omg_wtf_yeah | Reading

Photograph with added text: Female Relationships, at Fancake. Four old Nepalese women sit together on a low brick wall, their feet dangling, most of them barefoot, their shoes kicked off below them. They're dressed in loose patterned fabrics in various shades of red and the mood is relaxed.

fancake's theme for June is Female Relationships! That's any kind of relationship with any kind of female—cis, trans, alligator priestess, whatever you got! We already have recs in Star Trek Reboot, Mo Dao Zu Shi/Chen Qing Ling, a stop animation film featuring Barbie dolls and a Cher song (yes, it's as amazing as it sounds), Ghosts (US), and King Falls AM.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

runpunkrun

Miserable teenage lesbian makes bad dating (and life) choices while her best friend looks miserable about it: A Graphic Novel.

I didn't love all the bad choices and self-induced misery, but I did enjoy how effortlessly queer this is, and the ebb and flow of the friend group. I also loved how on target the fortune teller's advice was, but that Freddy was just too deep in her own bullshit to understand it. The greyscale art is modern and expressive, with a lot of movement and delightful pink highlights. A good read, and the ending improves on the beginning.

Also the cover is just so good.

Contains: infidelity; unplanned pregnancy; abortion.

melagan

When a scene just isn't working for you.

You've got a great idea only something isn't coming together quite right. A lot of plot bunnies end up gathering dust because of this very thing.

So, what do you do? That's a hell of a good question. What? It's not like I have the answer to it.

Although I do recall a little bit of advice I've found helpful. Backtrack through your work and find the place where it went off the rails. That's the point where it needs to be fixed.

Not that I have ever made my beloved characters have sex and forgotten to get their pants off first. *coff*

runpunkrun

Karina Ahmed's parents have gone to Bangladesh for a month to visit family, leaving her with her grandmother, her younger brother, and the class "bad boy" (he wears a leather jacket) she's supposed to be tutoring in English, if he ever shows up.

In this, I think Bhuiyan wrote the book she needed—a dutiful brown girl finds a rich white Tumblr-therapy speaking boyfriend and the courage to defy her parents—and I hope it finds the readers who need it. The story is moving and the romance is sweet, though the prose often reads as unpracticed and the romance eventually devolves into saccharine cliches with Ace (his name is Ace) saying things like "you've stolen my heart" and "you're the brightest star here" which dulls its originality and makes Ace the most supportive, considerate, loving, patient, woke, rich white teenage boy in all of New York City, which was a bit hard to swallow. It's 100% wish fulfillment and I'm 100% cool with that, but it made Ace and the actual dating the least satisfying part of this for me. Instead, I was most interested in Karina's struggle to figure out what she wanted from her life and whether or not she could stand up to her parents and ask for it. The family dynamics are well drawn and I was invested in Karina and her relationship with her parents, her brother, her grandma, and her many, many cousins.

Features:

a Muslim Bangladeshi-American teenager
teenage poetry
fake dating
a kick-ass Dadu (grandma)
the unconditional love of two OTT best friends
depictions of anxiety
controlling parents

melagan

I might have ideas aplenty, but when it comes to sitting down and putting the work into it....

This post is an excellent example. I could have pulled up my current WiP but oh-no instead I hunted down a picture of distracted prairie dogs for this post.

*headdesk*

It's a very fine line between distraction and procrastination.

runpunkrun

Finally, also from my drafts, and the last in my irregular series from 2020-2024 of watching stuff, The Twilight Zone, on DVD from the library:

Jordan Peele and Simon Kinberg (IMDb says: A British film producer, director, and screenwriter known for producing the X-Men films, Fant4stic, Logan, the Deadpool films, Cinderella, and The Martian) reboot the Twilight Zone. The stories are twisty, thought provoking, and intense, reproducing the original show's vibe and big name guest stars, while also adding diversity and confronting modern social issues like racism, sexism, and colonialism. I could only comfortably watch one episode at a time, and sometimes only uncomfortably. "Replay" was particularly effective in the way it portrayed the threat that police pose for Black people in America and I found it to be very tense. Other favorites from season one: "The Comedian," "A Traveler" (written by Glen Morgan of The X-Files's Morgan & Wong), and "Not All Men." But, as with any anthology, the stories are of varying quality and sometimes I spent the whole hour trying to divine the twist or decipher the in-universe rules because the show failed to make me interested in the characters or their problems. The season one finale, "Blurryman," was especially boring despite featuring my beloved Zazie Beetz.

I ended up I watching both seasons for completism rather than pleasure, with the second season a huge let down after the first. I briefly perked up for "8" about a remote science station doing deep sea research in Antarctica, all of that deeply my jam, starring Joel McHale's face, of which I am a big fan, but the rest of him is not so great at dramatic acting, and the episode itself was so flat I couldn't even care about what the twist meant for the fate of humanity. The standout in that season was easily "Try, Try" and its (correct) reading of Groundhog Day as romantic horror, as a woman is stalked and manipulated by Topher Grace in ways she couldn't possibly anticipate or defend against.