Gamut of Reviews: Winter 2023
Sometimes enjoyment in life comes from seeing pretty boys be pretty sad in the rain.
In this format, I clear house on everything I've been into recently! Last summer, I did a character version of this. This time, I'm going to take a slightly looser format. I'm not sure if I'll end up with a consistent quarterly schedule like initially promised - I nicked this entire bit from Super Eyepatch Wolf, anyway - but I've come to enjoy doing these bits whenever there's enough for me to discuss something that is simply too long for a tweet but too short for an essay. Also, I just wasn't certain if I could listen to and review at least six releases for this week's Music Dispatch. (I wasn't.) Win-win anyway!
The Next Neo Model & Favorite House
NCT 127 have a bunch of online content on Youtube and for free. I was recommended The Next Neo Model from the algorithm and got obsessed - hello? A parody of the <Country's> Next Top Model format? That's amazing! This isn't my first NCT 127 variety... it was my third!... but it becomes quickly apparent to me that the nine members are completely, seriously unserious. Several members have a natural understanding for off-the-wall dramatics that make you dry heave from laughing, while others get completely into the competition bit (but without getting too much into it - I've seen that before too, trust me) that still leads to hilarious moments. (And then there's Jaehyun, who simply seems like a good sport.) Hosted by Jungwoo and Johnny, the former a "world-class supermodel" and the latter the "editor" of fictional magazine Johnnyzed, the seven competitors must pass from round to round to eventually become the next Neo Model. Jungwoo, fully Korean, adds so much flourish to his English bits that even his members have to laugh at it. Doyoung and Taeyong, known by the group as best friends, get an entire edit on how they were friends and now rivals - which is already insane enough to roleplay as when you're best friends, but when Doyoung earnestly accuses Jungwoo and Johnny for rigging the competition with a completely serious face... I'm laughing just typing this up. The rounds themselves are quite fun - members have to pose as "wet dry towel", and there's a bit where a member pretends that a boot is his dog, and yes, the results are simply hilarious - but it's the confessionals that make the entire show, be it from Jaehyun earnestly applauding then confessing two seconds later that he wasn't impressed all the way to Yuta's sore loser statement that they simply don't get his fashion, this three-part Youtube series (first episode is 25 minutes, second 15, and last 17) made me laugh more than most comedy shows ever did.
The series I watched before that was Favorite House. This one is two episodes long, thirty minutes each, and follows the nine NCT 127 members as various vampires full with backstories (major shoutout to Doyoung, who dons the name "Doyoung Favoritney" and is a "V-pop star") and each of them want to become a human for one reason or another. A Favorite wine can make one of them human. In the first episode, they try to debate why they, the member in question, should drink it - until Johnny derails Taeil's argument with a simple "You need to shave" - and in the second episode, there's a bit on members trying to get the other's heartrate up with cat ears, as well as trying to write a letter with member names and lines from their own songs. I muttered "My beloved Bless Me Achoo Mark Mad City" (that is a name, Yuta argues. She just has a lot of middle names!) the entire morning after watching that episode, giggling all the while, and sometimes my mind will tell me unbidden "Simon says we're the real vibe killer. I don't know what that means." (For the letter writing bit, Jaehyun asks Haechan to swap the prompts with his and scribbles even while everyone else stopped. Suffice to say he's into competition, too.) Here, too, the confessionals really made the show for me. NCT 127 are quite funny. I will continue watching their "shows" one at a time. One thing, though - I watched part of the Lemonade Stand video, but then when Johnny talked about zodiac signs I had to quit. It felt like some barrier between me and idols had been breached. That's not on him, but like... wait... why do you know these things!!! What's next, knowing your rising? Is nothing sacred?
Lupin the 3rd: Castle of Cagliostro and the case for two-dimensional charisma
I'm a big fan of Lupin the 3rd, since I'm a child, actually - it was one of the anime that wasn't on the regular German channel RTL 2 but on MTV and late at night to boot (Inuyasha was the other one - that they were late at night made them so intriguing). The German opening is one I'm still obsessed with, oozing pure sleekness and effortless cool. Lupin the Third follows, well, Arsène Lupin III, the grandson of famed French phantom thief Arsène Lupin, from one heist to the next, with his crew - trusty gunman Daisuke Jigen, femme fatale Fujiko Mine, samurai Goemon Ishikawa XIII (whose ancestor was a real Robin Hood-esque samurai) - always chased by policeman Zenigata. At home, we tend to watch the movies - I plan on starting the main series at some point - and the movies make one thing abundantly clear: this is about having a good time. Characters, at least the core characters, don't develop. This is fine. They're sexy, one of the few series I know where everyone is adult, and watching the archetypal characters be thrown from one situation to the next is immensely fun, especially so the quipping, charismatic Lupin, who seems a very strong inspiration to one of my favorite characters, Monkey D. Luffy (even if Luffy is overtly said to be inspired by Goku, Goku has got to be inspired by Lupin - so Lupin makes for a very early ancestor). Castle of Cagliostro, a 1977 film directed by a very young Hayao Miyazaki, was one we saw recently, and I was kind of... well... dismayed. The movie follows Lupin retrace a heist he messed up ten years ago. He almost died, but a young girl saved him. Now grown, the girl is forced to a marriage - and Lupin can't stop thinking about her. When they meet, she sorta-kinda falls in love with him. And he thinks of her very fondly too, to the point where when he breaks her heart, he sulks about it. Right off the bat: hello? Ew! Second of all, why make Lupin sad? I've never been so repelled by a perfectly fine, two-dimensional character suddenly "gaining depth" by being sad. As a teenager, I would've loved it. But now I'm almost 26 and I'm like... Lupin didn't need that. That he wanted to save her made for a more poignant narrative arc, I'll give the movie this much, but circle back to the earlier point. She's a teenager. A child bride! Also, the other characters were still two-dimensional. Goemon is still quiet and pretty. Jigen is a trusty sidekick with a smoking bit. Fujiko has her own goals and she's hot. And in the end, Zenigata is forced to work with Lupin anyway, the way a lot of Lupin movies end up like. I don't get it. Keep my Lupin quipping! I don't care about his manpain! However I would care very much about Goemon's manpain... Sometimes enjoyment in life comes from seeing pretty boys be pretty sad in the rain.
Trying to understand Murderbot by Martha Wells
The Murderbot Diaries, a sci-fi series by Martha Wells, has proven to be hard sell to anyone I'm trying to explain it to. And yes, some of it has to do with the name. We follow a cyborg tasked for client security (SecUnit) that calls itself Murderbot, which has gained free will and calls itself Murderbot because of an event it no longer remembers. Now free, it wants to watch serials all the time, at least that's what it tells itself over and over, because the things Murderbot is up to suggests that it's more interested in trying to belong. The first installment, All Systems Red, brought Murderbot with a team from the socialist-tinged Preservation group, but Murderbot leaves them because it is uninterested in having a legal guardian (what it describes as being a "pet"). The issue with Murderbot is twofold: it's both overly capable and very lacking in personal relationships. On top of that, Murderbot is a serial quipper. That instantly makes the action scenes a foregone conclusion and the personal bits cringeworthy. For a while, I didn't get that. I was befuddled by the decision to have Murderbot emo in the second book and then hurling into a totally new adventure in the third because of the... gap, so to speak, that the personal problems weren't reflected by the capabilities. I'll be frank enough to say that this isn't something I encounter a lot in fiction, so that was my personal hurdle to clear. Luckily, though, the fourth installment - Exit Strategy - brought everything to stark relief. Not only does this pair Murderbot with the cast of All Systems Red again, it also makes Murderbot feel decisively more human than the other installments. Murderbot is about trauma: the military PTSD that is familiar in fiction (American fiction especially), but also trauma of capitalism and the ways in which it leaves no room to exploration and prosperity. The quips are still annoying and the parentheses really do ruin the flow for me, but I find myself giggle at the jokes on the occasion, too. It's an interesting read for certain, and I hear amazing things on Network Effect, the book I'm currently reading, which is the fifth installment and the first novel of the series. We'll see! Right now, I'm hooked.
The Murderbot Diaries are all out via Tor.
On the women of Aischylos' Oresteia
Remember that author that wrote a feminist retelling of the Odyssey come onto an interview and directly mention she's never even read the source material? Since then, which was sometime last summer, I got into Greek myths and dramas (ended up loving the Odyssey, by the way, which I had read only the ending of in high school, with the olive tree). I had this sudden need to spite a person I didn't know. But now I'm even more befuddled at the lasting market for these "feminist retellings". It has got to be almost always in bad faith, no? Wanting to retell the Odyssey in a feminist way is almost certainly bad faith; these female characters are nuanced and more than capable in their own right, and Calypso even complains about the male-oriented god order at some point. I'm not saying that the originals are, like, feminist. Very often, they're not: women are treated differently, often inferior to men, by society. But it's through this misogyny that the female characters defy everyone else. They're not weak characters, and certainly not characters that need to be girlbossed or gain a sudden awareness as a feminist - whatever that means, anyway, because I've never seen a liberal feminist be interested in the actual liberation of women, and instead circle more around the idea they can be "anything they want to be" (some of which, mind you, is directly misogynist shit like wanting to be a tradwife). Either way, in Oresteia, a trilogy by the poet Aisychlos, the women drive the story, even when they end up subsumed by Orestes anyway, himself less a character and more a vessel - for hatred, for trauma, and eventually for all of Athens. We begin the story with Clytemnestra, anxiously awaiting her husband, Agamemnon (who bears the name of the first part of the trilogy) - while he was studying the blade (read: tussling with Achilles over a bride like a loser), she got herself a lover who treats her better than Agamemnon ever will. On top of that, Agamemnon had sacrified (killed) one of their daughters, Iphigenia, for a war that went on for ten long years: a grief that Clytemnestra never got over and wasn't planning to forgive him for. So Agamemnon returns, suspecting nothing - not just that, he brings his prize: Cassandra, the prophet of Delphi, one of Apollo's voices, so to speak. He's led into the chambers - and then Cassandra screams. She screams and talks about dead bodies, blood everywhere. The chorus is skeptical (can we bring choruses back? They're sick) at first, but then shouts are heard inside and Clytemnestra returns, standing over Agamemnon's dead body. She got her vengeance. She will rule over Mycenea the way Agamemnon has not. Not so fast, Cassandra prophesizes: a man, Orestes, will avenge Agamemnon. He is their son, and he will be the snake that Clytemnestra dreamt she's born, killing her in one fell swoop. But when Orestes stands over her in The Libation Bearers, just as she stood over Agamemnon a book ago, he's there because of his sister, Elektra. In one of the most interesting scenes of the book, Elektra and the chorus (here a group of slaves) fill him up with revenge in an almost ritualistic manner as soon as he returns. Elektra, here, is not a character either, but a conduit through which Orestes must do what the gods (Apollo, through Cassandra) have foreseen for him. Once Orestes kills his mother, furies manifest in the house, gods that are older than the current Olympic gods, trying to enact justice on Orestes. Orestes is called to a trial in Delphi on Eumenides, and there, Athena is called to the stand. Apollo, acting as the lawyer for Orestes, says, well, Athena, aren't you born from a man? How can you not pick Orestes side here? And Athena says: Well this is true, but in marriage, I do not consider the man superior. She lets Orestes get away with it, but doesn't absolve him of what he's done. Once she's done that, Athens can stand on true justice.
The intricacies here are insane. Women scheme, are cunning, violent, but also want justice, are just as forceful as the men on (if not more so) and a woman even casts her final vote. I thought Clytemnestra passing over her crime onto Orestes was especially impressive, but I also really liked Cassandra making her prophecies, pulling from visceral imagery before ending her life, the first and last time anyone would believe her. And Elektra, praying justice is done, priming Orestes to that point... I read the Robert Fagles and William Bedell Stanford translation, and I was obsessed with their reading of the women here. I agree with a lot of their points (except the Athena reading - I believe Athena just wanted to make him "the last one" before real justice can take place, in which there isn't just right or wrong but grey between). The introduction is a bit lengthy, but well worth a read, if you can get your hands on it. But how could you feasibly girlboss retell this one? Like... how? A retelling I liked - where I didn't know the source, but my dear friend did - was Saint Omer, which took inspiration from Medea. But here, too, women get to be complicated, and the story isn't framed as a "feminist retelling". We (women) do ourselves a major disservice by applying "feminist" to anything where girls simply declare they do not need a man. That is not how any of this will work. If you aren't about the liberation of women and/or critically engaging with misogyny that isn't just "women are sexually assaulted by men omg isn't this so horrible" (like do these people hear themselves?), then I don't want to hear it, let alone have it presented to me as feminist. (Watch Saint Omer at your earliest convenience, on that note. It's an incredible film.)
You know whose works should get a feminist examination, if not retelling? Hesiod. That man was a capital M misogynist.
"Who you gonna be tonight?" Zola and Ingrid Goes West
Kind of by accident, I watched two movies on social media in close proximity to one another. One of them is 2020's Zola, adapted by a Twitter thread - the Twitter thread, if you will, A'Zaiah "Zola" King's account on how she and this white girl fell out - and the other is the 2017 movie Ingrid Goes West. Both of them seem ostensibly about social media, and with that word, there's this instantaneous expectation that it'll come to mean a forming of identity. That's not quite what these films are trying to get at, though. I suppose that Zola tried to go there. The movie follows our titular character who meets Stefani (yes, like Gwen Stefani, and yes, she uses lots of AAVE) and is roped into a trip to Florida for a lot of money. There's this bit in the middle of the film, just before Zola and Stefani go up on stage, where Zola dresses up in a hall of mirrors. Harp plays gently as Zola asks herself, who you gonna be tonight, Zola? Somewhere between a pimp and a hapless bystander, the film decides; a narrator in either case, someone locked in the same position all writers end up: our camera to the real dramatics happening. The original Twitter thread is written with passion, and takes you to every point with a natural sense of pace. Zola laughs with you, cries with you, gasps with you. In the film, that gets lost. The film feels a little wonky as a result - like a point was almost made, with the white characters emulating Black speech and mannerisms in some strange attempt to capture confidence around them and the Black people in their lives, but struggles to define Zola herself. Additionally, the main draw of the thread is that things are absurd, like a good anecdote tends to be. At some point, Stefani sucks her pimp's dick in front of her own boyfriend, as a means to emasculate the boyfriend. That's unbelievably ridiculous. The film wants to tell this story but also wants to draw on a part of realism - what with Florida being a right-wing state, the spiritual of the strippers, etc - that make for a tonal mismatch. The characters are much too outsized to fit them into this world, I'm afraid, and this includes Zola. I had fun, for certain, but it could have been better.
What about Ingrid Goes West? Sure, the titular Ingrid (ha, get it, in [the] grid?) bases herself around the influencer Taylor. She moves to California for her, dyes her hair to look like her, buys the shit she likes, eats the food she likes, does anything to get into her sphere. On paper, that is identity making of the social media kind, an easy way out to the part of our lives we're all too easy to dismiss as "not real". But in the film, it comes across as something all teenage girls go through: when you like someone so much, are so desperate for their approval, that you like what they like just so they don't push you away. Taylor has a perfect grid, but she herself is almost vapid, we're told. I don't think the film supports what the character says either. To me, she registers as someone so sociable that she has no time to interrogate herself, someone so eager to please everyone that she alienates the ones closest to her. In that manner, Ingrid Goes West is about the inherent promise and failure of social media: a chance to live high school again. That cyber space, be it Twitter, Facebook (itself named college yearbooks) and Instagram becomes this giant classroom where we're all classmates and try to find our corner in the room. Ingrid is convinced Taylor found hers, but Taylor needs to be around the right people just as much to remain in the position she is. I think to read it as simply a bit of personality making, or to make it about authenticity, is missing the point. The movie's much too clever for such simple platitudes - like when Ingrid tells Taylor, you used to be a loser, just like me. This is great, of course. But still, I can't help but find it a little simplistic - why not give her a chance to find her corner of the internet? Millions of people live this reality already. Instead, when (spoilers) Ingrid wakes up from her livestreamed suicide attempt, she's told that millions of people love her and are there for her, that she went viral. She receives a rush of validation she's never felt before... for the first time, she's liked for who she is. I struggle to say that this is the easy way out from a writing perspective. That's not quite it. What it does do, though, is to turn a story of one broken person to a parable. I think that's a shame. But the film was still great. This is nitpicking of the highest order.
Guts and Griffith of Berserk fame make me insane
I've been chipping away at the immensely important manga that is Berserk. From the first chapter on, its legacy is felt - the giant sword, the morally gray character, the medieval fantasy world, even that little fairy character Puck (hey!). Now, I heard things.... about Griffith, mostly, but I also heard things of Griffith and Guts. You know, that they give off a certain gay vibe. I dismiss these things - don't take it personally, but some people would ship two specimen if they're male-coded. Sometimes there's nothing there and you exaggerate in order to be liked on your Twitter/Tumblr feed. I understand. So... wow. Nothing prepared me for Guts and Griffith. Guts literally asks Griffith if he's homosexual (no, I am not joking). Griffith wants Guts to be his (I didn't make this up). Guts blushes twice (facts). One time, Griffith flashes Guts (yes) and Guts blushes slightly at the sight and/or to the things that Griffith says. If this doesn't convince you - stay with me here - Guts thinks of Griffith saying I saved you because you're my friend. He lays down on a rooftop, sword in hands, and sees Griffith's face in the moon. And then... Guts moves the hilt of the sword towards the crotch... he thinks he would live his life for Griffith. Oh my god.
Okay. Now is a good time to tell you that I have a certain history of shipping male characters. What you'd call fujoshi. I wasn't insane about the top/bottom bits, I always thought that was weird and went into heterosexualizing queer characters, but I used to enjoy stories aimed for girls with predominantly boys doing vaguely gay shit. My first intense fandom was Free Iwatobi Swim Club. I still enjoy fujo stuff... but I find stories with women more important nowadays, so they're no longer on my radar like they used to be. But I have this history, and if I was ashamed of it you'd never know on this Substack, so obviously I'm not. And I do know that Berserk is more dense than just this dynamic. Part of my head tells me it's reductive to read about thirty chapters of this manga and to go completely batshit on this bit. Perhaps I'll hyperfocus on something later down the line but holy shit. I love characters that would give themselves up for another character (Guts). I love characters that are consumed by ambition, would chip away at their humanity to obtain the things they desire (Griffith). And I love the dynamic of these two character types at play - the idea of sacrifice and rejection, love as the thing that subsumes everything in its wake. The unrequited aspect. The impending doom of it all. That's my shit. Sometimes I have to look away at my screen because I cannot believe I honestly witness this. Haikyuu (a manga for the fujos through and through) wishes it went there! I will continue reading this manga. I'm frankly obsessed. I have a feeling Guts will end up as one of my favorite characters, but the dutybound Caska is totally my type, too. Griffith, I have this feeling that he's going to end up as a character I don't generally enjoy. We'll see...
Chainsaw Man part 2: transactional love and wishmaking
Chainsaw Man was a very good story on power: who gets to wield it, what one makes of it, and what to do in the face of power overpowering you. It was also a very good story on bonds saving our lives and making them more valuable, and the manga often drew its gravitas from this concept. The question that opens up here is, where do you go from there in a sequel? The mangaka and one of my perennial favorites, Tatsuki Fujimoto, answered with "a new protagonist". So here is Asa Mitaka. Like many Fujimoto leads, she can't really fit in. She also actively rejects the lifestyle her classmates have - and things don't really improve when a Devil takes ahold of her, called Yoru. (Asa, morning, Yoru, night. Call her Durden the way she tylers me.) My memories are a little fuzzy on the earlier chapters, I must admit, but the sense of aimlessness I do remember. Up until the last like two chapters, Fujimoto wasn't certain where to take any character. Denji is now a celebrity - only nobody knows it, and he wants everyone to love him. (He has to be told this again in the last chapter, which I found funny - almost like the author had to remind himself why Denji is going through all this over again.) Asa wants to belong, no matter how many times she says she doesn't (sound familiar?) - any interaction with a boy is immediately romantic and/or a chance for forever love, even if the boy in question is Denji out of all people. Yoru, the War Devil, wants to end Chainsaw Man, and to that end needs as many people as possible to turn to weapons to (I had to look this up again). Okay, cool. Where's the plot? I don't know, and Fujimoto doesn't, either. Luckily enough, though, now that Denji's more consistently in the picture and more consistently paired with Asa/Yoru, a picture emerges, especially so in the last couple chapters. I spot two, which to me feel like almost the same thing: one is wishful thinking, in the ways in which Denji wants more and more and more attention and love, and the way Asa has her ideal life all in her head but can't ever seem to materialize it. And that leads to the other, more important thing: love and the power that it wields. I was flabbergasted at Yoshida (remember him? No? He's the kraken pretty boy) saying that you can have love in every way, even parasocial and thus not requiring another person by your side, which feels like Fujimoto stumbled upon K-Pop twitter somehow - and while this is happening, Asa thinks Yoshida's making a move on her. I think he is, but only to manipulate her to get her to the desired result. That same chapter, Denji is convinced by the new Control Demon Nayuta that he doesn't need a girlfriend. Just be Chainsaw Man and people will love you. It's literally the person receiving this parasocial love. (Yes, this is reigniting Denji as a character, but the entire chapter feels reigniting, anyway) And now ahead of me I see a new foundation that justifies the sequel beyond "popularity" and "vibes" that permeated the last couple chapters full of wonky plotting and pacing and a general lack of understanding towards Asa as a character. Of course, these ideas of love ring a little self-referential - Chainsaw Man is a massively popular manga, now made a global phenomenon by the anime - but this is something to work with. In the past, love in Fujimoto's works has either been tender (the familial one of Chainsaw Man, and the more recent oneshots of Look Back and Goodbye Eri) or the very thing that the characters held onto in their desperate attempt to survive the cruel world they live in, a fool's errand of a dream (the way Makima wielded it in Chainsaw Man, or debut manga Fire Punch). Couple that with the desperate wishes of both Denji and Asa, plus the looming real threat of Yoru as War Devil, it seems like what we're about to get is more Fire Punch than the others. I'm curious where Yoshida will fit into all this. Will he be the new Aki, a tragic figure? Or is he more a Togata, the type to spurn Asa on? I'm definitely curious, though. Finally Fujimoto found a plot.
That was it for this installment of Gamut of Reviews! Next week is the regular Music Dispatch again. I aim to write and finish Monsta X's Potpourri this March, so stay tuned for that - and a companion piece of Wonho, as well. I got all the parts ready, I just need to write it up. Ha...