2025 Reviews: Other Media

I’ve been keeping a list of everything I’ve watched/red/played since 2019, but this is my first time doing mini reviews for them!

I played enough video games for them to get their own blog - this is everything else, excluding a tonne of comics read for the Selkies which I'm excluding for hopefully very obvious reasons...

COMICS

The Power Fantasy – I still harbour affection for the X-Men, and I love Gillen’s other work, so this was always going to be right up my alley. Some thoughts on the gender side of the story here.

Flash Gordon – Hey, how come none of you ever told me syndicated strip comics could pull off a story-driven sci-fi adventure?? The weight the narration carries in keeping the action dense is so interesting that I kind of want to blog about it at some point.

Look Back – Story about two girls working on a manga together, by the creator of Chainsaw Man. Cried like a baby, obviously. Hard reading at a time when I realised that I simply don't enjoy making comics in the same way that I enjoy writing. "Why do you draw, Fujino?" hit different, that's for sure!

This Monster Wants to Eat Me Vol 2&3 – This was the point I realised that this story is Twilight for depressed baby lesbians and immediately got way more interested in it.

DIE: LOADED – Tabletop RPG Jumanji. Only read a couple of issues so far but HELL YEAH I’m so delighted by what I've seen. Going to be devouring this one again.

She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat Vol 5 – Domestic manga about two adult lesbians. Still great! Really interesting to see the minutiae of lesbian life in Japan, right down to trouble renting apartments. Such a far cry from my part of Glasgow, where 'pretending to be a queer couple to get a non-HMO flat with two friends' was a common tactic even 10 years ago.

PROSE

Humankind [NONFICTION] – A non-fiction exploration of human history which posits that human nature is fundamentally social, cooperative and altruistic, and gives fantastic examples of this being the case, while maintaining pragmatism about how these traits can be twisted into something bad. Really revitalising reading in the current political climate.

Babel [FANTASY] – A story about an alternative British empire where translation magic rules all. Very well written story about race, colonialism and complicity. The magic system is used to great effect to underline the author’s message, and the (slightly) alt-historical aspects feels very researched.

The Martian [SCIFI] – Very enjoyable, though I had no real desire to reread once I was done. Some clever narrative devices used to build tension (never has a dispassionate description of the manufacture of a tent filled me with such dread before). I read in an interview that the accident at the start of the story is the least scientifically grounded aspect of it, which makes me laugh; the rest feels so well researched that I have to assume the writer simply couldn’t find a more realistic inciting incident, and had to take the L in order to have the story happen at all. Mars is pretty chill, as it turns out!

The Traitor Baru Cormorant [FANTASY] – A story about a woman from a colonised land deciding to bring down the conquering empire from within. Can't recommend it enough if you want mature fantasy with deeply flawed lesbian protagonists. Oh, it's messy. Oh, how I hollered. I feel like I’ve been starved for complicated, adult narratives and this served it up to me on a plate.

The Monster/Tyrant Baru Cormorant [FANTASY] – Neither sequel is as tightly written as Traitor, which works as a standalone story, but they’re both still heads and shoulders above many other fantasy stories; the worldbuilding developments are fantastic.

The River Has Roots [FANTASY] – Sweet fairytale novella, did make me emotional. Not quite enough there for me to dwell in long-term. I'll continue to wholeheartedly recommend 'This Is How You Lose The Time War', co-written by the same author.

Nettle and Bone [FANTASY] – Good solid fairytale-esque fantasy, and I very much enjoyed a lot of the side characters, but the main character (and love interest) never really grabbed me, which hampered this from being a real favourite.

Wayward Children Series (Beneath the Sugar Sky, In An Absent Dream, Come Tumbling Down, Where the Drowned Girls Go) [FANTASY] – Raided a friend’s collection of the books I hadn’t read, and enjoyed the series, though only In An Absent Dream stuck out (Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones are still my favourites of the series). The most compelling part of these stories is that the protagonist kids are allowed to want weird, bizarre, and sometimes ‘unwholesome’ things, and the narrative doesn’t judge them for it unless they cause harm to others in pursuing them – which I think makes this a better metaphor for queerness (and in particular the strange shape of the queer community and its range of similar-but-different experiences) than basically anything else I’ve seen. That said, Where the Drowned Girls Go’s story, with its conversion therapy school, is my least favourite of the books.

FILMS

The Grand Budapest Hotel – My brother is a big Wes Anderson fan and I can see why. I love weird, artistic movies!

Wake Up Dead Man (A Knives Out Story) – I enjoyed Glass Onion well enough, but this was unquestionably far better. The emotional core was much stronger; in particular (without going into spoilers) the phone scene was SO good. Very much liked how they depicted Blanc’s attitude to the church. (The lighting throughout was very on the nose though. I’ll forgive the Jesus statue because it was both funny AND serious.)

PLAYS

Picture You Dead – Enjoyable enough, but not really a patch on last year’s Sunset Song at the Dundee Rep Theatre (the play which relit my love for plays). I intended to see more this year, but to say the second part of the year got away from me is an understatement…

TV

Andor (S1&2) – Binged this over the course of like a week at my parents' house. Easily my favourite TV show of the last few years (which doesn’t necessarily say the objective best). I ADORE how shitty and complicated and compromised everything is. Kleya Marki is my absolute favourite type of female character, and I loved Mon Mothma as well. God, how I wish this had gotten 3 seasons.

Murderbot – I literally have 3k words of an unpublished blog noodling over how I feel about the show, which I enjoyed in that frustrated almost-love-it way which makes me want to talk about it a lot. It did do some stuff better than the books, which is I think the mark of a good adaption, but (with the exception of the stellar final episode) the person who called it “the Corporate Rim serialisation of The Murderbot Diaries” hit the nail on the head.

Severance (Season 1) – I was spoiled for a lot of this, but I didn’t properly anticipate how funny it would be. Good show!!! Love how they handle the characters and the traits the innies/outies share with one another versus the way they are divergent. Also love that it really leans into the horror and abuses of the central concept. No need to “imagine if someone used severance to—” because the show is already doing it!