most bothered me about You is that it often felt like it was blaming toxic male behaviour on female-centric narratives. And, obviously, romance has its share of problems but they’re not the problems that You identifies. You works really, really well as a deconstruction of Nice Guy Syndrome: the belief held deeply by a lot of shy men that women are innately attracted to people who treat them badly and need to be shown the error of their ways. This is probably best summed up in the Bill Hicks song, Chicks Dig Jerks (if you haven’t heard it, it’s, spoiler, about how chicks dig jerks, and it’s kind of an anthem for a certain kind of guy who likes to blame women for his failure to get laid).

The thing is, Nice Guy Syndrome (and its regular drinking buddy, The Friend Zone) aren’t things that romance as a genre is especially interested in for the simple (although I will admit reductive) reason that romances and romcoms tend to be written from a female perspective, while chicks digging jerks and the friend zone are very much male preoccupations. The whole point of a genre romance, even if you make mistakes along the way, is that you end up with the person you want to be with. Not with someone who decided for himself that you were going out with the wrong sort of people and set out to change that. Of course, romance heroines will sometimes start a book bemoaning the fact that they seem to always date jerks who treat them badly, but that’s generally a problem they fix themselves by finding someone who is willing to treat them well, no questions asked, on their own terms. And even when romance heroines wind up with guys whose behaviours code as abusive to some people (and we’ve all got our examples here, I’m not going to go into specifics) that’s still generally something she has chosen, and a reflection of the book’s values (which is, I suspect, why books that code in that way provoke such strong reactions in people).

Okay, I said I wasn’t going to go into specifics but I should give at least one example. The central relationship in Twilight codes as somewhere between “get out now girl” and “toxic as balls” to many people, but you can’t deny that, for all its problems, Bella’s relationship with Edward is what Bella wants from day one. And that’s very different to a situation where a guy who a girl isn’t initially particularly interested in wears her down with a combination of persistence and big dramatic gestures until she agrees to go out with him.

And to be fair to the showrunners of You, in the actual quote I cite above they do talk about having watching romantic-type stuff more broadly and the tropes they’re talking about do exist, especially in sitcoms that have to get a certain amount of mileage out of a will-they-won’t-they and can play “he’s really into her, and she’s not really into him” for cheap laughs, knowing they’ll always be able to pop the audience with a kiss when that story’s finally got old. My objection is the unthinking way that these sort of ideas keep getting blamed on genre romance and romcoms, rather than on a much wider set of social trends. And, obviously, some of them do exist in some elements of romance as well (“not to taking no for an answer” is a thing in some types of romance, although a lot less so than people believe) but the way they’re used is profoundly different.

Take for example the big dramatic gesture which the showrunner seems to conflate with ‘slaying the beast’ which, again, is as much an action movie trope as a romcom one. From the perspective of the hero of the kind of story I think You is drawing on, the big dramatic gesture is a thing the man does to demonstrate almost in a vacuum that he is better than other men and, therefore, more worthy of sex. This can just mean “shooting a bunch of terrorists” or, to take an example from You, staging a re-enactment of the heroine’s failed first kiss. But in genre romance, or romantic comedy, a big romantic gesture doesn’t function like that at all. It’s usually something that happens late in the narrative and is a means by which the hero signals to the heroine his specific understanding of her as a person and—if it’s also an apology, which it often is—as a way a demonstrating that he gets what he did wrong.

In Notting Hill, when Hugh Grant stands in front of a room full of press photographers and tells Julia Roberts he’s been a total prick he partly just apologising for, well, having been a total prick  but his romantic gesture is essentially a mirror of hers. She comes to his bookshop to try and make him understand that she’s “just a girl standing in front of a boy”, and thus has a place in his world which, in a moment of panic, he rejects. And then he exposes himself to public rejection as a way showing her that he’s no longer afraid of her celebrity, accepting her thesis that they are, in fact, both just people who love each other. Even the bleacher scene in Ten Things I Hate About You which is, arguably, itself a deconstruction of the big romantic gesture (in that it occurs during the phase of Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles’ relationship where he’s still at least ostensibly only dating her for the money) is very centred around her needs and her value system: it’s playful, it’s silly, it’s ironic because she’d see through anything that wasn’t, and it’s got a real no-fucks-given daring to it. It’s exactly what she wants, and will enjoy it. Not what he think she should want. He’s proving he gets her not that he’s worthy of her.

In a sense, part of the problem with You as a deconstruction of romance or romantic comedy is that they’re genres that can’t really exist only from the perspective of the hero. Obviously, Notting Hill is told primarily from the perspective of Hugh Grant, but you could also make a case that Hugh Grant is the heroine of that story (in the sense that he fulfils he the role that a heroine normally fills in a genre romance, not in the sense that there’s anything emasculating in earning less than Julia Roberts). Perhaps the most obvious indication of this is that when a genre romance or romantic comedy is seen as abusive to some readers, the red flags its seen as raising are generally things that the heroine observes and is fine with or into. In paranormal romance in particular, it’s fairly common for the hero to represent a real physical danger to the heroine and for this to be waived off as something that’s just a bit cool and sexy. And, obviously, some people don’t think that’s okay. But others are willing to accept it as part of a fantasy. And that’s fine on both sides. But in You, from Beck’s point of view, her relationship with Lonely Boy falls somewhere between “fine” and “extremely healthy.” When they first meet, he literally saves her life and, yes, he’s only able to save her life because he was stalking her but she doesn’t know about the stalking part. Yes, he murders her ex-boyfriend and her best friend, but, again, she doesn’t find out about that until the end and, also, both of them are genuinely harming her in quite direct ways.  Obviously, he does a lot behind the scenes because he’s cloning her phone and manipulating her, but because it’s invisible to her it’s hard to tell what, as a romance reader or romcom fan, you can take away from that. Or what tropes it think it’s deconstructing.

For example, the “he only saves her life because he was stalking her” thing seems to be intended as a deconstruction of meet-cutes but, while you can argue that the meet-cute trope has issues (notably that how interesting or quirky your first meeting with someone is clearly bears no relationship to how romantically compatible you are), there’s nothing inherently stalkery about them.You could write an effective deconstruction of a meet-cute but you’d wind up with something like Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch where these two characters have a significant initial encounter that, spoiler, it turns out at the end only one of them can remember or cares about. To put it another way, there are reasonable concerns you could raise about the core tropes of romance, but the “guy who’s doing these romantic things might, completely independently of his doing these romantic things, turn out to be a serial killer” isn’t one of them.

The other problem with You’s only occasionally broken focus on Lonely Boy’s POV (apart from the fact that it makes the story of a woman’s murder primarily about the guy who murdered her, an issue that gets much as we move onto series 2 and forget about Beck entirely) is that if there is a case to be made that romantic comedies give people unrealistic expectations about romance I really think it’s stretching a point to suggest that the people it gives those unrealistic expectations to are men. I should stress, I’m not saying male entitlement isn’t a problem. I’m certainly not suggesting, in a post metoo world, that men don’t think they have right to control of women’s rights and bodies because they clearly do (see reams of evidence passim ad nauseam). What I am saying is that if a guy like Lonely Boy was going to have the kind of fucked up attitude to romance he has he wouldn’t have got it from watching romcoms (and he certainly wouldn’t have got it from reading romance novels). He might have picked it up from adventures stories, fantasy novels, video games, or for that matter from a PUA manual, but, assuming we’re talking about a relatively ordinarily socialised heterosexual man who has imbibed the “promiscuous archetypes” of his culture his attitude to romantic comedy is far more likely to be a patronising tolerance than an inability to distinguish them for reality.

I can just about see (though do not necessarily agree with) the argument that the presentation of problematic behaviour patterns and their portrayal as romantic in fiction primarily aimed at women might encourage women to be attracted to relationships that are harmful to them. Although I think even that argument skirts the edge of being a little bit victim-blamey in places. It should be perfectly possible to enjoy bodice rippers, but fully understand that you should be able to control what happens to your own bodice.  Where I really have to get off the bus is where you start (or, rather, when You starts)  making the case that the presentation of problematic behaviour patterns and their portrayal as romantic in fiction primarily aimed at women is responsible for problematic behaviours by men. That, to me, goes from a little bit victim-blamey round the edges to really, really victim-blamey. I personally am not a huge fan of alpha heroes, but I don’t think the fact that some women are is a proximal cause of murders committed by men.

I think the final thing I would say about You, and especially about the quote I’ve been looping back to throughout this post, is that perhaps the most telling part of it is the bit about how for research they watched “the most famous TV episodes, and then certainly all of the great ’80s and ’90s movies”. Because, the thing is, the 90s ended twenty years ago and the 80s started forty years ago, and that is a long arse time. And this happens a lot when people try to deconstruct stuff–because most people don’t pay attention to most genres and they forget that what they remember from their childhood in a previous century isn’t necessarily the current state of the art.

Because, yes, when you go back and watch 80s or 90s movies there’s a bunch of stuff in there that you couldn’t really get away with today. I briefly tried to re-watch Ally McBeal before Christmas and, at first, it was really good fun in a VHS and shoulderpads kind of way, but then there were two episodes in a  row in which Ally represents a client (one of them her best friend) who has been the victim of a sexual assault and responds by getting angry at the client for reacting to being sexually assaulted in an insufficiently romantic way. So it stopped being fun and I stopped watching it. And, obviously, problematic things continue to be made, but they’re usually problematic in different ways than they were nearly half a century ago. TV still doesn’t handle LGBTQ+ issues brilliantly but we’re well past the days where you could have an entire episode of Friends in which the only joke is people pretending Chandler is gay.

So I do have to question the value in making a TV show in 2019 with the primary aim of taking a valiant stand again tropes that had their heyday in sitcoms three decades ago. I think I find it particularly weird because it’s hard for me to look at a modern show about a socially marginalised nerdy white man whose actions are, on some level, driven by a deep and abiding misogyny without thinking about GamerGate and the incel movement. Those are real social problems that exist right now, and which this show could have confronted. But it decided instead that what we, as a culture, really needed to challenge were meet-cutes and running through the rain to tell someone you love them.

 watching
, 6 Comments

Things I Liked December 2019

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Alexis Hall

Belated happy holidays and happy new year. This’ll be a fairly short one because I’ve been quite busy writing and therefore haven’t had much time to Like things.

But I enjoy this series and didn’t want to lose the habit.

The Witcher 

Err, the Netflix series rather than the game or the book in this instance. 

tl;dr Henry Cavill cosplays has a video game character he likes and has a great time doing it. 

I’m sure there are things that are problematic about The Witcher—we timed it and we got boobs ten minutes into the first episode. I suspect its disability politics are probably messy as is the fact that nearly all the women are obsessed with their wombs. 

But it’s kind of awesome in a simultaneously intensely high concept and intensely campy way. On the one hand the dialogue is ropey, the plots of individual episodes often border on the silly, and someone has already done a supercut of nothing but Geralt saying fuck and mm. On the other hand, the first series at least has decided that what a casual Netflix watching audience really want is three interwoven stories told non-chronologically in different timelines. You have to admire that kind of commitment to doing … whatever it was it was trying to do.

For them who have missed this thing, Netflix’s The Witcher is TV adaption of a video game adaption of a series of extremely well-regarded Polish fantasy novels that began the life in the 1980s. The titular witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is albino mutant wandering the lands of the opaquely named “Continent” fighting monsters, boning down on ladies, and trying—often unsuccessfully—not to get involved in politics. The politics in question are a mixture of grimdark fantasy cynicism (there’s elf terrorists for God’s sake) and straight up folklore. For example, there’s this really important concept in the setting called the Law of the Surprise that means that if you save someone’s life then you can do that thing from fairytales where you say “all I ask is [non-specific thing that is blatantly going to turn out to be your daughter]” and people do this often enough and it works out often enough that a child of surprise is … like … a recognised thing in the world. This works remarkably well—and strikes me as an interesting contrast to Game of Thrones, which is sort of lauded for its intrigue, man, intrigue but never quite paid off for me. The kings and queens of the Continent are clearly shitty, shitty people but they do actually believe in (and die for) the things they say they believe in. 

The other thing I really like about The Witcher was, um, all the sex. Not because—ten minute tits aside—there’s actually a huge amount of it, but because the show uses its sex scenes to explore and drive character in a way I’m quite familiar with from reading romance novels but not used to seeing on TV. Like every time two characters banged I genuinely felt I understood them both better afterwards—even if it seems kind of fleeting. Like in the first episode Geralt gets with Renfri in the woods (clearly grinding for an achi) and it’s mainly a kiss and a fade to black, but the kiss itself is this slow, hesitant, almost-not-happpening-thing that reveals just how unused to vulnerability both of them are. And, with a few exceptions, the camera is at least as interested if, not moreso, in showing us bits of Henry Cavill than it is whoever he’s getting with.

The fight scenes are also pretty impressive.

So. Yeah. The Witcher is on Netflix. Check it out if you fancy it. It really helps to know going in that it’s taking place across three timelines.

Also. A song. There is a song.

Ravine

Ravine is Don’t Starve the board game. For those who aren’t particular familiar with indie games you can buy for about three quid on Steam and then get an absurd amount of play out of, Don’t Starve is a game, where, well, I mean, like the goal of the game, right, and tell me if I’m going too fast for you, is to not starve. 

Back to Ravine, it’s a cooperative game where you play the survivors of an air crash on a generically unpopulated island where you need to survive for a number of days until you are rescued. This involves foraging for stuff (which might kill you) in order that you can use the stuff to overcome night time events (which otherwise will kill you). It has an interesting mechanic where you have a limited pool of health (I know, not exactly revolutionary so far) and going foraging requires you to spend that health and it might allow you to find food that replenishes your health or items that you can use to stop yourself losing health in other ways. Or you might wind up with three rocks and a bone, none of which you need. 

It’s short, pacy and surprisingly fun for a game where you feel basically doomed from the outset. We did actually manage to win although, I think, more by good luck than good judgement. And, at the point of rescue, one of us had died and been resurrected, another had stopped talking (you get madness cards—your tolerance for slightly whimsical portrayals of mental illness may vary—which modify your behaviour outside the game) and the third would respond only if addressed as Captain Cranberries. Needless to say, this had let to some tension mid-game because one party member was dead, and the two remaining couldn’t talk to each other.

The Shapeshifting Detective

So ages ago now I reviewed two FMV games. The better written one was called The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker and the more … what’s the word … unintentionally entertaining one was called Contradiction. I was, therefore, overjoyed to discover that the writers of the The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker had released a new game featuring the actor from Contradiction.

You know, the guy who did this.

In The Shapeshifting Detective you play and, again, stop me I’m going too fast for you, a shape-shifting detective. It’s never really specified what you are or where you come from or even really who you’re working for but you have the ability to shapeshift into anybody you’ve met. So the idea is, you do a round of suspect interviews, then you go back to your room, shapeshift into one of the suspects and see what the other suspects would say if they thought you were that suspect. It’s a really cute little mechanic and it mostly works although, like most adventure game inventory puzzles, you sometimes find yourself just combining everything with everything (or everyone with everyone in this case).

The game has a couple of odd quirks. The most annoying one is that there is an hourly in-world radio broadcast that plays unskippably every time you unlock a new chapter and then plays again every time when you advance to that chapter. So you wind up listening to all of them at least twice. And, as with The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker the killer (there’s a killer, obviously, you’re investigating the murder of a professional cellist) is randomised—although unlike Dekker it’s not randomised from the entire suspect pool, but from a subset of three. This means that the thing you got in Dekker where there’ll be clues that are basically left-overs from alternative versions of the game where someone else is the killer is less of a problem but still a problem. And, if I’m being completely fair, I’ll say that it’s fine for there to be red herrings in an investigative game (there would be in a novel after all) but I think the slight difference here is that in a linear narrative (interactive or otherwise) with one solution most red herrings would have an explanation of why they were herring-ing. Whereas in these randomised killer mysteries some clues just dead end because if the variables had been set up differently at the start of the game they’d turn out to be crucial.

For example, one of the things you find out fairly early on The Shapeshifting Detective is that the first victim kept her grandmother’s wedding dress in her wardrobe and the police chief (the guy from Contradiction – I love this guy) quite specifically tells you that the only way someone would know about that would be if they’d looked in her wardrobe, which is something only her boyfriend or the killer would be able to do. And, in some play-throughs, that’s how you’d know who the killer is, but not in the one I did. So basically there’s just this weird wedding dress thing that goes nowhere.

Another peculiar quirk of The Shapeshifting Detective and I don’t think this is game-breaking but I do find it very very odd is that you actually get more information about the story if you identify the killer incorrectly. At the end of the game, you’re given an opportunity to have a suspect arrested and if you guess right that’s it and they confess and you’ve won. But if you don’t, they come and try to kill you, which means you get to have a conversation with them in which they explain their motive. And, usually, also don’t kill you anyway because you have shapeshifting powers. 

And I just don’t think the more satisfying ending should be the one you get if you mess up. Particularly because it means you only find out whether you reasoning was correct if you reasoned incorrectly. To be honest, we (I always these things with my partner) only got it right on our play-through because we sort of thought the person who did it was sort of creepy. And as detective work goes “he’s clearly a wrong ‘un m’lud” isn’t actually rigorous.

Having said that, it’s like a tenner on Steam and it’s fun. So check it out if you want to check it out.

Fireplace For Your Home

I don’t normally do two Netflix shows in the same post, but Fireplace For Your Home is so genre-defining and groundbreaking that I really had to talk about it. It’s a bit of a slow burn, but it really rewards re-watching, and a new series just dropped—Fireplace For Your Home: Birchwood. Interestingly, this doesn’t contain any of the same characters as the original and has a kind of darker, grittier tone but I do think I prefer it it overall. 

If you want to get into this show, I’d personally advise skipping the first episode of the first series, which is sort of a Christmas special and I don’t think makes sense out of context. And they do make the bizarre creative choice of having two musical episodes in first season but, despite these early flaws, it gets really good and I’ve been watching it on an almost continual loop for most of Christmas.

Being on holiday

Wow, being on holiday is nice. Curling up on sofa under a duvet with a cup of tea is probably the best thing. 

I hope you’ve all had a lovely holiday season. Tell me you’ve been enjoying in the comments. Or, you know, don’t.

 silliness
, , , , , , 8 Comments

Things I Liked – September, October and most of November

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Alexis Hall

Wow, I haven’t done one of these in a while. I have been quite busy writing-wise, some of which I hope to have news on in the near future.

So, without any further ado, here are things I’ve liked in the last two-and-a-bit months.

Perfect Sound Whatever

I listened to this on audiobook really quite a long time ago now and—actually, back up. I should probably explain what the fuck this thing is. So, Perfect Sound Whatever is an autobiographical book by a British comedian named James Acaster. In 2016 he, according to the book, it’s not like I’m spilling hot tea here, broke up with his girlfriend and his agent, and generally went through a lot of shit, life and career-wise. He then spent most of 2017 trying to get his act together which he did, somewhat bizarrely, by deciding to listen to as many albums from 2016 as he could. Leading him to conclude that 2016 was the greatest year for music there had ever been.

It’s a very strange listen, because it’s a combination of personal anecdotes, stories about the albums themselves, and discursive meditations on life, music and mental health. It’s also just really nice because I’m so sick of people whining about music (and everything else) being shit these days—and it’s great to have someone sit down and explain to you, passionately and at length, that there are remarkable relevant artists doing remarkable relevant work right now if we’d stop banging on about how entitled millennials are and pay attention for five minutes.

Now I think about it, it’s a slightly odd text to recommend on audiobook because what will happen is he’ll discuss an album and you’ll think “oh that’s cool, I should look that up” but because you’re already listening to something—that thing being James Acaster talking to you about albums—you can’t really stop and source the album he’s talking to you about. On the other hand, James Acaster is a professional performer and he writes like a stand-up comedian so the text itself works, I think, so much better when it’s read out loud by James Acaster.

I should probably also mention that listening to Perfect Sound Whatever makes it a lot harder to go back and watch, for example, the quartet of Netflix shows that James Acaster made over the period he describes as being really difficult in the book. Because you suddenly become very aware of quite how not-joking he is about the many dark themes he touches on. Like, he does a routine about growing up as a “little Christian boy” in a show that ends with him turning the lights out and eating a Christingle and that whole gag feels a lot stranger when you’ve heard him talk quite honestly about his struggles with religious faith.

So I suppose my recommendation is to watch Repertoire on Netflix, then listen to Perfect Sound Whatever, and then watch Repertoire again and feel way sadder about it.

Disco Elysium

This is the nuts. It’s a … I’m honestly not sure if it’s originally French, it feels like it might be, and it’s got quite a lot of slightly Frenchified language… anyway … it’s a game in the fairly standard isometric RPG mould. Obligatory note: for those of my audience who know shit all about videogames, an isometric RPG is a computer game where you play the role of a character (hence role playing game, hence RPG) and the graphics are two dimensional, shot from an isometric angle, rather than being fully rendered in 3D. If I want to be really pedantic about it, I’d suggest that isometric RPG is a good example of a retronym in that, back when 2D graphics were the only graphics, we just called them RPGs.

Where was I? The role that you play in this particular roleplaying game is of a washed up, probably divorced (?) completely awful, or possibly a genius (?) detective who wakes up, drunk and amnesiac in a hotel room, discovering that he has a murder to solve in a richly realised but subtly bizarre world. Also his tie keeps talking to him.

I’ve not got that far into the game, partly because it’s quite slow paced and complex, and partly because I’ve actually started a second play-through. The reason I’ve started a second play-through is because during my first play-through I accidentally let my morale score dip too low, got drunk, making it even lower, then had a conversation with myself that went so badly I gave up on being a cop. And, technically, I could have re-loaded the game and made slightly self-destructive decisions but it just seemed like such a perfect end to that frankly surreal story that I couldn’t quite bear to.

And, actually, my second play-through is really my third play-through because on my second play-through I tried playing a custom character, accidentally gave myself a health score of 1, and died of a heart attack trying to turn the lights on in my hotel room.

It’s that sort of game. It’s completely bananas.

Play it if that sounds at all appealing.

The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula

I feel like a bit of a national traitor for putting the Boulet Brothers’ Dragula as my dragshow entry for this list rather than Drag Race UK. But, the thing is, although I really liked Drag Race UK, it was still basically Drag Race, and I’ve seen a lot of Drag Race over the years.

The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula seems very much designed for people who’ve seen a lot of Drag Race over the years. Obviously, I don’t want to speculate too much about intent but it feels to me like it almost deliberately positions itself as an anti-Drag Race. One of the quite fair criticisms that’s been made of RPDR is that it can present quite a narrow view of what drag is and while it is getting better at this (to some extent) and, in a way, Dragula is no less narrow I think there’s quite a big difference between a narrow portrayal of an art form that sells itself as the entire art form and one that doesn’t.

Hell, by the third series the Boulet Brothers have taken to saying really explicitly in every judging “we are not here to judge your drag. Drag is art and art is subjective. We are here to judge your drag as it relates to this competition” which is basically the opposite of the way the judging is presented on Drag Race. Like, they never ever do the “we need to see you do something different” thing. People who have one shtick don’t necessarily go far in the competition but, if you always wear a mask, generally they don’t read you for always wearing a mask.

For what is essentially horror drag (with all the full-on sideshow grossness and freakery that entails), Dragula has a strange sincerity to it. And, obviously, there’s that old saying about sincerity being the most important thing and if you can fake that you can fake anything, but the show really does feel less produced than most reality television. Partly, I think, because it has such a narrow focus that it can be honest about what its looking for. I mean, yes “next drag supermonster” is, in a sense, no less vague than “next drag superstar” or “Alan Sugar’s next business partner” but, in the context of the show, you get a very, very good idea of what the brand actually is. It’s someone who can turn a fabulous lewk, but also eat live spiders, and staple dollar bills to themselves.

Dragula is super not everyone but you kind of have to respect how hardcore it is. Also, it’s very noticeable that it only took them to season three to start including drag kings and bio queens in the competition.

Biscuits

One of the great things about the “holiday season” (which is to say the period of 3-6 months between the schools going back and shops finally running out of excuses for flash sales) is that you can buy family boxes of biscuits. I fucking love biscuits.

The Vampire Diaries

So I did actually watch this when it first came out on TV but I drifted away from it about the time it forked off into The Originals, and there was that whole weird thing where Klaus went to New Orleans and suddenly the racial dynamics got really uncomfortable. On the discovering that the whole thing was on Neflix, I finally decided to do a re-watch and, you know, this is definitely my favourite girls & vampires series, and I love girls & vampires series. It’s just so balls-to-the-wall everything, like their vampires just straight up murder people all the fucking time, their werewolves also just straight up murder people, although slightly less so, and the only thing better than a broody vampire boyfriend is his a broody vampire boyfriend with a cooler, sexier, less broody brother. Also, I know pretending to be different people is, like, an actor’s whole job but I’m always secretly really impressed by the way Nina Dobrev comes across so differently when she’s playing Elena (the heroine) and Katherine (the heroine’s evil doppelganger vampire murder villain).

And I do get that the show has its issues. I mean, there’s no getting away from the fact that Damon murders a lot of basically innocent women and yet still comes across as a surprisingly plausible alternative boyfriend for a teenager. And the racial dynamics that are non-ideal in The Originals are also non-ideal in, um, the original, not least because it’s set really specifically in Virginia so you do have the slightly hand-waved fact that both the romantic interests really explicitly fought for the Confederacy. Okay, now I say it out loud, there’s a lot that I could see would be a deal breaker for a lot of people with this show.

But, hot damn, is it watchable. I have very much the opposite feeling watching a season of The Vampire Diaries that I have watching a season of Game of Thrones. Like, I get to the end of a season of GoT and find myself thinking “well, that was really compelling, but I’m pretty sure nothing actually happened.” Whereas when I get to the end of a season of The Vampire Diaries I have forgotten what the plot was at the beginning because there have been six different plots since. I have watched this show before and I completely failed to remember that there’s a crypt with 26 vampires in it that gets opened up about halfway through the first season because so much other crap happens afterwards.

I’ve been sitting here for about ten minutes trying to sum up what it is I like about this show in spite of its obvious problems and I just can’t do it in sentences so here’s some bullet points:

  • Elena has a tonne of agency, and genuine chemistry with both guys, even the one she’s supposed to going out with, which never happens
  • The heroine’s friends get to be genuinely interesting and do their own shit—although I feel consistently sorry for Caroline
  • The nice normal guy in it is genuinely nice and not a creepy douche bag, despite having previously gone out with the heroine
  • Everyone keeps a diary. I know it’s the title of the show but dude
  • Little brother Jeremy is weirdly not awful
  • Even the token jock character actually gets quite a good arc
  • Every so often they’ll just wheel in a new hot guy in case you don’t like any of the current selection of hot guys
  • The escalation is off the charts
  • People just kill each other all the time, and it’s fine
  • Like, seriously, look up half the characters on the Wiki and they’ll have an entry for ‘death’ and it’ll usually have more than four entries

The Netflix Cinematic Christmas Universe

So I love Netflix Christmas movies. I don’t know why because they’re all the same, and they’re all terrible. Maybe it’s just as bloody minded reaction against that one tosser who sent the “who hurt you” tweet when it turned out that some people were, for some reason, watching Christmas movies at Christmas.

The most recent entry to the Netflix Christmas stable is called The Knight Before Christmas and, frankly, that is already amazing because not only is the title a weak pun based on a famous Christmas story, but, also .. knight? Like actual knight. With a sword and armour and stuff. Oh my God, it’s the best. By which I mean, quite bad, but in a brilliant way.

To talk very briefly about the actual film (spoiler, that is not the topic I’m most interested in) it’s about a knight who travels in time due to the intervention of an “Old Crone” who appears to be, maybe, thirty five but prematurely grey, and does dashing, knightly things in the 21st century, trying to work out what his “quest” is that he must perform in order to become a “true knight.”

Spoiler: it is to make out with a hot chick.

Very, very briefly I was bothered by the fact that they seemed to forget what century he was from, like, all the time: the splash screen says he’s from 1334, they keep referring to him as being from the 13th century (when, of course, 1334 is in the fourteenth century) and he is, and to be fair this is a problem that all fictional knight have, wearing a type of armour that would not have existed until the 15th or even 16th century. I am, frankly, shocked at the lack of historical detail in this time-travelling Christmas movie.

But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that there is a reference in the movie to someone having had a message from Aldovia.

Which means that this film, which canonically includes real magic and time travel, takes place in the same universe as A Christmas Prince, its sequel A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding, and its upcoming threequel A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby.

So much about those movies makes sense when you realise that they take place in a world where magic and time travel are real. Like, why is it always Christmas in Aldovia? Time travel magic. Why was the King of Aldovia required to hide the proclamation declaring that his adoptive son is also his real heir inside a hand-carved Christmas decoration? I still, don’t know. But probably something something Old Crone magic swirly blue portals.

To make things even cooler, in the film The Princess Switch, Vanessa Hudgens’ character watches A Christmas Prince, meaning that A Christmas Prince exists as a movie in the world of The Princess Switch. But, therefore, also presumably The Knight Before Christmas, which exists in the same world as A Christmas Prince, must also exist as a movie in the world of The Princess Switch. But The Knight Before Christmas ALSO STARS Vanessa Hudgens.

Which means not only does Vanessa Hudgens in the world of The Princess Switch have an identical double in the form of either the princess or of the lady who undergoes the titular princess switch but she must also exist in that world either as the actress Vanessa Hudgens (who in that universe looks identical to a princess who exists in that universe) or, as I am increasingly thinking more likely, she doesn’t exist in that universe as an actress and the films that are watched in Netflix Christmas Universe B, rather than having been made in Netflix Christmas Universe B, are actually windows into Netflix Christmas Universe A (The Knight Before Christmas / Christmas Prince universe) through which Universe B characters can observe the actions of their Universe A alter-egos.

How did a universe full of Christmas-themed characters wind up being separated out from their alternative reality selves and imprisoned in a hermetically sealed space-time bubble of eternal Christmas? TIME TRAVEL MAGIC.

I haven’t gone as deep into this rabbit hole as I’d like to yet (partly because I’m worried I’ll get trapped in an alternative Christmas universe). For example, I’m not yet certain whether A Christmas Inheritance takes place in Universe A or Universe B. It could, of course, take place in its own Universe C but William of Occam enjoined us that elements should not be multiplied needlessly, and therefore I will, for the moment, posit the existence of only two Christmas Universes.

Anyway. movie isn’t out yet. But the  moment it drops I’m watching the shit out of it.

Aaand, as ever, tell me what you’re into at the moment in the comments. Or don’t.

 silliness
, , , , 27 Comments

Things I Liked – August 2019

Posted on September 2, 2019 by Alexis Hall

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Things I Liked in or around the month that I liked them. I always try to do a witty preamble for these and then realise I should just get on with talking about things I liked, that being what I’m here for.

So, uh, here’s some things I liked.

Mind Hunter (Season 2)

Occasionally people will ask me what my guilty pleasure is, and I’ll go off on a long rant about how I find the concept of a guilty pleasure really annoying because it tends to get used “a thing that you like but feel you shouldn’t like for somewhat abstract reasons of social censure.” Basically, it’s how people describe things they enjoy but think are too lowbrow for them (sidebar: it gets used about romance novels a lot and I’m not mad keen on this) and I very strongly believe you shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying something just because it’s not Proust.

Having said which, there are some things which I do feel genuinely feel guilty about enjoying because I am concerned that they are on some level actually harmful to actual harmful people. Professional wrestling is my go-to example here. Love Island has gone through guilty pleasure and out the other side in that I decided not to watch this year, and probably won’t until they can prove they can at least one season without killing any cast members. And another thing that I think might need to go on the list is true crime.

And the true crime thing is complicated. You’ve got things like Serial which seem to be legitimately concerned with a potential miscarriage of justice, but even then they blur the lines between storytelling and journalism, and often get presented in a very victim-erasing way (although I’ll admit this is kind of damned if you do / damned if you don’t in that, on the other hand, it squicks me out that I can easily remember the name of Adnan Syed but can’t remember the name of the girl he might have murdered, but the other hand, I’m sure her family would rather not be household names). Even further down the “ethics-o-meter” are what you might call the sexy serial killer shows. There was quite a well-publicised one on Netflix recently about Ted Bundy that got thoroughly lampooned by how much it emphasised Bundy’s essential hotness. And those I flat-out avoid because, yeah.

Mind Hunter, for me, skates just close enough to the line that I’m okay with it—although every so often I’ll Google the person they’re talking about and realise that the serial killer in question is still alive, and that makes me feel really odd. I think  one of the factors that lets me enjoy Mind Hunter as a cool “inspired by a true story” crime thing that pushes all the buttons that other stuff that serial killers does is that it’s set just long enough ago that it feels like a period piece. And so the realisation that actually no, this is still within living memory throws me. But there’s enough architecture around it that carries me through. Having said which, I am on some level aware that I’m sort of having my cake and eating it in that most of the time I can tell myself that I’m watching the show for the fascinating insights into the origins of the FBI Behavioural Science Unit, even though deep down I, like everybody else, am mostly just waiting to see which big name serial killer they interview this week.

And to give the show its due, it’s actually quite conscious of that approach to serial killers, and engages with it in a way that doesn’t come across (at least to me) as condescending. The main character obviously has tendencies in that slightly sensational direction – there’s quite a nicely set up sequence where he’s desperately hankering after an interview with Manson even though interviewing Charles Manson will in no way help with the case they’re working on, and when the interview finally happens it’s weirdly anticlimactic because Charles Manson ultimately is just a guy. In fact, “just a guy” is sort of the way it portrays most of the serial killers it presents. From years of crime dramas we’re a very used to the idea that a serial killer is some kind of real world supervillain capable of inhuman feats both physical and mental (Red John in The Mentalist is the poster child for this kind of character). But most of the people they interview are just shit and broken, and yes they’ve done terrible things, but that’s because people sometimes do terrible things, and the really frightening things about terrible things is that they’re not that hard to do.

But none of that is why Mind Hunter season 2 was one of my favourite things on TV in August. In season 2, the Deputy Director of the FBI stands down, due to events of the previous series, and is replaced by a character called Ted Gunn who we have been trained, once again by years of police procedurals and, for that matter, any other kind of institutional procedurals, to assume will be evil, incompetence and dick with the protagonists for no reason or benefits for himself. We’re told he’s a suit, or a pen pusher from city hall, who’s more interested in politics than cracking cases and whenever he interacts with the team he sits there in sinister lightning, with ominous music playing, and you keep expecting him to say “you’ve got to fire the genius guy and make the woman a secretary, and wrap up this impossible in case in six seconds or I’m closing the unit.”

Except, um. He doesn’t do any of that. He’s really supportive and gives them the resources they need and works the politics so that they do what they need to do. And this is fucking weird. But then you remember that Mind Hunter is based on an actual autobiography and is about the establishment of a department within the FBI that exists today, and is well-respected and well-funded. So the story is basically about how representatives of the establishment recognised that what these people were doing is worthwhile and helped them do it better.

I think there should be more of this. I mean, I know conflict is important for drama but popular culture should not be training us to believe that it’s impossible for state institutions to do anything right.

Naturally Tan

I kind of love Tan France. I mean, all the Fab Five are, and the clue is very much in the name, fabulous but Tan is the British one so he is my guy forever. The thing about Tan France’s autobiography and, no offence to Tan, is that he hasn’t had an especially interesting life—sort of his whole deal is that he’s just this kid from South Yorkshire who ran a bunch of business, married a Mormon rancher, and, as far as I can tell, accidentally got cast on a major Netflix show. But everything about this I find really charming.

To be fair, his autobiography feels deliberately, well, British in that there’s clearly quite a lot of things that he doesn’t think are anyone’s business but his own and so he’s going to ignore all that stuff, and instead go on for quite a really long time about why you should never wear a functional belt. It’s basically the opposite of a tell-all autobiography. It’s a polite-chat autobiography, but he’s very open about what you’re getting into, and what he’s willing to talk about, so it’s hard to feel cheated.

In short, it’s an endearing portrait of the Tan France that Tan France is willing to share with the public—it has its carefully chosen intimacies, like his husband’s refusal to believe him about the sizing of his wedding ring, and some experiences with being south Asian in Britain and America (spoiler: they are not always pleasant). But mostly it’s just … nice?

I will say, I picked up in the Audible edition, which is narrated by Tan himself—because I have a particular fondness for people reading their own autobiographies—and I think a lot of its appeal comes from his presentation because you can stick it on in the background as you wash the dishes or make the dinner and it’s like Tan France has come round to your house for a natter.

Obviously your mileage with this will very much vary depending on how much you like the idea of Tan France coming round your house for a natter.

Slay the Spire

Okay, I’m a year late on this one. And for the vast majority of my readership who have no idea what the terms “roguelike” and “deckbuilder” mean this game is a roguelike deckbuilder. What fun. A roguelike is a game that takes place in a randomly generated dungeon and a deckbuilder is a game that is played using a small deck of cards that you add to over the course of that game. Confusingly, deckbuilders as a genre are different from customisable card games in which you have a larger deck of cards that you design for yourself at the start of the game.

The thing I most admire about Slay the Spire is that it contains nothing that it does need to contain. It started out without two playable characters, has since added a third and will be adding a fourth sometime next week. The dungeon has three and a half floors, each with a very small number of possible bosses. But all of these limited sets of interacting pieces work together to create something with a surprising amount of depth.

If I have one criticism of the game, and this isn’t really a criticism of the game, it’s a criticism of myself, it’s that the set of skills you need to be good at the game are non-obvious and don’t necessarily relate to the things you instinctively want to be doing. You want to be saying “ooh, I’ve got a lot poison cards this run, I’ll take more poison stuff and make a poison deck that does things with poisons.” What you need to be saying is “ooh, I’ve got a lot of poison cards this run, I need more front-loaded damage to have a good chance of dealing with Gremlin Nob.”

And actually there’s a weird if deeply nerdy satisfaction in gradually building your mastery of the game, even if it’s a skill that is of absolutely zero practical value in the outside world.

Jenny Nicholson

I watch a lot of YouTube channels, usually of the “I am a person having an opinion” variety. And at the moment I’m super into Jenny Nicholson because her opinions are … kind of delightful? She somehow manages to be snarky without being smug or diminishing the thing she’s talking about, even when the thing she’s talking about is blatantly terrible.

One of the issues with discussing YouTubers is that because these sorts of channels are usually just someone sitting on their bed talking into a camera it’s hard to separate the content from the person. Or at least your perception of the person. So it’s hard to discuss them or recommend them without feeling like you’re projecting way too much onto a stranger on the internet or offering a random human being up for judgement.

Which is to say, I like the YouTube persona that Jenny Nicholson presents, because she seems cool. And I think what I find cool about her (that is, her YouTube persona) is that she doesn’t seem to give a shit if you think she’s cool. I mean she’s done an entire video in which she talks about how much she loves Beastly. Once you’ve done that you can never be cool again. Which is, y’know, cool.

Anyway, here are some of my favourite Jenny Nicholsons to get you started:

She Used To Be Mine

One of my favourite things as someone who knows shit all about either music or theatre is that thing you sometimes get in instances of musical theatre where you’ll have a song that’s structured as if it’s the show’s main love theme, but is actually about something completely different. Sondheim does this all the damned time, see My Friends in Sweeny Todd or I Am Unworthy of Your Love in Assassins.

Back in the mid-to-late-2000s there was a musical version of the indie movie Waitress. Full disclosure, I have seen neither the musical nor the film it is based on, but one of its big numbers is called She Used to be Mine, and it does that thing that I’ve just said I like. So I like it.

SYtbM is a love song that the main character sings to herself in the past. Which is awesome. Also it’s Sara Bareilles, who is also awesome, although I confess I mostly know her because Gravity was used as the backing for a well-known Community fanvid.

And those are the things I liked. As ever tell me about the things you liked in the comments. Or don’t.

Also, I’ve got a book out. Like, tomorrow. Yay. Maybe you could buy it?

 silliness
, , , , , , , , 15 Comments