Books I Read Last Year

Hello! I am tired this week. I haven’t been sleeping that well, and for whatever reason, Sleeping!Me is plotting to make me freeze by throwing off the comforter blanket so I wake up colder than usual. It’s very frustrating.

Anyhow, I told you guys I wanted to talk about books that I read last year. And like, part of the problem is that a lot of the books I read last year I’ve already talked about to one extent or another? And that… worries me, because I don’t want to be too repetitive to the, like, three people who read these Notes.

So I decided to do this as a sort of awards-type thing, where I give out awards for books and serieses I read last year in totally arbitrary categories. And to be clear, these are I books I read last year, not books that were released last year.

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Best Superhero Comic: Kingdom Come by Mark Weid and Alex Ross

In today’s world, in which it seems like everyone’s trying to do a storyline that makes superhero stories darker or more politically complex, it’s invigorating to read a story that handles these issues, all the while affirming that superheroes are, at their core, about helping people. I think that’s lost sometimes. People blame that on DC because of the battle at the end of Man of Steel, I think, but there’s a tendency in Marvel as well to try to tell stories about superheroes where we ask questions like “Why do there need to be heroes?” and that’s… not really why we read superhero comics, is it? 

There are times when it seems like the story’s going down the road of being harsh on the ideas of superheroes, or in its depiction of iconic characters like Batman, but in the end it’s remarkably hopeful. It’s hopeful in regards to Superman and to humanity. I wasn’t expecting to be wowed, considering how other Elseworlds stories I’ve read have gone, but this story manages to blend dystopian future, superhero reconstruction, and Biblical apocalyptic imagery into one coherent and fun-to-read story, and that’s really cool and I wish more comics were like this.

Best Horror: American Vampire by Scott Snyder

I was kind of between this and Locke and Key but I ended up on this because I haven’t gotten far enough into Locke and Key for me to really love the Plot. It’s good, but American Vampire starts with vampires in the old West, and that’s difficult to beat.

I’m not a huge horror guy, nor a huge vampire guy, but I do like historical fantasy, wherein the author puts the supernatural in a historical setting. American Vampire starts with a story about an outlaw that gets turned into a vampire. The twist is that Skinner Sweet turns into a new breed of vampire, making him not just a threat to the lawmen trying to put him down, but also to the other vampires, as no one yet knows his weaknesses and limits. 

Interspersed with this is a story of vampires in the Hollywood of the 20’s, and the young actress, Pearl, who gets wrapped up in this shadowy conspiracy. And the books take off from there, covering different periods of history in the wars between vampires and vampire hunters. I would like to see more world-building, and in-depth demonstration of how the vampires of this world work, but that’s my only main complaint. The plot and characters are usually excellently written and loads of fun to read, which is great in any kind of comic. 

Young Adult: Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Phillippe

I read a lot more teen books than I expected to this year, and some of them weren’t even explicitly genre, which was more of a surprise. This one was… well it’s fun. It’s funny. It’s got a likable protagonist. It’s not going to throw down any major plot twists, I think; there’s not a plot point or character beat that’s going to shock you. But it’s genre savvy, which is more than I can say for some other high school teen books I read recently (One of Us is Lying comes to mind here).

And part of the reason for that is because the protagonist is explicitly a character who has seen a lot of teen movies set in the US so he has his preconceived notions of what high school is going to be like when he moves to Texas. So being a snarky kid, he tries to make the whole thing a parody of a high school movie, because that’s the kind of guy a lot of us would like to be in these situations. Except this book points out, “Hey you know that’s actually really a dickish person to be, right? The one who refuses to take his classmates seriously as real people and doesn’t engage with them on anything more than as cliches he sees and despises?” It’s not a huge revelatory novel, but I like that it deconstructs this mindset.

And it’s funny. That’s important too. I can’t stand teen books that aren’t funny.

Young Adult Fantasy: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

I tried picking up Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf and I just… didn’t get into it. So I finally decided to pick up Children of Blood and Bone, a YA book I’d been seeing everywhere with a similar premise (high fantasy in a world based off of African rather than European culture), I wasn’t sure if I’d get into it. But I did, and it was cool.

Mind you, it does feel, plotwise, very much like Avatar: The Last Airbender (something the author said she realized after she wrote it). But it is refreshing to see a fantasy that takes its cues from a different mythological and cultural tradition from the ones we’ve constantly seen over and over again, especially in an original world.

It was good, I liked it, I had fun, and I want to see much more from this author and from this world. 

Science Fantasy: The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Hey! What if I told you there was a book series about two characters dimension-hopping through different Alternate Universes, dripping with ship tease, witty dialogue, dragons, fae, and all the characters really love books? Yeah, that’s the Invisible Library series in a nutshell, chronicling the adventures of Irene, an agent of the interdimensional Invisible Library, which collects unique books from alternate worlds and grants its employees power over The Language.

Cogman knows she’s essentially telling stories about stories, and she takes absolute joy in doing so. And this very easily could have burst into a very cumbersome story about a dozen different characters and worlds and such, but instead it’s almost entirely filtered through the point of view of our lead, Irene, and her personal struggles. Yes, the fate of the Library and the worlds she visits are sometimes at stake, but those are important to us because they’re important to her, and she’s a fantastic character to be stuck with for several books. It helps that she doesn’t really do anything stupid for the sake of Plot, like so many other fantasy protagonists do. 

Children’s Fantasy: The Squire’s Tales by Gerald Morris

The Wings of Fire books almost made it, as did Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky. Call those honorable mentions. But I just couldn’t get over the fact that the Squire’s Tales books by Morris are really, really funny. Maybe it’s because I just read a lot of Arthurian stuff recently, but seeing Morris both lampoon and celebrate these stories tickles me. 

So many of the King Arthur stories you read are laser-focused on the big-name characters. Which is fine for an epic, I suppose. But Morris likes to make his main characters the ones that aren’t the big-name heroes, or used to be the big name heroes but weren’t after Lancelot stole the spotlight. The squires, the ladies, the knights that aren’t Lancelot--these are the subjects of the novels.

And the books are happy to illustrate just how ridiculous or plain bonkers Arthurian legend get sometimes. Why is there a random knight that guards a river and refuses to let anyone cross unless they fight him? Why do monsters just pop out in the woods for no reason? Where are these people in England that they can’t find where they’re looking for? Why is Kay letting himself get beat up all the time?

If you like King Arthur stories, you have got to read these books.

High Fantasy: The Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne

Fun fact! The library says the first book in this series isn’t anywhere in their system. Except I read it after finding it on the shelf. And it’s still there. So.

It’s been a while since I really got into a high fantasy series like this. And there were some bits in this one I didn’t like as much; the majority of the world it’s set in, for instance, is baffled by the invention of the shield wall, because it’s dishonorable or something. But overall it was good, and it had a very interesting question that I’ve seen more from fanfiction authors than from traditionally published ones:

What if you’re led to believe you’re the Chosen One… and you’re not? At all?

Because we’re given multiple points of view, it’s not clear who the Chosen One will be until part way through the first book, but it becomes radically clear that the guy who thinks he’s the Chosen One isn’t, even though he’s clueless to it. And because he’s buying into his own hype, he starts doing more and more monstrous things in the name of the Greater Good, being blinded to the things that he starts doing wrong. 

What’s infuriating is that the moment he found out it was too late was a cliffhanger, and the library doesn’t have the next book! Or maybe it does, and it’s just not listed. Who knows anymore?

Mythological Fantasy: Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Oh hey, a dystopian future novel that’s also a fantasy about Navajo mythology? [thumbs up] Rock on, my dude.

Trail of Lightning is bleak. It’s unflinching in its depiction of how difficult life is on the reservation, regardless of an apocalypse happening. But it’s also remarkably hopeful, in that our lead, Maggie despite constantly hunting monsters that rip people to shreds, despite not having many close relationships, despite living in a world that’s basically been destroyed, just. Keeps. Going. Because there’s work to be done, and someone’s got to do it.

And hey, it’s cool to see a fantasy series that’s based on a Native American belief system. Many times I’ve seen white authors try to tackle the topic, to varying degrees of success; many just throw in ‘Coyote’ as a trickster figure and leave it at that. But as Rebecca Roanhorse actually is Navajo, this feels more authentic, and while I always appreciate an exciting story, I appreciate it more when it teaches me about a culture and belief system I know very little about to begin with.

Historical Fantasy: The Age of Unreason by Gregory Keyes

I know I’ve raved about this series, and it’s kind of everything I wanted when I started Quicksilver and didn’t get there. But GUYS THIS SERIES IS GOOOOOOOOOD

Set in the early to mid-1700’s, and featuring alchemical magic as discovered by Isaac Newton, this series starts insane things like an immortal Louis XIV, and Cotton Mather teaming up with Blackbeard, and Peter the Great attacking Prague with an airship fleet, and Isaac Newton making an invisibility cloak. And it’s all going to crap, because there’s a race of spirit-angel-things that want to wipe out humanity! 

Astonishingly well-researched, this is the best kind of thing to do with speculative fiction dealing with historical periods and people in the real world: take as much of it as you can, stick it in a blender, and see what you get out. It’s weird, it’s funny, it’s terrifying, and it’s constantly surprising me with how many tiny little things it packs into the story. 

Sequel Series: Gods of Blood and Powder by Brian McClellan

A good sequel series doesn’t just say, “What happens next?” Often, it takes a slightly different track, picking a character who wasn’t in the spotlight in the first book and gives him or her more time to shine.

[points to Gods of Blood and Powder] That’s what this does. It has several main characters, but the one we’re familiar with is Vlora, who was a supporting character in the Powder Mage trilogy. There’s also two other characters: a legendary war veteran-turned-convict, and a spy who has more angles to his country’s situation than the reader is first let in on.

It doesn’t try to make everything a callback to the original trilogy, which is something a lot of sequel serieses don’t do very well. Yes, those events are important, but they’re not necessary to what’s going on right now, in that you don’t have to have read the previous books. It helps, but you’ll still be okay if you just start here, because most of the characters are original characters and the old ones are in new situations anyway.

It’s also one of the few high fantasy series I’ve read where guns are a thing.

Nonfiction: We Fed An Island by Jose Andres

Hey, you remember that time a massive hurricane hit Puerto Rico, and it sucked? And also the government screwed the pooch in trying to send relief? Yeah, this is about that. Which is frustratingly relevant after the earthquake (which was nowhere near this scale, but still).

Jose Andres is a cook. He wanted to help people in Puerto Rico after the hurricane. So he flies to the island and starts working on feeding people. But instead of being able to just get food and cook it and hand it out, he ends up having to compete with several other organizations, many of whom have no idea what they’re doing and have no experience with disaster relief. And then there’s a bunch of red tape for no apparent reason, people misinforming the public as to what was actually happening, and difficulty getting food around.

I liked the Andres made a point to say that a lot of the screwups were done by people who really did want to help, but were in over their heads in what help they could provide or the kind of crisis they were dealing with. It’s a reminder that a lot of the problems in the world aren’t caused by deliberate malice as much as ignorance, poor planning, or outright stupidity. And then you have some people who don’t care at all. Screw those guys.

I’m hesitant to say it should be taken as complete 100% truth, but I think it DOES do a good job of displaying how disaster relief works, and how it very often doesn’t.

Picture Book: We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins

It’s a book about a dinosaur who goes to school, and frustratingly finds out that all her classmates are human children! And she’s not allowed to eat them.

It’s a picture book. It’s not that deep.

Honorable Mentions:

Forever Evil by Geoff Johns

Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia

Locke and Key series by Joe Hill

Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland

Onyx Court series by Marie Brennan

Delilah Dirk series by Tony Cliff

The Time Quartet by Madeline L’Engle

Spellslinger by Sebastian de Castell

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Derkholm Duology by Diana Wynne Jones

Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo by Ben Costa and James Parks

2020 Update

So I don’t have a Note this week, but I think once I see Rise of Skywalker I’m going to have Thoughts, from everything I’ve heard, so expect that/those Note(s) sometime. But until those potential Notes are written, some thoughts on what’s to come:

-Best Books I Read in 2019

-Favorite Books By Genre

-Favorite Movies of 2019 (probably not this considering I didn’t go to the movies that much)

-Eagles in Assassin’s Creed

And that’s kind of all I got. The reason I’m not doing a ‘Movies I’ve Seen Last Year’ is because I don’t really have a way of recording all of the movies I saw last year, other than checking the reviews I’ve done for the currently-down Movie Munchies, which isn’t really a comprehensive list by any means. I like all the ‘best of decade’ lists I’ve been seeing, but I don’t think I can put together one of those. In any case, I tend to measure the decade as ending in 2020?

I’m open to suggestions for other Note ideas, but that’s what I think is coming up for the next few weeks.

Sucking Up to Disney

Merry Christmas, folks! We’re still in the twelve days of Christmas right now, and will be for a while. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be making a Saturday Note for next week, as the next few days are going to be a little bit hectic. 

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Sucking Up to Disney

I try to not make these posts too repetitive. I notice when I harp too much on the same topics, and I try to switch it up on what I talk about. I don’t always want to talk about my problems with the same companies/serieses/books. So I thought I’d try to come up with something that wasn’t about Disney. Except then when I was checking for news on Rick Riordan’s website, I came across this.

If you don’t feel like reading the link, it’s a post on Rick Riordan’s blog that doesn’t really tell much news at all. Presented as a conversation between himself and the Olympian gods (he writes kids’ books about Greek mythology, after all), he talks about the idea of an upcoming screen adaptation of his work. The gist of it is that after the last couple of movies didn’t do that well, 20th Century Fox decided not to go ahead and make a third, and now that Fox Entertainment was bought by Disney, the rights for any movie adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians now belongs to Disney. He’s had some meetings, fans have made the idea trend on social media, and once Riordan even spent a week in Los Angeles, but so far there’s nothing actually moving forward.

The entire thing felt… well, okay, I know I’m not in Riordan’s target audience, and haven’t been for a long time, but this felt really corny and unfunny. He made a post to announce… that there haven’t been any developments to announce. And I get that maybe it was meant to be a cheeky little thing for fans, but what does he spend it doing? Having the gods talk about how powerful Disney is, how brilliant and beloved Riordan is, and how he really wants a good adaptation of his work.

I’ve already written a bit about how I feel weird about this turnaround that Riordan’s had about the movies. When the first film came out, Riordan didn’t say much about it, other than announcing the casting and that he wasn’t planning on seeing it, because he didn’t want the version of the story from the movies to affect his vision. He did claim that his sons saw it and liked it, but he very clearly distanced himself from the films and told everyone he had very little to do with them.

Except not, because in the past couple of years, whenever they come up he tells everyone how much he hated them, how they’re terrible movies, terrible adaptations, with no value whatsoever, and how he did get a chance to edit a script, but those hacks at Fox didn’t listen to him, and if only they had they would have had a fantastic million-dollar movie franchise by now. It feels really entitled and annoying. I don’t mind an author being dissatisfied with his or her works’ adaptations, but it’s quite a huge difference to do this full 180, and then not only say you didn’t like it, but insist that if only those fools had listened then everything would have worked out.

So I’m already… not thrilled with the direction of this post. He seems to act like 20th Century Fox being dismantled, plenty of projects cancelled, people losing their jobs, and being absorbed into Disney is some sort of just punishment for the studio’s hubris, not really caring about the fact that Disney is the most powerful entertainment juggernaut in the industry and that’s a bad thing. He makes references to the “hydra of the Mouse God” which sounds like satire, but he’s still begging these people to make his movie. So it comes across less like he’s mocking their power as much as… elevating it to godlike level.

“Please do this adaptation, and do it in a way I’ll approve of! It’ll be great!” Never mind that outside of its remakes, Lucasfilm and Marvel films, Disney’s live-action properties tend to be one-shots that don’t do very well and they don’t give as much advertising to. So even if Disney decided to go ahead with an adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, chances are it won’t get a lot of marketing so that Disney can prepare for their live-action Lilo and Stitch remake.

Worse than that is how self-congratulatory this post sounds. When you are an author and you write yourself talking to the gods, and you write the gods saying how beloved you are, how successful you are, and how you have millions of fans… look, step back and look at this, will you? This is downright weird in how upfront it is. It’s Riordan bragging about how wonderful he is, and how blessed Disney would be to do a movie with his input in it.

What the actual fudge, Riordan.

I think at this point it’s become rather common knowledge that authors shouldn’t reply to online reviews, or harass people who don’t like their books, or that sort of thing. Don’t do that thing where you write an essay saying how the people hating on your books actually secretly like your books, the way Laurel K. Hamilton did. Nor reply to an Amazon reply claiming that haters are “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective” the way Anne Rice did. 

But this isn’t good either. This self-congratulatory short that has the gods themselves declaring how great he is, where he brags about how many fans he has, about how he could make a movie that’s a smash hit adaptation in an age when almost all the successful big budget films are either remakes or superhero films.

I’m becoming more and more frustrated with Riordan’s public persona, and with his writing seemingly going on forever and ever. He doesn’t need to declare how great he is to the world. I’m not even saying he can’t have a public persona. But this thig he does where he talks about how great he is? And won’t shut up about it? And how he can’t get over how much he hates the movie of his work?

It’s annoying as all get-out. If you ever become a successful writer, poet, artist, whatever--don’t do this.

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Plotting a Trilogy

The new Star Wars came out this weekend! I have not seen it, because I generally don’t see movies on opening weekend. Regardless, I had a lot of thoughts on it. But please, no one give me spoilers yet? I’m just going off of a couple of spoilerless reviews when I talk about it in this week’s Note.

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Plotting a Trilogy

Looking at several different reviews, one thing that’s stuck out a few times is that critics have said that this new film doesn’t really fit alongside the last one; it feels like it’s trying to correct the perceived mistakes of The Last Jedi rather than continue going with those plot developments. Some have commented that Rise of Skywalker makes it clear that Lucasfilm didn’t go into this trilogy with a plan, making it up as they went along.

Which, uh, we been knew.

And to be fair, much of the beloved original trilogy wasn’t planned either. George Lucas has waffled a bit on how much was planned, how much wasn’t, and is generally just an unreliable source on what happened in the production. But it’s a bit more forgivable for a couple of reasons: A) he was inventing a universe for the first time and B) he seems to have at least had a general idea of where things were going. No, maybe he didn’t know where Vader stood in Imperial Hierarchy, and maybe he didn’t know that he was Luke’s father, but he knew that at the end of the day, the Emperor was the Big Bad (more or less) and had to be defeated and where the other characters stood in relation to that.

The sequel trilogy doesn’t have that certainty. And part of that is J.J. Abrams’s approach to storytelling: making the audience ask a lot of questions from the get-go, so that they’re invested in finding out more. The problem is that with The Force Awakens, he didn’t have any answers in mind to the questions he had us asking, so we got The Last Jedi, which more or less told us that the questions we were prompted to ask weren’t important.

Another part of that was the approach Lucasfilm had with these movies. The original plan was that all three movies were to be directed by different directors, each of whom could leave their own stamp on their individual films. And that’s not a bad idea for their anthology films, which are meant to tell different kinds of stories that don’t fit in the main saga films, but for a unified trilogy where everything is meant to feel tightly connected, asking individual directors to go nuts with their styles isn’t really that great of an idea. Especially when it’s not just a question of style, but Plot and story.

DC’s currently using that approach with its movies, since the Avengers-style films didn’t quite work out for them. They’re letting each director do his or her own film in whatever style, to do whichever story, and they’re not even concerned with making sure their carry strong continuity. Just watch Arthur Curry and Mera’s characterization in Justice League versus Aquaman, or how Joker doesn’t seem to fit in any continuity at all with the character shown in Suicide Squad. And it doesn’t have to, because it’s not meant to be one continuous story, it’s meant to be a bunch of one-shots. So one can be a psychological character study, another can be an 80’s action fantasy, another can be a globe-trotting adventure film, and so on and so forth.

Star Wars doesn’t have anything like that excuse. By all rights, they should have had a plan to start with. When planning a massive epic trilogy of films, I should not be sitting here wondering how so little story information about basic ideas has been filled out. 

It’s abundantly clear that this is being made up as it goes along, especially in tie-in material. Star Wars: Resistance is ending after only two seasons because after taking place concurrently to the events of The Last Jedi, it can’t go any further without the events of Rise of Skywalker coming up. I recently read Resistance Reborn, and Rey asks Leia how Kylo Ren turned to the First Order in the first place, only for her to dodge the question like she doesn’t know all the details, despite the fact that the basics of it should be common knowledge. In both cases, it’s like the writers and producers are waving their hands and saying, “Don’t worry, it’ll be revealed somewhere else!” I don’t even blame the writers that much (because Dave Filoni and Rebecca Roanhorse are awesome by the way) as much as Lucasfilm for making this bloated thing that they have no way of sustaining.

Look, I talked a lot of shiz about Marvel Studios and their approach to movies and continuity. But I never got the impression that there wasn’t an overarching plan, story-wise. By 2012’s Avengers, it was clear that they were going somewhere, that they were going to tell the story of Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet. Now maybe I disagreed with how they got there, or how they told the story--Thanos was, up until Infinity War, a very incompetent villain--but it was a story that they had planned. They didn’t know all the steps of how to get there, but they knew where they were going.

I don’t think that you need an end goal in mind when you start a story, like a novel or a movie. But if you’re plotting an epic trilogy, like Star Wars, or even Avengers, it’s good to have at least a strong idea of where things are going, and making sure that the audience knows that you’re leading them to a conclusion that they care about. 

The sequel trilogy doesn’t have that at all. And it suffers from it. Now I could be wrong, I could watch The Rise of Skywalker and be blown away by how it all fits together, regardless of what critics think. I’ve disagreed with critical consensus plenty of times before. But if I did, I still don’t think I’d look back on the trilogy that fondly, considering that while it was going on I thought of it as a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on nostalgia without an actual story that was meant to be told from the get-go. 

Which is a bummer, because Star Wars is kind of the quintessential modern epic, the big story that everyone wants to be. And no, this isn’t the first time that a film trilogy from this property has gotten a critical bashing or rejection from fans, but this time one of the reasons is that it wasn’t planned out. And that’s obnoxious, because that should have been one of the very first things that they did.

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On Colonialism in Fiction

I had this thought earlier this week, making this one of the rare Notes that I didn’t have to scramble to come up with a topic for on Thursday or Friday. Hooray! 

So, uh, let’s talk a bit about colonialism. Some spoilers for Frozen II ahead.

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On Colonialism in Fiction

I recently saw Frozen II in theaters and while I enjoyed it I was ultimately underwhelmed. I think there was a lot of Plot and characterization that got underutilized. And I remember looking back at the Tor review and being confused, because their critic praised this movie to Kingdom Come, declaring it “about history and colonialism and how to repair the past, but it’s a story informed by the present.” This quotation is true, but that doesn’t make it a good movie, in part because it’s handled pretty clumsily.

In Frozen II, we’re presented with a wrong that has been done in an enchanted forest, done by someone from Arendelle a long time ago, and how this has made that forest cut off from the world, and now the spirits of that forest are demanding reparation. The person who made this wrong in the first place… isn’t someone we know, it’s not someone the characters talk about with reverence, like a hero of their country’s past or something. And there’s no reason for animosity between the two peoples presented: it’s not like one wants the other’s land or resources or something. And towards the end of the movie, we’re told exactly what the reparation would entail, and that it might be disastrous for Arendelle; but still, it must be done, because otherwise the world will stay out of balance and there will never be peace. Except it turns out, nope! That terrible price for fixing the mistakes of the past? Never mind, no one has to pay it. 

It’s about colonialism, but it fumbles around on the big issues. It doesn’t go into the ideas of how one figure revered as a hero in some people’s cultures is remembered by another group of people quite differently--Confederate figures from the Civil War come to mind in the US, but in this world you have other weird things like how Oliver Cromwell still has a bunch of statues around the UK despite him actively trying to murder all the Irish. No, the perpetrator is someone the characters have a tie to, but not a strong enough one that they feel particularly betrayed by the idea that he did something villainous. And it’s someone who is barely in the movie.

And I’m very frustrated, because apparently I keep running into stories that are “about colonialism” but do them very badly. I’ve been told by defenders of Thor: Ragnarok that it’s about colonialism and therefore A Good Movie, but that doesn’t really hold up for me: none of the main characters are people who are victims of that colonialism, except Loki, and almost all of Loki’s trauma is played entirely for laughs. (As is everyone else’s trauma, but when it happens again in Endgame it’s bad because… I dunno.)

And we can say “This movie proves Odin’s a dickbag!” as many times as we want, but it’s Odin who is shown to be in the right for imprisoning Hela, and it’s Odin’s wisdom that lets Thor realize his true potential as the God of Thunder. He’s not part of a past they’re leaving behind; he’s the wise mentor guy who gives Thor what he needs to keep going, and if we’re leaning into Ragnarok as a narrative about the evils of colonialism… that’s a pretty big fumble.

Heck, Asgard wasn’t destroyed because it was the natural outcome of a colonialist empire, it was destroyed because Taika Waititi admitted that he hated the place. Apparently he thought the warrior kingdom had too many nerds. No, really.

And then this year I also read the Soldier Son Trilogy by Robin Hobb, which I’ve harped on just as much; it beings by showing you the evils of colonialism and the effects it has on indigenous people, and then ends with the character riding off to his happy ending without caring at all about that conflict. His actions lead to their being a temporary peace between the Empire and the indigenous people, but there’s no telling exactly how long that will last.

Obviously, if you’re decide you’re going to write a story tackling a deep subject, you’re not going to get everything right. You’re not going to always score a complete home run, and in movies you’ve got limited time to really delve into every facet of an issue. And yeah, colonialism is a complex topic. There are very few pieces of media that handle it anything close to what I’d call ‘incredibly well’ (*coughAvatar:TheLastAirbendercough*). So no, because a work doesn’t handle it perfectly doesn’t mean that work has no merit. 

BUT it’s bothersome that there are so many really thoughtless takes on this topic out there, especially because it’s one that continues to be a part of our world today. And even more annoying is that there are critics who will praise these works because it deals with an ‘in’ topic, not really bothering to notice if it was bungled. It’s like if I cheered every time I saw a Puerto Rican character showed up on screen in television or film, despite most of the Puerto Ricans on screen being stereotypical criminals and gangsters with little to no character development other than being mooks to get mowed down by heroes or other villains.

Stop praising works for covering big topics in the shallowest way possible. And if you’re of the mind to write about colonialism, actually make it about colonialism, instead of holding back and not showing the real ugliness of it. Because there’s a lot there that people have to deal with every day.

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Arc of a Scythe by Neal Shusterman Review-Shaped Thing

I had a few ideas for a post this week, but many of them were derivative/too close to other Saturday Notes I’ve done in the past. Which might not be bad as such, considering that I’m posting these on a new website now rather than on Facebook Notes. But I don’t like to feel like I’m always harping on the same things.

I also had an idea for writing about the increasing homogenization of American culture but that sounded a bit big and it’s Friday and I haven’t written jack so, uh, maybe some other time.

Some, uh, spoilers ahead.

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Arc of a Scythe by Neal Shusterman Review-Shaped Thing

So I recently finished The Toll, which is the third book in Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy. Starting with Scythe the story goes something like this: in the far future, we live in a world where death itself has been cured. The benevolent AI that runs everything, the Thunderhead, decides though that since too many people on the planet is still a problem, proposes the institution of a body to regulate death: the Scythes. The Scythes are not subject to the rules or laws of the Thunderhead and act independently. The Scythes must ‘glean’ a certain amount of people in order to keep population in check. Of course, while there are people who hold a morbid fascination of them, for the most part they’re not exactly popular with the Average Joe who does his or her best to avoid gaining their attention.

Our story follows two young people, Citra and Rowan, who are chosen to become apprentice Scythes, but given the condition that only one of them will make the final cut. Things get complicated when someone makes a ruling that whichever one graduates must glean the other. And of course this is a teen book so the two fall in love. And then there’s this one guy among the Scythes who has a thing for murdering people (because OF COURSE) and he’s trying to grab power for himself.

I liked the first book a lot because it seemed like an interesting thought experiment. What does a word that has cured death look like? And how would the people living in it live? It was a bit more teen drama-y than I would have preferred, and I didn’t think all of the worldbuilding really added up. For instance, it’s explained that there isn’t a lot of religion in the new deathless world, because religion’s a lot about the afterlife, and because people don’t die they don’t care anymore! Except people totally do die, it’s just regulated and less frequent. Most of all, I don’t think it really dealt with the fact that the main characters are essentially state-sponsored murderers. But it was still funish, and it was a science-fiction idea I hadn’t seen before.

The sequels? Not as much for me. Especially this last one, The Toll, which felt bloated and overdone without actually delivering anything I particularly wanted to see. It was established in the first book that one of the only religions that survives into the deathless world is a sort of Tone cult, which worships… sound. For some reason. And the Tone Cults become increasingly focused on in the second and third books. Why do they worship sound? [shrugs] I dunno. I don’t really care. And the resulting explosion of Plot Importance just didn’t make much sense to me, other than he needed a religious group to fill the role and a made-up one would probably offend less people, I guess.

The story also is meant to sort of be a love story between Rowan and Ctira. The problem of course being that aside from the first book, they hardly ever spend that much time together. Years after their training, I’m still struggling to work out why these two are apparently so in love with each other and what they like about each other. Unlike some examples, there’s groundwork to develop this relationship, but since they spend most of the story apart concerned with saving the world, it feels almost extraneous. But it clearly wasn’t meant to be because the end of the final book ends with a scene establishing that they’ll be together. But why? Why are they so obsessively in love with each other?

It’s also hard to feel serious about character death when it feels like the way it works is arbitrary. It’s explained in the first book that a body destroyed by fire cannot be revived, but then the main villain is revived because his body was burned but his head was recovered, so one of his minions grafts it onto another body. The end of the second book goes, “Oh and by the way, if an animal consumes your body then it also can’t come back from that!” which makes sense but still should have been mentioned before. We also see that the Thunderhead keeps recorded memories and personalities of every single person, and can upload them as a consciousness to someone’s body, effectively reviving them that way. And gleaned people are off-limits to revival, I guess, but is there anyone physically stopping someone from doing that if the technology exists?

So basically, even if someone is permanently killed, there are plenty of BS reasons to use in order to bring him or her back that don’t get used unless it’s to tie up some Plot.

But I thought the main problem I had with the series was that the characters all lived in a dystopia, and none of them seemed to really notice or care. The world is run by an omnipresent AI that knows everything about everyone, controls every facet of life, and can easily wipe a person’s memories and implant someone else’s personality and memories into them. And yet we’re not really meant to view this as a terrifying amount of power that this AI has, because it’s benevolent.

This feels super weird having watched Person of Interest, which similarly deals with a godlike AI. But in that one, even though the Machine is benevolent, it’s still infringing on what we’ve been told are our basic rights, and everyone is either horrified by this invention or is trying to control it. And this is made even more complicated by the introduction of Samaritan, an AI that doesn’t have as many moral compunctions. And even though Samaritan is trying to make the world a better place, it’s an AI trying to take over the world and will murder anyone that gets in its way, rig elections to get its candidates in power, play with people’s lives to figure out how to best control them… 

But the Thunderhead is okay, because this one’s nice!

[Between this series and Spider-Man: Far From Home, I’m wondering why there’s an increased upsurge of people in popular media who are perfectly alright with mass surveillance and using AI to control the world.]

The only thing that the Thunderhead doesn’t have control of is the Scythedom, which is also kind of horrifying because it’s a privileged class of people who are given the job of murdering people and governing themselves however they want. And the villain is this douchebag who gets his kicks out of killing people, and the old school Scythes act like this is an affront to their vocation, as if it wasn’t insanely obvious that the job that requires you to kill people every month would attract axe-crazy maniacs. Especially when they can basically claim whatever they want, so that so many of the Scythes have the biggest mansions, nicest cars and jewel-encrusted cloaks. Yeah, the sympathetic Scythes don’t do this, and wealth as we think of it has been eliminated, but Scythes are still the upper class in a system they helped build to benefit themselves and let them kill people. Theoretically, it’s for the good of the world, but that’s what it boils down to: an upper class that tells everyone that it kills people for the Greater Good, and a disagreement between factions in that class as to the correct way to kill people. Yes, they specifically can’t kill people based on things like race, ethnicity, age, sex, orientation, political beliefs or religion, so at least they’re not bigoted, in theory anyway, but I feel like that’s putting a great big ‘Not As Big A Jerk As You Could’ve Been’ sticker instead of a bandaid on a gaping head wound. They pick the names of famous people as titles, and that’s cool, but that doesn’t cover the fact that they’re murderers and we’re meant to be cool with it.

And there’s some conflict that Citra and Rowan feel about the idea of being Scythes, of being state murderers, but this isn’t really explored enough. Rowan goes off to become a vigilante, going and assassinating Scythes who are corrupt, and that’s fine, even if the narrative acts like he’s going down a dark path. But Citra goes on to become a revered Scythe, because she treats her victims with compassion and speaks out against the villain’s corruption. But it’s still working within a system which essentially trusts that the Scythes will behave themselves.

The conclusion to the story isn’t overthrowing the corrupt system entirely. It’s just… reworking it a bit, so that a lot of the Scythes die, but presumably they’ll just re-recruit and some time later the cycle will start all over again. What’s to stop some other bloodthirsty Scythe from climbing up the ranks in the future? Especially now that our two leads have buzzed off to space?

Also everyone from Madagascar is genderfluid in the future. Why? [shrugs] I dunno. Apparently that’s how queerness works in the deathless future.

It just felt like the author thought a lot about the setting, but not at all about how horrifying this all is if you stop and think about it for five minutes. Which is okay for a science-fiction novel that’s a standalone, but the more he revisits this world the less sense it made. As a teen love story it doesn’t feel like it works because it doesn’t put enough focus on their relationship. As a commentary on society it doesn’t feel like it works because no one seems to react to how horrifying this system is, mostly chalking it up to a few bad apples.

The system is rotten to the core, and the resolution just doesn’t really address that in a way I found satisfactory. It’s frustrating to me because this is the second trilogy I’ve read this year that had an ending like that (the Soldier Son trilogy had a similar problem), and I just really want authors to address the societal problems they establish in their first novels, you know?

And I don’t care about cults that worship sound. Not even a little bit.

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