lucymonster | Recent Entries

…are few and far between at the moment, because my life is on fire and the world is on fire-er and my PPD is SO BACK, BABY. But I’ve managed to find some things to keep the good brain chemicals flowing.

Firstly,

rhoda_rants made an amazing Halloween mix and mailed me a copy as a physical CD, which is the most delightfully nostalgic thing that’s happened to me in forever! ❤️❤️❤️ The mix absolutely rocks and I’m keeping it on permanent rotation, because spooky season never ends in this household.

Also on the music front, I’m loving Nordic Gothic by Cemetery Skyline. It’s the goth-inspired side project of a bunch of big names in metal, including guys from Insomnium and Dark Tranquility, and their take on the genre manages to be both faithful in essentials and wonderfully fresh in execution.

Ymir by Rich Larson is a fantastic sci-fi thriller novel. I never know exactly how to talk about thrillers, because I don’t want to say anything that spoils the suspense, but basically this is a story about a guy who joins the corporate empire taking over his home planet, and the freedom-fighting brother he betrays by doing so. It’s a deeply compelling portrait of a villain who believes he’s a victim, carried along by a pacy space-militia plotline and absorbingly gritty worldbuilding. I picked it up solely on the strength of its having been blurbed by Tamsyn Muir, and I’m so glad I did!

I’m also enjoying yet another Skyrim playthrough that doubles as catharsis for *cough* recent global events, since my new character is a Dark Elf who enthusiastically sides with the Stormcloaks (because surely the leopards won’t eat her face!). She’s a stealth archer because I can’t help myself, but I’m shaking things up a bit by investing in my alchemy and enchanting skill trees as well, and going much deeper into the roleplay than I usually do.

And finally, in Star Wars news, they’ve recently announced a new comic series called Star Wars: Legacy of Vader which, despite the title, is going to be mainly about Kylo Ren! It’s by Charles Soule, who writes great Kylo Ren and also great comics in general, and the fact that it’s not coming out until Feb 2025 is unbearable. Three months! I can’t wait three months!

Never, Neverland by Unto Others: I am SO UNHINGED over this album, you guys don’t even know. The weird thing is, I was slightly apprehensive while they were releasing singles in the lead-up: I liked each song on its own, but I wasn’t sure about the coherence between them, or about the move away from the very distinctive heavy metal/goth rock fusion of the previous two albums. I think it’s one of those cases where I loved their old work SO MUCH that I wasn’t sure any new release was going to fully live up to my hype. I needn’t have worried. This album hangs together beautifully from start to finish, and feels like a really natural evolution of Unto Others’ style: it’s still hitting those goth and classic metal notes, but folding in a really fun and creative blend of new influences as well, from call-and-response arena rock to horror punk to jarringly radio-friendly ballad pop. I’ve listened the whole way through about a million times in the...week? maybe fortnight? since it was released, and the only shame is that it has completely obliterated any uncertainty over what my album of the year is going to be. 2024 can go home now - no one else is going to release anything I love more than this.

Special shoutout to Suicide Today for being equal parts heartwarming and fucking hilarious, and to Fame for its insanely catchy riffs.

Die Urkatastrophe by Kanonenfieber: blackened death metal about World War I! I like this quite a lot, but I’m unable to give it a truly fair hearing, because the reason I like it (it’s almost like having a new 1914 album) is also the most disappointing thing about it (it’s not actually a new 1914 album). No one (imo) really stands a chance when compared too directly with 1914, but this is still a solid, enjoyable slab of metal about the horrors of trench warfare, and what can I say? I’m weak for that shit. Looking forward to combing through his historical sources on my next, more thorough listen!

Just a heads up: we are very much engaged with WWI from the German perspective here. The guy’s not fash as far as I can tell from this side of the language barrier, but if loud, militaristic songs about stormtroopers defending their glorious fatherland hit wrong for you then this rec might be one to skip.

Movies

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022): This was absolutely heartbreaking. Last time I tried to watch it, I was in way too soft a mental space and had to nope out early; I got the whole way through this time, but man, it hurt. It's a film about the senselessness of war, and the total disconnect between the men calling the proverbial shots and the men actually forced to fire them.

But if you've read All Quiet, the novel, then perhaps you're reading my summary and thinking 'but that's not really what it's meant to be about!' and - yeah. I'm not entirely convinced this a counts as an adaptation? I'll grant you, the film does contain characters named Paul Bäumer and Kat and Kropp who fight in WWI, and they occasionally do the same things as their book counterparts, but huge chunks of the plot are made up from whole cloth. The geopolitics of the situation, so little touched on in Remarque's work, are front and centre; the intimacy and psychological insight are largely gone. (Paul never even goes on leave!) If the filmmakers had only had the courage to stand on their own two feet and give their work a different title, I'd have had nothing but praise for it: the acting is top notch, the score is exquisite, the themes are powerful, and the combat is fucking terrifying. It's a great film, but it has so little to do with its source material that I'm left with a bit of a sour taste.

Music

Walk the Wire by Miazma: YO DAWG I HEARD YOU LIKE SISTERS OF MERCY. Listen. Sometimes you want to hear musicians reaching for new heights and pushing the boundaries of their chosen genre; other times you just want to shovel huge, heaped helpings of First and Last and Always into your greedy goth mouth, and when you've scraped your plate clean, you want to continue the binge with something that technically isn't First and Last and Always but tastes pretty much the same. This is an album that absolutely makes a virtue of being not particularly original, by being so good at what it does that you can't imagine caring.

Chappell Roan: In the past week or two, tumblr has been talking about this artist so much that my dash would probably have become unusable if I tried to block her name. Her music is a very long way away from anything I would normally listen to, but I watched a few of her film clips and now I think I'm a little bit obsessed? The unabashed queer joy and playful eroticism of Red Wine Supernova is activating feelings I didn't even know I had about my own sexuality. I was lucky to grow up in a fairly non-homophobic environment - I never exactly "came out" so much as just started including girls in my teen dating life without much fanfare - but I had nothing teaching me how to nurture those attractions the way I did with boys. Having lesbian women like Chappell Roan visible in the mainstream back then would have meant so much to me.

YouTube

With no input from me that I can figure out (my YouTube use is like 10% music videos and 90% me streaming Bob the Builder for my toddler), The Algorithm has recently offered up Tasting History with Max Miller, an alarmingly RTMI channel devoted to recreating old recipes and telling fun historical anecdotes along the way. So far I've really enjoyed some videos he did on medieval taverns and monasteries, and another on Regency era breakfasts. I've got a couple about WWII-era cooking queued up next, and also I think I'm going to have to buy his cookbook and see if I can lure any of the neighbours over for a historical dinner party...

Snagged from, like, everybody at this point: The last five fics I wrote with song lyric titles. Are they all going to be Iron Maiden? There's a chance they're all going to be Iron Maiden.

1. the earth will turn to a funeral pyre, The Acolyte, Osha/Qimir, <1k. Title is from Deadlock's The Arsonist, because the song is about fire and the ficlet is full of heavy-handed fire imagery and, well, yeah. This one doesn't really go any deeper than that. But hey! It's not Iron Maiden!

2. say a prayer on the book of the dead, Star Wars, Poe/Finn/Rey/Ben/Jacen, 13.5k. From Blood Brothers by Iron Maiden (theeeeere we go!), pretty much every single lyric of which is perfect 'redeemed Ben Solo searches for new purpose in life while trying to make sense of his hideous past and leaning heavily on his new friends/lovers/allies for support' material.

3. a cross to bear, a heavy faith, Star Wars, Reylo, 1.1k. From Stratego by (wait for it) Iron Maiden, which is about a warrior who can't stop fighting. The warrior seems less enthusiastic about the endless violence than Ben/Kylo, but I liked the vibe of it, and the suggestion of deep existential misery that Ben (ever the unreliable narrator) mistakenly thinks he has put behind him now that he's a Good Guy (TM).

4. we fly just like birds of a feather, I won't tell no lie, Star Wars, Reylo and Han/Leia/Luke, 3.9k. A clumsy misquote (I'm literally just now noticing - should be flock, not fly) from We Are Family by Sister Sledge. This fic is a riff on The Birdcage, in which this song features prominently - link goes to a scene from the film, instead of the official music video. I wanted a title that nodded at the song without being completely on the nose, and I liked that lyric in particular for its adjacency to the two related themes of Rey finding her people and Ben learning to fully accept the ones he's got.

5. self-loathing before you awoke me, Star Wars, Finn/Kylo, 1.5k. From This World Can't Tear Us Apart by Trivium, which Kylo (again, not always the most reliable of narrators) might well pick for his and Finn's theme song: he was alone in a miasma of violent hatred towards himself and everyone else, until Finn broke through like a sunbeam and showed him the way, the truth and the light. (Poor Finn has an awful lot on his plate in this fic.)

Look at that - only two-fifths were Iron Maiden songs! I am the very model of lyrical diversity.

Copying my answers to this tagging meme on tumblr. Please steal at will, I'd love to hear all your answers! <3

1) The Last book I read:

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. I honestly don't know how I got this far in life without reading it given my interest in war history, but oh well - I've read it now, and it was every bit as devastating and wonderful as expected.

2) A book I recommend:

Oh, come on, this isn't a fair question. Who am I recommending it to? And for what purpose? My book recs come tailored, dammit!

For the sake of the game I'm going to plug Star Wars Propaganda, which combines two of my very favourite topics: space wizards and politics! It's also very nicely printed and comes with a bunch of posters included so that you, like me, can live in a house plastered with stormtrooper recruitment posters.

3) A book that I couldn’t put down:

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It actually took me a while to get into - I found the early chapters so off-putting I nearly gave up - but as soon as the plot kicked off, I was utterly obsessed. I mean keeping it on my person at all times, reading while walking to the supermarket, cooking dinner one-handed while propping it open with the other obsessed. Same for Harrow and Nona.

4) A book I’ve read twice (or more):

War by Sebastian Junger. The title makes it sound vast, but it's actually a very specific and self-contained sort of nonfiction character study, of a US infantry platoon stationed in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. It's a powerful read, and very useful if you're someone who spends a lot of time trying to access the mindset of soldiers for your own storytelling purposes.

5) A book on my TBR:

Not in Love by Ali Hazelwood, though it has slipped somewhat down my priority list since I opened the front jacket to find a note from the author warning that it departs from her usual formula. Sincere props to her for expanding her creative horizons, but the days I reach for an Ali Hazelwood novel are the same days I skip supper in favour of shovelling ice cream straight in my mouth from the tub, which are emphatically NOT days on which I'm open to surprises. The formula is the whole appeal.

6) A book I’ve put down:

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, but I think that was a mistake. It's the sequel to a novel I enjoyed a lot but had some lingering quibbles with, and it was a non-renewable library loan due to the reserve queue, so I took that as a sign to give up - only I keep thinking about it every now and then, wondering how the space lesbians are coping with the alien invasion. I might have to rejoin the queue again myself.

7) A book on my wish list:

A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon. Saw on a friend's blog (

osprey_archer it was probably you); saw again on a Goodreads rec list; want.

8) A favorite book from childhood:

The Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell captured my imagination so vividly, it was responsible for more than one twisted ankle when I would tear around the back garden jumping over too-high obstacles and pretending I was Thowra.

9) A book you would give to a friend:

The last book I did give to a friend was the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith novelisation, and the friend was my sister, and she requested it for her birthday. Apparently it's an absolute banger of a novelisation, especially if you like Obi-Wan/Anakin.

10) A book of poetry or lyrics that you own:

Milton's Poetical Works. I am, ever so slowly, picking away at Paradise Lost - it's SO FREAKING GOOD, but I really have to be in the right mood.

11) A nonfiction book you own:

Significantly more than half my library is nonfiction, but I'll pick one I'm currently working on: 1914-1918 by David Stevenson. It's a solid read, in the sense of both 'this is sound history writing' and 'holy fuck there are a lot of pages in this thing'.

12) What are you currently reading:

Other than above, I'm also partway through From Cradle to Stage: Stories from the Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars by Virginia Hanlon Grohl. All these famous musical legends probably belong right up the top on the list of people I've never pictured as babies, but it's a really fun, charming read so far.

13) What are you planning on reading next?

I'm on a bit of a church kick at the moment - the first of a couple of parcels of theology books I ordered have just arrived this afternoon, so I'll be getting stuck into those.

I'm also sorely tempted to do a Lord of the Rings reread. I've been really trying to prioritise new-to-me fiction this year, but what can you do? The heart wants what it wants.

Unto Others have released another new single, Momma Likes the Door Closed! It's my favourite off the new album so far: faster, heavier, and absolutely oozing camp. Cheesy satanic-themed 80s horror vibes, and the music video leans into that so hard I had to laugh aloud. I love this band so fucking much.

Watch on YouTube

Sonja also have a new single out, called Discretion for the Generous, that has me SUPER excited for their next album. It sounds mostly on par with Loud Arriver (which is a VERY GOOD THING imo), but with a cleaner vocal mix - the overused vocal distortion was my only complaint about the last album, so it's great to hear Moore maturing into her voice a bit more and letting it come to the forefront.

Onto full albums: The Ritual by Tryglav is good, solid black metal with catchy melodic riffs that have been floating through my head on and off since I first heard it. I don't think there's anything groundbreaking going on here, but it's a fun, repeatable listen.

Ashes by Grai reached my radar by way of some guest vocals their singer, Irina Zybina, did for Rotting Christ. This is hauntingly beautiful female-fronted Russian folk metal that I've listened to the whole way through an embarrassing number of times already. Disappointingly, the previous album of theirs that I also listened to left me a bit cold, but I love Ashes so much that I'm going to keep giving the rest of their discography a chance. Maybe it just needs time to sink in?

I've always taken the existence of a comprehensive English dictionary for granted. It's the sort of invention that, now we're so used to it, feels both inevitable and obvious - but of course, it was neither, and the story of how it came into existence fills me with a similar kind of awe as I feel when I remember that the pyramids were built without modern machinery.

Before the OED, English dictionaries were slapdash books, focused mainly on rare words that authors thought their readers would find difficult or interesting. In the mid-19th century, the London Philological Society arrived at the idea of a dictionary that covered all words. They had no idea how huge the initiative would become: early predictions had the whole thing completed in just a couple of years, but the first fascicle (A to Ant) wasn't published until 1884, nearly 30 years after work began. Their method relied on an army of volunteers who undertook to read the entire corpus of English literature and copy out quotes illustrating the use of all the words they encountered. They sent these quotes on individual slips of paper to the dictionary staff, who sorted the slips first alphabetically, then chronologically, then by nuance of meaning, then by fitness for purpose. Editors would draft definitions for each word, using the quotes to show its first recorded use and the evolution of its meaning over time. I doubt anyone who has ever met an editor needs telling just how long it could take to finalise a single definition, or how contentious the process could get. But in 1928, the first edition of the Dictionary was finally complete, freeing the team to immediately begin revising it. As far as I can tell, the work has been ongoing ever since.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams is a novel slipped between the pages of history. Esme is a fictional assistant's daughter at the very real Scriptorium where the real Dr James Murray and his team worked on the OED. From a young age she becomes obsessed with words, and with the powerful transformation that occurs when they're plucked from the verbal aether and solidified in print. Her story is a feminist bildungsroman: raised in a loving bubble of clumsy but well-intentioned support within the stiflingly chauvinistic world of late Victorian philology, she becomes keenly aware that the Dictionary's perspective on the English language is heavily skewed along gender and class lines - that countless speakers, historically and in her own time, lacked the means or education to leave a record of their speech that would meet the dictionary's criteria for inclusion. She starts to collect words for her own, private dictionary: the working-class jargon of the Murrays' maid, Lizzie; colourful obscenities from Mabel, an impoverished former sex worker now scrounging the occasional coin as a junk seller at the local markets; the politically conscious language of her friend Tilda, an actress and militant suffragette.

It's a beautiful book, equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking, brimming on every page with love for women and deep, respectful curiosity about our lives that have gone so largely unrecorded throughout history. The pacing is wonderfully natural, following the arhythmic ebbs and flows of a life that feels too lifelike to submit to any rigid story structure. Things happen for a while, and then they change as Esme moves on to something new; not all questions are answered and not every resolution is neat, but it’s all done in a thoughtful, intentional way that only helps make the story more vivid.

The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester is nonfiction, albeit sensationalised in places. It tells the story of Dr Minor, one of the OED’s notable volunteers, who contributed thousands of quotations while incarcerated in an insane asylum for the murder of a total stranger. Minor, a wealthy American army surgeon, suffered from what seems fairly recognisable in modern terms as schizophrenia but was at the time viewed as tragically incurable madness. His work on the Dictionary gave him a connection to the outside world and offered temporary distraction from the nightmarish world of paranoid delusions in which he passed much of the rest of his time.

For a lot of reasons it’s a very enjoyable book, full of fascinating details about the Dictionary, its editors and contributors. But I have to admit that the gusto with which Winchester tackled its more lurid elements gave me, as the kids are saying these days, the ick. Minor’s compulsive sexual behaviours and neuroses are a big part of his story, but I think they could have been faithfully conveyed without eroticising them the way Winchester chose to. At one point, when recounting a truly horrifying instance of sexual self-mutilation, he spins off into a sordid theory that Minor might have been carrying on an affair with his victim’s widow, for which he admits upfront there is zero evidence or even grounds for suspicion - my dude, why include it, then? Was the canonical autopenectomy not dramatic enough for you?

So, yeah. WEIRD VIBES. But I have to give the book credit for being well researched and extremely readable, and even if I don’t agree with all Winchester’s choices, I suppose I can see why he felt that this particular story - half stern lexicography, half miserable untreated mental illness - might need a bit of sexing up.

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner is fantastic, but misleadingly subtitled, I think. Only the first 40 pages are about Tolkien's work on the OED; the rest is a much more general treatment of his passion for philology, including a discussion of how words (not only in English) inspired his writing, and - the largest part of the book - a series of word studies on interesting usages or coinages from his work. It's all quite nitty-gritty and technical, and a fascinating window into the creative process of an author who cared as much about the mechanics of language as the narrative events of his stories.

One thing that especially struck me was the incredible depth and breadth of linguistic knowledge that lexicographers like Tolkien were drawing on for their work. These days, if you want to know the etymology of a word, you look it up in the OED; Tolkien's job was to figure out those etymologies from scratch, which relied on him knowing a whole bunch of old languages (and their literature) inside out. Amazing stuff.

Taken from

delphi!

🎶 Last song I listened to: The Hundred Days Offensive by 1914.

📺 Currently reading/playing/watching: I have several books on the go, but the last one I opened was All Quiet on the Western Front. Not really watching or playing anything at the moment. I recently tried to get back into Jedi: Survivor, but the things that annoyed me about it last time are still annoying so I didn’t get far.

🌶️ Sweet/Savory/Spicy?: All of them! I’m sorry, I know that’s a copout, food is just too good what can I say. At gunpoint I guess I would jettison spicy but it would suck.

❤️ Relationship status: Married with kids.

🤩 Current obsession: Recently read a novel (which I hope to review soon in a separate post) that has me obsessing over a) the OED and b) WWI. Star Wars is also still churning away in the background, as always.

It's been a while since I posted about music, mostly because it's been a while since I had bandwidth to listen to a new album the whole way through. But things are turning around! Here are a few fantastic new releases from this year.

Estrangement by Rope Sect: How do I describe Rope Sect? They're a goth rock (ish) band that have been getting some cross-genre hype in metalhead spaces, which makes intuitive sense to me even though I can't point to any specifically metallic qualities in their music. The Vibe(TM) is just right, I guess. Apparently they're also a concept band, but I haven't really delved into their mythology much yet. (It's something about a separatist cult that's obsessed with hangings, hence all the noose imagery.) They set dark, disturbing lyrics to beautiful melancholic melodies, and the singer's voice is truly gorgeous. Estrangement is their most recent album; I've had their first, The Great Flood, in regular rotation for quite a while now, and I expect this new one will join it.

Never, Neverland by Unto Others: New EP new EP new EP!!!!! Unto Others are a heavy metal band who kind of accidentally reinvented goth rock for themselves, and only realised it after everyone started comparing them to Sisters of Mercy. They're among my favourite bands and it's going to take me a while to digest these new three songs (rest of the album coming in September), but my first impression is that they're leaning more into the soft, wistful side of their sound. It's not the choice I'd have made for them if they came to my house and asked me to pick (heavier, though not always better, is usually where I gravitate) but I'm very much still on board and enjoying the hell out of the new material.

Cutting the Throat of God by Ulcerate: I did say mostly. I went into this album blind, never having listened to Ulcerate before nor seen any reviews - it just came up on a list of new releases, and the cover art looked like roughly what I was in the mood for, so I gave it a try. And holy shit I'm so glad I did. It's been one of those "grabbed by the throat from the opening bars and transported straight to another world" experiences. This is gorgeously dissonant blackened death metal, both melodic and highly technical (though melody is at the forefront imo - the technicality is complementary and never drowns it out). It probably helped that my first listen was outdoors in thin clothes on a freezing cold, grey, windy day - perfect atmosphere for such relentlessly dark, grim music - but I'm finding it no less evocative now, tucked up snugly indoors with my feet in a spa.

Vaxis – Act II: A Window of the Waking Mind by Coheed and Cambria: And now, for something completely different, prog rock! This one was a social listen for me: I had a friend over and they were telling me about an upcoming show by their favourite band and whether or not it's worth going alone when they have no one to drag with them. I was not able to offer to go, as I'm still very much needed at home by tiny people, but we listened to the new album together and I enjoyed it! I actually sort of know the band from my high school days, when they tended to get lumped in with emo based mainly on the high-pitched male vocals. I'm pleased to learn that they're still going and enjoyed the album enough on my first chatty encounter that I'm definitely going to give it another more attentive listen on my own time.

Breaking my recent (ongoing since, uh, mid-April) Star Wars binge down by media, because if I don't then it's going to get wildly out of control and nothing will ever get posted. No spoilers to speak of - I've discussed both plots in general terms but avoided going into detail or revealing any major twists.

The Acolyte
Around a century before the Prequel Trilogy, Mae, a Force-wielding assassin, sets out to get revenge on a group of Jedi who she blames for the death of her mothers and their whole witch coven. By mistake, the Jedi investigators - led by Master Sol, a surviving member of the target group - apprehend her identical twin sister Osha instead, who used to be Sol's Padawan before she dropped out of training and ran off to scrape a living as a meknek. Osha's efforts to prove her innocence quickly snowball into a mission to expose the dark master who's guiding Mae's rampage and uncover the truth about what happened to Mae and Osha's family.

My feelings about this show are all over the place. It has lesbian space witches! A romantically charged dark side corruption arc! A hot evil dude with vulnerable eyes and shaggy dark hair! (It's a bit embarrassing how accurately a haircut can identify who's going to be my fave.) From interviews with the creator (which btw, I'm invested enough to be reading creator interviews, so I guess that says something) it's clear she has a strong artistic vision and a gutsy, subversive message she wants to bring into the Star Wars mythos. It's equally clear the cast all believe passionately in the story they're telling, and there are some incredibly strong performances at play - Master Sol and the Stranger both deserve Iconic Star Wars Character status. (Did you guys know Lee Jung-Jae, of Squid Game fame, learnt English for this role? And did you know Manny Jacinto, that himbo from The Good Place, is actually one of the hottest men alive? My horizons have been broadened!) I have strong fannish feelings about the main ship and have already been writing fic. The amount of potential here is ridiculous.

But the execution is ... also ridiculous, and that truly pains me to say, because I want so badly to be able to love it unreservedly. But it's sloppy. Clumsily written, atrociously paced, full of plot contrivances that don't make sense and promising leads that aren't followed up and details that don't withstand even a cursory sense check. The season is eight episodes of a little over 30 minutes each, and two of those - so, literally a full quarter of the show - are flashback episodes, rehashing the same historical event twice in an attempt at Rashomon that doesn't yield anywhere near enough difference in interpretation to be worth the protracted screentime. Much more could have been accomplished with shorter, more selective flashbacks, like in The Last Jedi. Tonally we were all over the place: one minute it was all Game of Thrones style grimdark carnage (which I have some pretty major issues with, but at least if they'd done it well I could have overlooked it as a matter of taste), the next minute the baddie was getting carried off cartoonishly by giant CGI bugs. One review I read questioned who the target audience was intended to be, and I'm inclined to wonder the same thing: it's too dark to be any fun for kids, too goofy to be Star Wars For Grown-Ups, and plays too fast and loose with lore to please the fandom die-hards. That subversive message I mentioned gets buried almost beyond hope of retrieval under the avalance of 'wait, but' and 'no, actually' and 'hang on, what?' that I couldn't quite suppress even as a biased viewer with a strong preexisting investment in liking this sort of thing.

So look. I'm a Sequels fan, my sister is a Prequels fan, and the two of us have spent the whole season flinging stones via live chat from our respective glass houses. Falling in love with the good bits of a bad story is such a quintessential Star Wars experience that I'm not even mad. I just wish the show had made more of its potential, because I can see the story it could have been and it's so damn good, you guys.

Andor
I grouped this together with my Acolyte thoughts based purely on them both being TV shows, but I'm realising now that it makes for a nicely complementary review, since my reaction to Andor is basically Acolyte's polar opposite: I think it's legitimately brilliant telly, I enjoyed it unreservedly, and I have no real fannish feelings about it at all.

This is the story of Cassian Andor's radicalisation, from a nihilistic thief to a rebel willing to lay down his life for the cause. It unfolds in four meticulously crafted three-episode acts, each one basically a mini-season of its own, interwoven with several other connected but very distinct plotlines. Cassian's friends and family are adapting to life under tightening Imperial control; Senator Mon Mothma is playing dangerous political games while her relationships with her husband and daughter disintegrate; petty, power-mad corporate cop Syril Karn is investigating Cassian for murder, with his own career at stake; intelligence agent Dedra Meero is clawing her way up the ISB career ladder while pursuing her controversial theory that pockets of isolated anti-Imperial activity are coalescing into a unified rebel movement; Luthen Rael is playing God with the lives of countless rebels as he puppeteers that movement from under fragile cover in the heart of the Empire.

It's a stridently political show with a lot to say about the banality of evil, the all-too-human inhumanity of empire, and the necessary ugliness of revolution. There's no lightsaber-twirling escapism on offer here - the whole thing feels devastatingly real and almost too contemporary, but only almost. I thought it struck an impressive balance between speaking to real-world issues and maintaining immersion in its fictional setting. The acting is uniformly excellent. The score is exquisite. The locations feel like you could reach through the screen and touch them. I know I'm a little late to the hype party, but I now appreciate exactly why Andor's reception was as stellar as it was. It's Star Wars for people who don't care about Star Wars and Star Wars for people who are already up to their eyeballs in the canon, and it services both demographics (and everyone in-between) as though reconciling their different demands is as easy as breathing.

So, I guess to wrap up: Andor is phenomenal and I'd recommend it to absolutely anyone, but I've gotten everything I want from the show itself and have no real interest in exploring its subfandom any deeper. The Acolyte is a disaster and I can't honestly say I recommend it at all, but I nonetheless hope everyone watches it because I need more people to scream and snark and squee about it with while swapping messy lapslock tumblr meta and gifs of Manny Jacinto's bare arms.

Books

I tore my way through Love, Theoretically and Love on the Brain, both by Ali Hazelwood. Conveniently, I can cover them both in a single review! Our heroine is a brilliant but impoverished young scientist trying to find her footing on the academic career ladder. She has a zany best friend, a chronic health issue she manages badly enough to give an attentive suitor plenty of occasions to rescue her but well enough to skate under everyone else’s radar, and due to painful past baggage, she’s determined never to fall in love. A professional opportunity forces her into close contact with ~~Adam Driver~~ a senior colleague who is big and aloof and big and well off and academically acclaimed and big, who she hates because she thinks he hates her, because of how aloof he is. But - shock! twist! - as soon as she has to spend time with her colleague, she finds he’s actually a good guy in general and goes out of his way to be good to her specifically. Nevertheless, she will continue to think of him as an asshole for most of the novel, while periodically wondering why she can’t stop noticing how big he is. A bit over halfway through they start having passionate sex, and the colleague reveals he’s been slavishly, pathetically, consumingly in love with her since the moment he first became aware of her existence. This doesn’t really land with the heroine, who’s still pretty sure he hates her. In the antepenultimate chapter we learn that a misogynist has been plotting against the heroine, and the colleague finally proves his love by helping her overthrow him. Her career dreams all come true, she realises she’s in love as well, and the happy couple ride off into the sunset talking about all the science they’re going to do together.

It’s safe to say that Hazelwood has a formula. But honestly, I’m eating it up with a spoon. It’s witty and tropey and sexy and demands absolutely nothing of me, and sometimes that’s what you want, you know?

Food

Husband bought us a tasting box of single origin chocolates after watching a YouTube video about it. You guys, omg, did you know cacao beans are kind of like wine grapes? Mass manufacturers blend a whole bunch of different sources together and process them for uniformity, but left to their own devices, they actually taste SO DIFFERENT depending on where they come from! I tried fruity ones and nutty ones and an extra-bitter one I hated and a sweet, kind of tangy one I could eat forever, and they were all made to exactly the same recipe: cacao beans, sugar, cocoa butter.

I’m in love. I can’t do wine tastings any more because my liver and/or stomach have it out for me, but frankly, I think chocolate tastings are an even better substitute.

Exchange fic

So, May the Fourth Exchange happened! (This post has been sitting in drafts for a while now. Oops.) Firstly: just look at my gifts. LOOK at them. I have been spoilt rotten and I'm still pinching myself a little that so much rarepair goodness came my way. I really, REALLY do not have time to be doing exchanges at the moment, but Mt4 is my one big do-or-die event of the year and I have zero regrets for the full body push it took to cram the thing into my schedule.

Secondly, I want to blather a bit about the fic I wrote, because it got wildly out of control in a way that was both very fun and very exhausting. (There's also a punchline. Please stick around for the punchline! I'm still screaming about it a little inside.) ( tl;dr is it even Mt4 if I'm not drowning in canon review and >20x over the wordcount? )

Anyway - now we're at the punchline - reveals day came around and it turns out my recip not only wrote for me in return but basically joined me in a surprise round robin! Like, theirs is the get-together, mine is the three-years-later established relationship. Same core cast, same canon divergence, same complicated polyship. If the premise of 'Ben survives Exegol and goes on to have complicated relationships with a whole bunch of Resistance heroes' sounds even a tiny bit appealing to you, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND:

All the Stars in the Sky (7571 words) by ambiguously
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Finn/Rose Tico & Poe Dameron/Jacen Syndulla, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Finn/Rose Tico/Poe Dameron/Jacen Syndulla
Characters: Poe Dameron, Jacen Syndulla, Rey (Star Wars), Finn (Star Wars), Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, POV Poe Dameron, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Canonical Character Death
Summary: Poe has a lot of problems left to deal with after the Battle of Exegol.

TV shows

As mentioned above, I've been (re)watching Resistance and enjoying it SO much more than I remember doing last time. It's first and foremost a fun, goofy show aimed at a somewhat younger audience than the other cartoons, but it also has some really thoughtful messages about how far right organisations recruit by exploiting people's natural cravings for belonging and security. The whole cast are pretty much all lovable, but I'm especially taken with Synara and Tam ~~and their glaringly obvious romantic chemistry that deserved so much more screentime than it ended up getting~~.

I also started The Bad Batch, which until now I'd correctly but misleadingly lumped in with TCW as Clone Stuff(TM). Like yes they're clones, and Clone Stuff(TM) doesn't usually interest me very much, but these clones are living their best Accidental Child Acquisition lives! If Disney wants to milk The Mandalorian's success forever by churning out an endless stream of gruff action heroes adopting and protecting small children, I think I'm actually okay with that. I'm still early in season 1 so no idea where it's all going, but I'm enjoying myself a lot so far.

Comics

I read Crimson Reign and Hidden Empire, in which Qi'ra leads Crimson Dawn and an assortment of other criminals and miscreants (prominently including the Knights of Ren) on a campaign to end the rule of the Sith. The plot revolves a McGuffin that can literally freeze people in time and is a bit silly even by Star Wars standards, but it clips along at a great pace and has some truly heartwrenching Qi'ra moments. It's a fairly large crossover event, and I've grabbed all the other tie-ins that my library had, so I'll be reading those at some point soon. Doctor Aphra is involved!

Video games

I started playing Squadrons, which is the first flight simulator I've ever touched. This experience has taught me that I don't like playing flight simulators, but I do like watching them played, and luckily my husband is not the kind of man you have to pressure very hard to pick up a game controller. It's an enjoyably different perspective on the big Star Wars adventure, since you're playing ordinary pilots on both the Rebel and Imperial side, nobody important. There's also an embarrassingly hot Imperial NPC named Terisa Kerrill, who's portrayed by an Aussie actress, which is nice! It's not Mandatory Star Wars Content by any stretch, but it's a good bit of fun.

I happened to check back in on tumblr just in time for The Boopening, and man, it was so much fun! Tumblr in its heyday was a miserable hellhole, I know, but I also had some of the best fannish times of my life on there and that silly button brought back the very best of that chaotic, gleefully uncool energy I’ve been missing.

I’ve been out of the loop on new Star Wars stuff for a little while. There seems to be a bunch going on with new movies and video games that I don’t especially care about, but I did just learn that there’s been a big comics crossover event starring the Knights of Ren, Qi’ra AND Aphra! The library seems to have most of it, so I’ve done the right thing and requested it there instead of blowing a whole month’s fun money on digital instant gratification. I want it SO BAD.

In other library news, I’ve been picking away at A Desolation Called Peace, which is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire. It’s a non-renewable loan that I ordered before realising I was lukewarm on Martine’s writing, and I’ve been persevering out of some kind of sunk cost fallacy - as with the previous one, I really WANT to love it, but it just isn’t quite grabbing me.

I’ve also been reading more Ali Hazelwood, starting with Check and Mate, which I didn’t realise was YA until I’d already brought it home. YA is great and romance is great, but I think YA romance is a bridge too far for me. I’m not going to be the grown woman who bitches about how a gooey love story for teenagers didn’t scratch her itch, so I’ll leave my review of this one at ‘wasn’t for me’. Next up is Love, Theoretically which is for an adult audience and much more promising so far.

Also on my pile is Icebreaker by Hannah Grace. There are so many red flags: it’s billed as a ‘TikTok sensation’, the summary sounds very ‘YA with added sex scenes’, and I can feel in my bones that it’s going to be Wrong About Figure Skating. But my sudden appetite for grumpy-meets-sunshine het romance is out of control so I’m going with it anyway. I expect no sympathy from anyone if it ends badly.

Nothing on the TV/movie front except that I still have Deadloch on the brain. I honestly NEED more Cath/Dulcie/Eddie in my life, but poking around for fic has taught me that I simply no way no how cannot overlook non-Aussie writers getting the slang wrong. This also means I can’t request it in exchanges, because ‘don’t write for me unless either you or your beta are Australian’ would be the wankiest thing since ‘DNW gross stuff’. I’m not usually this picky! I don’t like it!

The Locked Tomb obsession, on the other hand, continues to bring me nothing but joy. I’m usually wary of doing fandom on reddit because it’s such a mixed bag, but subscribing to r/TheNinthHouse has been a great decision. Toothsome meta and lots of great fanart, with no bad vibes that I’ve seen so far.

That’s me, anyway. How are all you guys going? I have lots of flist to catch up on, but it’ll have to be in the coming days because it’s 7pm now and I’m sorry to say that’s bedtime when your up-all-night tiny one won’t take a bottle.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine: I did like this, but I wanted very badly to love it and that unfortunately just didn't happen. It's a cerebral and reflective space opera, with intricate worldbuilding inspired by the author's expertise in Byzantine history, and a primary f/f romance. There are a lot of things I could pick at to explain why I didn't quite buy in, from relatively major weaknesses in the plot to trivially minor issues with the prose (so many italics, oh my stars), but I think ultimately what actually let it down is the thinness of the characterisation. There's a lot of tell vs show re. the protagonist Mahit's personality: we're told that she's extroverted, ambitious and politically canny, but I didn't think any of those traits came across in any notable way, and mostly the plot just seemed to happen to her as a side-effect of more convincing political operators doing their thing in her vicinity. The chemistry between Mahit and her love interest also wasn't there for me. I can forgive just about anything in a book that makes me truly love its characters or root for a particular relationship, but without that strong emotional connection, other flaws stand out a lot more.

What I did really savour was the focus on language: Mahit is an ambassador from outside the empire, working in her non-native language, and she has a lot of interesting insights into how different languages express concepts in different ways and so subtly shape their speakers' worldview. There's also some really cool stuff about memory and identity. Mahit's people use a kind of brain implant that lets them install a deceased predecessor in their own mind, which imperial culture (with which in this case I'm inclined to sympathise) finds existentially horrifying. And of course the book's overall theme - the insidiousness of empire as a political structure - is deftly handled, with an uncompromising message that's both direct enough to be deeply thought-provoking and removed enough from our reality not to feel didatic. So if any of that sounds appealing, I think this book is worth a read! It didn't quite scratch the itch I wanted scratched, but it's still got a lot in its favour and I'm glad I read it.

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood: I wasn't sure how I'd feel about reading reskinned Reylo when I could be reading actual Reylo, but as it turns out, I enjoyed the everloving fuck out of this. I've read some of Hazelwood's fic before (though not the fic that turned into this book); she's a skilled, compelling romance writer whose Star Wars opinions are just a little too far removed from mine for it to be a good match. But changing the names is apparently all it takes to take that pressure off; it's Reylo enough to hit some of the same notes that make me like Reylo, but the characterisation I might disagree with for Kylo and Rey doesn't matter when it's Adam and Olive. (Side note, I unironically love that she renamed Kylo as Adam. And that the cover art is blatant Reylo fanart, by one of the most distinctive and instantly recognisable artists in the fandom. Literally no fucks were given about concealing this novel's origins and I have nothing but respect for the chutzpah.)

Fannish biases aside, this is a witty, indulgently tropey novel about a sunny PhD biology student who ends up fake dating her department's most illustrious (and notoriously dickish) professor for genre-typically flimsy reasons. It's full to the brim with banter, mutual pining, STEM nerdery and gorgeous sexual tension. I polished off the whole book in just slightly over a day (and a busy, heavily interrupted day at that) and I'm looking forward to reading more of Hazelwood's original work when I just want to relax and smile.

Books

I read Translation State by Ann Leckie, but tbh, I should probably have DNF'd it. I kept pushing on because I've loved Leckie's other work so much - the Imperial Radch trilogy is up there with my absolute favourites of all time - but I really was not the target audience for this book, which was basically just a heavy-handed YA simplification of themes (gender diversity, consent, autonomy) that Imperial Radch handled with far more nuance. It had three protagonists, but they were all kind of samey, despite the fact that one of them was a Translator and should have been utterly unhinged by human standards. All three were underqualified nobodies thrust unwittingly into an adventure of galactic proportions, for reasons just a bit too contrived for my taste, and the ultimate outcome was telegraphed so far in advance that the tension just wasn't there for me. I'm disappointed because I was really motivated to like this book, but I think I'm probably just going to discard it from my personal Radch canon.

I'm currently about halfway through A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, which I'm enjoying much better, though still not quite as much as I wish I was. I picked it up because I was desperate for more space lesbians after finishing the Locked Tomb books, but I think it suffers unfairly for that - my space lesbian expectations are just too sky high at the moment. But the worldbuilding is really fun, with lots of linguistics details and tidbits of in-universe meta at the start of each chapter.

TV

I've been seeing a lot of hype about Deadloch on my flist -

fiachairecht and

delphi, looking at you - and holy shit you guys were right, this show is brilliant. It’s an eight-part Aussie crime drama/black comedy about a buttoned-up lesbian cop and a crass, douchey, delightfully gender nonconforming detective who team up to solve a series of grisly murders in a small Tasmanian town. The cast is chock full of complicated women, the humour is dry and daggy in a quintessentially Australian way, the atmosphere is tense and spooky, and the feminism pulls no punches. I talked my sister into watching it as well and we both went absolutely feral for it. 10/10 would recommend to everyone.

Music

I’ve been seeking out new music for a playlist I’m calling ‘metallic goth’. If gothic metal is metal that draws inspiration from goth, this is the opposite: a true goth rock sound, with heavy metal influences. Some faves so far:

Cemetery Echo - I've been loving their EP, Come Share My Shroud, which uses a really compelling range of vocals: heartfelrt cleans, blackened screams, and gravelly spoken word.
Babylon Whores - Sol Niger has made it onto the very short list of songs that Mini willingly lets me play in the car! Variety! Yay!
Horror Vacui - atmospheric deathrock with heavy, driving rhythms. Mini does not let me play In Darkness You Will Feel Alright in the car even though it has everything in common with some of his favourite music, but I sneak it into rotation sometimes when he's asleep in the back.

( Letter under the cut )

(I usually use my skeleton icon for music posts, but honestly, how can I not)

Tore my way through Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth. Loved them so much that I have no idea how to review them: I don't want to spoil them for anyone because the suspense is a big part of what made them such a mind-blowing read, and most of my favourite bits are massive spoilers. I can't even say who one of my faves is without semi-spoiling a major reveal for anyone who knows me or my taste. ('If you tell me it'll betray who the secret villain is,' said my best friend. 'Your fave committed genocide, didn't they,' said my husband. I'm mad as hell but can't argue back because they are both, unfortunately, correct.) So this is not a review at all, just a jumble of excited thoughts that I don't think will even mean anything to anyone who hasn't read the books but I recommend not clicking just in case. You should read the books!! They're really, really good!!!

( Spoilers below )

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I adored this! Full disclosure, I didn’t start out adoring it: Harrow’s cruelty to Gideon in the opening chapters was so wretched and pointless that I had to pause and look up spoilers, because the difference between me loving her and hating her in a not-even-fun-to-hateread way was going to hinge entirely on the backstory that motivated it. Without passing on those spoilers, let’s just say she passed the backstory check and is now my poor little meow-meow.

Aside from that initial speedbump, everything about this book seems almost tailor made to appeal to me. The basic sales pitch that everyone throws around is “lesbian necromancers in space”, and that’s accurate, but doesn’t convey just how gloriously, unrestrainedly gothic the whole thing is. The lesbians live in Space Gormenghast! They dress in thick layers of decaying black and paint their faces to look like skulls! Their jewellery is made of human bones! Their rosaries are also made of human bones, because they’re ultramorbid Death Catholics with an actual religious obligation to be as creepy as possible at all times. I know Muir’s writing style can be a bit polarising, but the fusion of lush gothic prose with quippy modern slang really worked for me. It was vivid, visual and atmospheric in the way of a classic gothic horror novel, but as relatable and semi-ironically dorky as my tumblr dash. The scariness level was also calibrated perfectly: the whole thing is suspenseful as fuck with some truly chilling moments, but also periodic releases of tension (of both the answer-to-tantalising-mystery and silly-comic-relief varieties) that stopped the stress becoming un-fun, which tends to be a problem for me with a lot of horror because at heart I’m a giant wimp who deserves to have her goth card revoked.

So yeah. I love this book a lot. I love it so much that I bought the second book of the series in hard copy - the cover art is so good omg, I need it on my shelf - and am now fuming because my order is days late and I want it noooow.

Unruly: a History of England’s Kings and Queens by David Mitchell. Yes, David Mitchell the comedian. I have to start on this one with a disclaimer, too: British royal history is super not my area, and this is pop history of the glibbest, most minimally sourced kind, so I have absolutely no idea how trustworthy it is. It could be! It could be a brilliant distillation of rigorous scholarship into a more appealing vernacular style, but it could also be riddled with misinformation and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Honestly, though, I don’t care. Life is too short to try and be an expert on everything, and this book is a damn enjoyable foray into a subject that doesn’t interest me much for its own sake but that becomes equal parts gripping and hilarious in Mitchell’s hands.

The book spans from the earliest years of post-Roman Britain to the reign of Elizabeth I. To make up for its huge chronological span, it’s quite narrowly focused; contemporary events and culture are treated only as far as strictly necessary to make sense of the story. What really seems to interest Mitchell is a) understanding each of the monarchs as people and b) tracing the evolution of British monarchy as a concept, from the early days when kings were basically just successful warlords to the eventual notion of special sacred dynasties chosen by God to hold supreme executive power. He has no strident anti-monarchical agenda as far as I can tell, but finds joy in highlighting the absurdities of the system and being generally as irreverent as possible (he has an absolute field day with King Cnut, whose name apparently suits him best if you read it as a typo).

But while his political sympathies are mildly expressed, his personal empathy is keen - and it’s that, ultimately, that kept me absorbed in this book. In treating all these long-dead monarchs with gossipy flippancy, Mitchell humanises them - I imagine he’d write exactly the same way about modern political leaders. He’s never slow to point out how alien their cultural context was from anything we as his readers will have experienced, but at the end of the day they’re all just people, and the core business of being human doesn’t meaningfully change across time, space or culture. Mitchell makes ordinary human figures out of people who worked extremely hard to hand themselves down to history as somehow special. He’s also just really, really bloody funny. He hasn’t changed my mind about my general lack of interest in this subject, but in his hands it was well worth the time.

Jumping on the bandwagon because this meme has been all over my reading page!

Three Ships

Reylo (Star Wars Sequels): Actual cosmic soulmates kept apart by ~~fate~~ ~~duty~~ Kylo’s shitty, shitty life choices. Came for the heartache, stayed for the heartache.

Din/Bo-Katan (The Mandalorian): I shipped this from the moment Bo-Katan swaggered onto the screen, and then season three came and piled on the loyalty kink so thick I nearly died.

Byakuya/Renji (Bleach): What if loyalty kink and lovers kept apart by fate/duty/shitty life choices? This is one of those ships that is probably going to simmer in the back of my mind for the rest of eternity, even though I’ve pretty much 100% moved on from the rest of the canon.

First ever ship: James/Lily (Harry Potter). The day I found Mugglenet and learnt that other people shared my obsession with what happened between Lily’s rejection of James at age fifteen and their marriage several years later - that they were publishing their fantasies about it for everyone else to read - was the day transformative fandom sank its claws into me too deep to ever let go.

Last song: Demonon Vrosis - Rotting Christ

Last film: A documentary about a tragedy to which I am tangentially connected enough that watching it was a bad idea. I can’t really blog about it without halfway doxxing myself, but I don’t want to anyway because seeing the fan community discuss it all over social media like an ep of their favourite show is a not insignificant part of what’s fucking me up.

Currently reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Not far enough in yet to know if I like it, but the aesthetic is gorgeous.

Currently watching: Nothing, really. I still have one episode left of OFMD season two but I’m so turned off by the spoilers that I probably won’t bother.

Currently consuming: A spoonful of bolognaise sauce, to check the seasoning. It’s nearly ready.

Currently craving: An uninterrupted night’s sleep but that’s not going to happen lmao.

Barbie (2023)
I managed to get to the cinema after all, and I'm glad I did! More diligent viewers than me have had lots to say about the movie's messaging and cultural significance; honestly, I was just happy to switch my brain off and enjoy the spectacle. As a big childhood Barbie fan, I found the sets, props and costumes all deliciously nostalgic (Weird Barbie got off easy, though I understand why - the things I did to my Barbies when I 'played with them too hard' might make an interesting slasher spin-off, but for this movie's purposes they would have brought down the vibe). The stakes were nonexistent, in a relaxing rather than boring way. I laughed at basically every joke. Ken's whole shtick was especially hilarious! I'm looking forward to eventually watching it again on home release with my siblings who couldn't make it to the screening.

Layla M. (2016)
Dutch film about a Dutch Moroccan girl who, angry with her home country's rampant Islamophobia, falls down a rabbit hole of Islamic extremism. The story tracks Layla's radicalisation with a lot of compassion: grooming plays a part, but so does the ongoing trauma of racism, police brutality and religious oppression. Her more moderate family and friends are at a loss how to reach her, and conflict with them only increases her alienation. She ends up running away to Jordan with her newlywed jihadist husband, where her dreams of religious and moral freedom come face to face with the realities of life under strict patriarchal rule and the violent military conflicts that now loom on her doorstep.

Layla's fiery personality and deep care for the plight of Muslims around the world are impossible not to admire; I felt like the movie did a good job of getting inside a worldview that Western culture finds it all too easy to demonise. Ultimately there's a strong sense of Layla being caught between two cultures with two value systems, both of which have a powerful claim on her and each of which wants to crush the other half out of her. And there's no easy out, no safe place she can run to. In Jordan she's her husband's property; in the Netherlands she's a "jihadi bride" at the mercy of an unsympathetic legal system. It's a devastating story, and unfortunately as topical now as it was on release.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023)
This has to be the most heavy-handed movie I've seen all year, and yes, I say that having just seen Barbie. I enjoyed some things about it! But oh man, it is so heavy-handed. I mean, it's for a good cause at least. It's about the Afghan interpreters who US and allied forces abandoned to the mercy of the Taliban, fictionalised in the bodies of Ahmed and Sergeant Kinley. Rough synopsis: when a raid on a Taliban explosives manufacturing facility goes wrong, Kinley escapes into the wilderness with his interpreter Ahmed but suffers incapacitating injuries. Ahmed, a married man and father-to-be who took the job 'just for the money', dares everything to get him home by a long and painful journey through Taliban-controlled territory. A repatriated Kinley then fights to get Ahmed and his family (who are now deep in hiding) their promised visas, and track them down so they can be evacuated to America.

Ahmed was most of what made this movie enjoyable. He's a great character, instantly likeable, and I appreciated the ongoing emphasis on the value of his expertise - he's whip-smart and always ready to challenge his US employers when their ignorance of local terrain or custom threatens to derail a mission. Unfortunately, nothing else really lived up to his performance: Ritchie fumbled every other opportunity to put nuanced and interesting Afghan characters on screen (mostly they were interchangeable AK-toting extremists), most of the action scenes were nonsensical, and Kinley was so bland it almost (but only almost) circled back to being impressive. The movie tried desperately to give Kinley and Ahmed's respective struggles equal billing, which was a pitiful flop, given that Kinley's problem was "getting Ahmed out of Afghanistan is hard" while Ahmed's problem was "I'm on the run from the Taliban who want to torture me to death and also murder my wife and newborn child, while the occupying army that was supposed to guarantee my safety twiddles its thumbs and argues about paperwork".

But on the other hand it was a very pretty movie, and the nonstop dramatic string music kept tricking me into feeling emotionally invested, so. Points for that?

Three Songs for Benazir (2021)
This is a short (<30min) documentary about Shaista, a young Afghan father living in a camp for internally displaced people in Kabul. Shaista dotes on his wife Benazir but struggles with the strictures of family life when his father and brothers prevent him from enlisting in the army. Instead he is pushed to take work harvesting opium poppies, which leads to a devastating addiction; the documentary ends with him in a residential treatment centre, receiving a visit from Benazir and his kids, who in his absence are going barefoot due to lack of funds.

The cinematography is beautiful and intimate, and the storytelling is sparse, leaving most of the work up to the ordinary human charisma of Shaista and Benazir. I really enjoyed seeing a snapshot of everyday life in Afghanistan: the devastation of war is inescapable, but the focus is very much on people being people, and loving each other, and living the best lives they can.

teach me the art of war

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