This is ramble (okay, rant) about why I may be responding as I am to Wonder Woman: 1984 (liked it okay) and Discovery, especially S3 (kind of hate it). I am socially on the left but increasingly find my responses to pop culture out of step with some of the more prominent left-leaning responses. To wit, Wonder Woman is being panned and most of the left-tube seems fairly strongly pro-Discovery. So why am I out of step? Rambles and spoilers below. ( Read more... )

When I first heard of Fray, the futuristic Buffyverse graphic novel, I didn't seek it out because I didn't see the point of reading what sounded like a retread of Buffy themes without the characters I'd come to care about. In terms of my own experience as a reader, that judgment had some foundation.

Fray reads very much like season 1 of Buffy set in a generic, mildly dystopian future (with a good handling of future slang!). It's got all the trademarks of basic Buffy executed well: a kickass Slayer, female bonding, an emphasis on friends/family/community as essential to heroic success, cute witticisms, and impending apocalypse. I give it extra points for not needing to include romance. It doesn't feel very original, but it does produce a Slayer whose life experience and main relationships are different from Buffy's, and its engagement with her family life is genuinely interesting and the novel's most original aspect.

I think it overdoes the Buffy trope of having a scene end and the next scene begin with a heavily ironic line that answers or contradicts the end of the previous scene. Ex. from S6 of Buffy:

Buffy: Warren's not going to get away with this.

CUT TO:

Warren: We're going to get away with this.

I like that trope; in fact, I'm guilty of emulating it, but it was a bit too much here. But that's a niggle.

I am very impressed by the art of Fray (full color). Almost every panel is a work of art. By contrast, it highlights how hastily executed much graphic novel artwork is.

All in all, it's a fast read with some fun bits and some good feminist messages and a bit of pathos and originality in character relationships and settings. Lovely art. I recommend it if you like Buffy, but it also serves to illustrate that Buffy has already been done.

Thank you, Soseki Natsume-sensei for reminding me of what it's like to get lost in a really well-written book--and it feels like it's been a very long time. Kokoro, written in 1914, is a collection of three connected novellas, detailing the lives of a university student and a melancholy older man he assumes as a mentor. The translator's (Edwin McClellan) preface tells us that the dominant theme is loneliness, and I guess I wouldn't disagree. All three stories read as very real, very human, and fascinating depictions of the interplay between traditional Japanese culture and emerging western values in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

( Thoughts that actually don't have much in the way of spoilers )