Obsession, Backrooms and the rise of the YouTube movie

Can saving Hollywood be as simple as this One Weird Trick?

Movies created by YouTubers are having a moment. A very, very lucrative moment.

In January of this year, video game YouTuber Markiplier released his self-financed, $3-million debut theatrical film, Iron Lung, which he mostly promoted by appealing directly to his 40 million YouTube subscribers. In its opening weekend, it looked like it might beat Send Help, legendary director Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre after his adventures in the MCU. The Walt Disney Company financed, produced, and marketed that movie, with an estimated budget of $40 million, and Oscar-nominee Rachel McAdams played the lead.

In May of this year, Curry Barker, an aspiring actor and director of popular YouTube horror shorts, released his theatrical writing and directorial debut, Obsession, produced for a reported $750,000. It finished third at the box office on its opening weekend, with $17 million. The following weekend, it made even more money, landing in second place with $24 million. On its third weekend, it made even more more money, finishing again in second place, with $27 million. As a rule, movies don’t improve on their opening weekend in their second weekend. And they certainly don’t improve on their second weekend in their third weekend. The last movie to do so was, I kid you not, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in friggin’ caveman days back in 1982 (editor’s note: this post’s author saw E.T. in the theater in the caveman days of 1982. Don’t even let him pretend like he didn’t.).

In Obsession’s third weekend, it finished second behind a new release, Backrooms, the theatrical directorial debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, based on his YouTube series of the same name. Produced on a budget of $10 million, it grossed over $80 million in its opening weekend, tying the previous weekend's haul for the debut of the latest Star Wars movie. By just its second weekend, Backrooms had already become distributor A24’s biggest release ever, beating the total domestic haul of last year’s Timothée Chalamet Oscar-vehicle Marty Supreme.

So… what’s going on? What does it mean?

Capsule Reviews

The Occam’s Razor answer to why these three movies are doing absolute gangbusters at the box office is, hey, maybe they're all just really good? Let's see.

Iron Lung: Based on a somewhat popular video game, the movie takes place almost entirely inside a small submarine, with only Simon (Markiplier) appearing onscreen. It is over 2 hours long. Markiplier is not an actor, and doesn’t know how to command the screen. But he's the only actor we get. There is a section of the film where we watch water drip. Later, something happens. We don’t know what. Maybe he’s hallucinating it. Maybe there are giant dead aliens outside the sub. It’s not clear. Then there is so much blood. So, so very much blood, and Simon's body begins to disintegrate. I don’t know why. From the blood maybe. This is a bad movie. But you know what? Markiplier stans went and saw it, they had a great time, and I have zero desire to take that away from them. It had a great opening, it made the folks who saw it happy, it made Markiplier a good return on investment, limped across a couple more weekends, and was gone. It’s not looking good for Occam’s Razor.

Obsession: Bear has a crush on his friend Nikki, but doesn’t have the nerve to tell her. She’s about to quit her job at the music store where they both work, alongside friends Ian and Sarah, so Bear buys her a going away present at a New Age store, a novelty toy called a One-Wish Willow. But Bear chickens out before he can give it to her, and makes his own wish on it—that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. He gets his wish. Inspired by the Monkey’s Paw vignette in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror anthology, it’s also the basic setup of a Twilight Zone episode, a million other things, and the aphorism “be careful what you wish for.” Sounds kinda derivative. But in execution, this movie is flawless. It’s not just that Inde Navarrette gives an all-time horror movie performance as Nikki, but the writing and the implications for things taking place just outside the frame of the movie’s point of view will stick with you for days after you leave the theater. It’s a phenomenal film.

Backrooms: This movie has a lot going for it. First, you’ve got a small cast led by magnetic Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve. Second, there is something primal and dreamlike in the basic premise of finding another room that somehow you’ve always missed before in a space you are intimately familiar with, maybe even living in. This is eerily similar to the closest thing I’ve ever had to a recurring dream. So when Ejiofor’s Clark finds a secret, permeable section of the basement wall in the furniture store he owns that opens into a seemingly never-ending network of (mostly) empty rooms, I for one felt a profound sense of uncanny recognition. But moments later, I realized that if this actually happened to me in real life, I would nope out of there so fast I’d leave vapor trails through the portal. So even though the direction is competent and the producers brought in a veteran TV writer to handle the screenplay, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the characters in this movie and believable human behavior. I think it’s a good movie, but it’s a good movie that feels like a talented young filmmaker with a lot of support trying to find their way. And, it must be said, once we do see the monster of the backrooms, it’s pretty derpy.

Despite a strong (for January) opening, Iron Lung wound up with only $50 million in worldwide grosses. Backrooms has, at the time of this writing, made over $300 million worldwide, but its week-over-week drop-offs have been massive. Obsession has made almost $400 million, and when I saw it last weekend on a Sunday at 5 pm, the theater was sold out. So with the exception of Obsession, I don’t think these are great movies where word of mouth is driving their success in theaters.

A Grand Theory

So not Occam’s Razor, then. What's the next simplest explanation? Probably that these creators were successful on YouTube and just brought their audiences out to the theaters. Let's check that one.

Markiplier is one of the most successful YouTubers on the platform, with nearly 40 million subscribers. He made multiple webseries for YouTube as his popularity expanded, and Iron Lung is a video game adaptation, which feels at home with his core content of the video game play-through. Massive YouTuber brings $17 million of ticket sales to the box office by hyping the movie on his channel throughout production, editing, behind-the-scenes, and as it neared release. Cool. Seems reasonable.

As of today, as I type this—even after the success of the movie—the Backrooms YouTube channel has 4 million subscribers. Obsession’s Curry Barker‘s channel—again, even after the black swan success of the film—has a little over 1 million subscribers. It seems implausible that these creators ported their vastly smaller YouTube audiences over into the multiplex seats in the same way that Markiplier did to multiples of that success. So what gives?

I think it’s actually really simple. You know who has always gone to the movies? At least since the 1950s, anyway? Teenagers. Young people. You know whom studios have been trying to lure into the theaters for the last 20 or so years? Families. “Four-quadrant pictures” that appeal to everybody, where parents can take their kids. The conglomerate-owned studios justify $200-400 million investments in IP and sequel-driven four-quadrant pictures by wagering that these are safe bets. But you know who doesn’t want to sit with their parents at the movies? Teenagers. These massive tentpole pictures have spent 20 years teaching young people that going to theaters is boring and for old people or little kids.

These three directors have something in common that I think is much more powerful than their shared YouTube origins—they're young people. Markiplier is the oldest—he's in his thirties, but he's been on YouTube since 2012 (same year this blog started. James Wan, call me).

These are young people making movies for young people. Where have we heard that before?

A… ahem… New Hope?

Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet got in trouble during his Oscars blitz because he said he was worried that the theatrical experience was moving toward niche entertainment, like the ballet or opera. I found his comments utterly unobjectionable, but lots of folks got Big Mad. Not that Timmy C needs me in his corner, but box office has been down for years, never bouncing back from the pandemic closures, and the rise of streaming has led to so much hand-wringing and so, so many op-eds about whether or not this is the End of Cinema.

It's not. It never is. But as I wrote at the end of last year, Hollywood will become something different. It has to, and it always does.

The studio system collapsed throughout the 1950s, and in the 1960s young people like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and other young filmmakers who either got their start or a significant boost from Roger Corman (my man, the GOAT, whom I interviewed in 2017). The thing that Corman gave them was an opportunity to get reps, to make things, to learn the ropes as storytellers, and to introduce themselves to other producers who could give them work on bigger platforms. It sure seems like YouTube gives today’s creative folks the same opportunities.

As the 1970s reached their back half, suddenly Stephen Spielberg gave us Jaws and George Lucas gave us Star Wars—both previously unimaginable box office and cultural successes. Lucas was 32 or 33 when he directed Star Wars, his third feature film. Spielberg was 29 when he made Jaws, his third theatrical feature and fifth or sixth overall including made-for-TV movies. These were all young guys. Spielberg and Lucas went on to be responsible for most of the top-10 highest grossing movies of the 1980s.

Moving forward in time, Spike Jonze was 30 when he made Being John Malkovich after a career in successful music videos. M. Night Shyamalan was 29 when he made The Sixth Sense. Quentin Tarantino was 31 when he made Pulp Fiction, which essentially invented an entire genre of 90s action movies by mashing up things Tarantino grew up with into a distinct package that appealed to young moviegoers and other young filmmakers.

So Hollywood will probably learn the wrong lesson from this year, because it usually does. Back in the early aughts, blogs and Twitter feeds were the new hotness, especially after blogger Diablo Cody’s script for Juno turned into such a beautiful movie. Hollywood signed everybody with a blog or a Twitter feed, resulting in utterly forgettable (or worse!) shows like Shit My Dad Says and movies like I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell. So they'll probably sign folks who have big YouTube channels, regardless of their storytelling ability, and some of them will never make anything, and some creators behind breakout hits (remember The Blair Witch Project? Remember?) will fizzle.

But others will not. Other creators will go on to write and direct movies that we will talk about forever. The nice thing is that the success of this year’s smaller movies will create a permission structure for not only distributors like A24 and NEON, but also for studios to take chances on more and smaller movies. And if they’re made by young people for young people, in a way that excites young people, or scares them, or reflects back to them a world that they recognize or dream of, then that’s what movies do best, and that’s what brings people together to experience them together.

I know Toy Story 5 just made all the money in the world this weekend. But if you are rooting for the future of movies in theaters, go see Obsession. Or if you’re squeamish, go see Backrooms. Don’t dismiss them because their filmmakers came from YouTube. In the end, these particular movies might not be for you, exactly, but their success will open the door to more movies in theaters that don’t start with the word “Avengers” or end in a number.

Posted by Vance K - co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together, and Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer.

Review: Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

The adversary in no man's land

cover artist: Julia Lloyd

This is my first Daniel Kraus, and I came to it because it won a prize and because I’ve been on something of a horror kick the last few months. In case you didn’t know, Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and another of his novels, Whalefall, is about to hit cinemas.

This is by way of saying I don’t think I would have picked this up if it wasn’t for Kraus being seen by other people first. Talk about the things you love, folks.

>It’s also a novel that’s quickly become (in)famous for its treatment of punctuation. Angel Down is told as a single sentence. There are people who’ll raise their eyebrows at that, others who’ll say that books should cater for the reader first. I have no time for either. I love it when writers play with the form of the novel as much as the text. Sure, it doesn’t always work, and sometimes it’s clear the writer thinks they’re cleverer than they are, but so what? Personally I think we should reward ambition and intensity and reaching for the edges of things.

Still, stuff like this can be a gimmick, and by that I mean they add nothing to the narrative, the sense and atmosphere of the novel itself.

Kraus’s first big achievement, then, is to make this structure work. He does it in a specific way that allows you as the reader to breathe while also rendering the entire story urgent and imminent in a way that more conventional punctuation would have missed.

This urgency, the quasi-stream of consciousness that Kraus invokes on the page, is essential to the tale he builds over the course of the book, and I didn’t even notice I’d not seen a full stop until three or four pages in. Then I noticed, and then I thought hard about what it was accomplishing, and then I relished getting back to the rest of it.

The story itself follows one Private First Class Cyril Bagger: scumbag, conman, son of a bishop who lost his faith and, mostly, concerned with surviving the First World War no matter who else dies in the process.

Bagger has spent most of his life insulating himself from feelings towards his fellow man. He’s done this because feelings make it harder to steal from rubes, fools and the greedy, and these folks are Bagger’s congregation.

If his father is a bishop, in one of the endless self-made Puritan inspired American expressions of Christianity, then Bagger is his own sort of preacher—one of confidence and misplaced faith, of chance and getting ahead of those around you. Bagger’s view is the distillation of the American dream—the idea that you can make it big, built on the truth that if you do, others can’t. Kraus illuminates in swift strokes of the pen how the American Dream is built on a zero-sum game where, for you to win, many others have to lose.

And Private Bagger is determined to win that game—other people are his stepping stones.

The thing is, in the battalion in which Bagger serves (and swindles soldiers around him to go over the top on his behalf), there are very few good men of his acquaintance.

On a morning when the familiar screams of the wounded fill the air from no man’s land, Bagger and four of the worst soldiers in the battalion are left behind by their commander as the rest of the unit marches away. Their mission? To find and “help” the person screaming. By which they know to kill them, as that’s the easiest thing they can do.

Kraus has the patter and feelings of these fellows down—he has done the work to make this feel like a specific time and place. Attitudes, technology, experiences are all there situating Kraus’s characters in the most miserable of trenches at the end of WWI.

I think this would be enough to tell a story with. Erich Maria Remarque did it with All Quiet on the Western Front and told one of the most profound anti-war stories ever seen.

Kraus does something different here. This setting, with its horror—bodily, social, political and existential—morphs into something else when they discover that the person wailing in no man’s land is no wounded soldier. They retrieve an unconscious body whose appearance none of them can agree on, save to say it’s a woman (clean and unspoiled by mud, war or time).

Krauss departs here, using this woman’s presence to help outline each of Bagger’s comrades, to show them at their weakest and most venal, their most desperate and most vulnerable. None of these men are good, but none of them are quite intentionally evil either.

Don’t get me wrong, part of Kraus’s theme here is that men do evil things and relish them for the benefits they bring them. However, he’s also quite clear that it is this equation, that evil brings good things to those performing the evil deeds, that drives so much suffering and harm.

Krauss doesn’t say that this justifies acts, or even that the perceived and actual benefits of doing evil last. He just carefully lays out how ordinary people are quite capable and willing to do evil to others if it helps them get what they want in the moment. It’s not even that they’re great planners—a momentary feeling of satisfaction can be enough. We see this in the acts of complying in advance we have observed in the USA since White Supremacists came to power there. For each valorous act of resistance there are the equivalent acts of cowardice, complicity and collusion.

Bagger and his comrades are prepared to suffer so long as it means those around them suffer more. Kraus is clear that each of these men are traumatised, but also that they brought nothing but themselves to the war, and those selves were already primed to walk paths in which other peoples’ suffering was a price they were happy to see paid.

War is misery, says Kraus, but war exists because we make it. Where, then, the blame?

I don’t want to say too much about the story here—it is a gossamer thing which rewards a lightness of expectation and a lack of foreknowledge, especially around who this woman is and what she wants. I'm going to elide the way Kraus treats the uncanny too. It is good but nothing special in its own right. It's the service to which he puts it I find especially interesting.

Suffice to say that Kraus is, I think, playing with our ideas of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, not simply with the story but with the way he’s written the book. Bagger is human. In the end he can’t escape feeling things for the people around him. He hates this as much as it’s a salve for his soul. Kraus isn’t writing a Disney movie here—the real story isn’t the friends he makes along the way. It is about the choices we make—the ones we barrel through and feel are inevitable because we are hemmed in on all sides, as well as the power to stop and choose something different, something new, something that can break not just us but the world around us.

There are revelations that Kraus delivers to people who think about changing but often cannot, or who might try but have no moral muscles and so can’t make it stick. The weight is too heavy to lift. So they find change hard and leave it untried.

Angel Down is a horror novel. It is a speculative novel. It is an anti-war novel. It is a novel about the American Dream. Most of all it is a novel about how, across our entire lives, it might be that only one choice matters and how we might miss it because we sleepwalk through life without considering what we do and how it changes us and the world around us.

It’s not about agency per se; it’s about moments when who we are and what we choose matters, about how the rest of our lives might seem full of choice but are, really, expressions of us playing in tiny little prison cells where we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we’re acting across the entire world.

Kraus, in the end, skewers the idea of agency as the supreme good in the same way a tender philosopher might skewer the idea that free will is absolute, and he does so with the uncanny and the otherworldly sitting in judgment of our hubris.

Highlights:

• One freaking sentence
• Layered, thoughtful and mystical

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, a superb experimental novel that has a lot to say about the things we take for granted as good and the things we might really consider if we wanted to actually do good.

Reference: Kraus, Daniel. Angel Down [First Atria Books, 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at @stewarthotston.com.

Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

(First things first: of course the dog survives. This movie may be mediocre, but they’re not that foolish at Warner.)

The comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a wonderful piece of art. It dances between moments of striking action, serious thought and generous color. It absolutely deserved its Hugo nomination in 2023. So it’s a strange whiplash to sit for the two hours of this year’s Supergirl, which supposedly adapts the comic but unnecessarily restricts itself to an emotional range between ennui and sullenness, and to a visual palette of dirty yellows and dusty browns. If this is the movie Warner chose to make, one has to ask: why did they adapt that particular comic, and what did they like about it, and why doesn’t it show up anywhere in the movie?

In Supergirl, Superman’s cousin Kara is drinking away her childhood trauma when she meets Ruthye, an orphan on a mission of revenge. Ruthye hopes that Kara can help her hunt down the interstellar outlaw who killed her family, but Kara can’t be bothered to get involved—that is, until said outlaw poisons her dog. Now it’s personal. During the quest to find the cure for her dog, Kara learns to become a heroine.

The basic outline of the plot has a lot of potential for drama that the film doesn’t fully utilize. When we meet Kara, she’s a mess. Unlike Superman, who didn’t witness the end of Krypton, Kara was old enough to live through the whole tragedy, and though her cousin is a fellow Kryptonian, she doesn’t feel he’d understand her suffering. So she routinely travels to planets where the red sun cancels her superpowers so she can numb her pain with alcohol. The encounter with Ruthye should give Kara an opportunity to create a meaning and a purpose for her suffering by serving as a guide to another orphan who is also confused and directionless, but instead we get clumsily inserted blocks of exposition and endless moralizing.

For a movie that is set on several planets, Supergirl looks disappointingly bland. Space locations should be weird and surprising, but the set designs we get look generic and lazy. I’m going to show you an image from the comic and one from the movie so you understand the magnitude of the problem.

Supergirl sends us to half a dozen planets that look all the same and may as well be any dilapidated neighborhood on Earth. Aside from the briefest shots of alien faces in the background, there’s very little sense of the wonder of traveling across the galaxy. On its own, this movie looks just ugly. But as an adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, it’s unforgivable.

And as an action movie, it’s scattershot. Not only does it resort to conveniently depowering Kara too often; when she’s at full power, it’s not clear how much strength we should expect of her. Last year we had Superman punching a kaiju and holding a whole building with his hands; here Kara struggles to deal with a handful of bandits. There’s a ridiculous scene where the plot forgets that she has superhearing and X-ray vision, and the villain stabs three innocents right under her nose, while she’s less than a block away and actively searching for him. The moment provides juicy drama, but it shouldn’t happen with this character.

This is not exactly a bad movie, but rather one that had great material on its hands but took the boring option every time. The villain’s visual design is so over the top that it goes full circle into forgettable, the twists are obvious (there’s a family of helpful locals that have WE WILL BETRAY YOU painted on their faces), the pacing is broken by misplaced flashbacks, and the delivery of some crucial character-defining lines is careless. In the trailer, Kara says “My cousin sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth” with the tone of proper gravitas that it deserves; in the actual movie, she blurts it out like she’s annoyed at the thought. Does she disapprove of Clark’s philosophy? Does she disagree with being a hero? What does it say about Kara that she finds it easier to connect with a dog than with Clark? We get no clue.

Supergirl should have been the story of a detached loner who discovers a cause worth the risk, a cynic who learns to care. But it stays stuck in cynic mode for too long, and in the end it’s hard for the viewer to care, either.

Oh, and Lobo is there too. I don’t know why.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Villain, by Natalie Zina Walschotts

Everything's connected, and it's all fucked up.

Six years ago, Hench appeared, the first book in this very fine exploration of the nuances of villainy, and the dangers of knee-jerk support for institutions we are instructed to regard as the good guys. How much of superhero vs. supervillain is good vs evil, and how much is merely antagonist against antagonist? Even if we flip the good/evil spectrum, how many of the superheros are actually baddies, and how many of them are mere victims of the self-serving machinations of their institutional overseers?

Villain picks up where Hench left off, with our narrator, Anna Tromedlov fully embodying her new name of The Auditor. She has become Leviathan's right-hand woman; she runs the organization in his name while he plays dead, and drives policy when he returns to the job. As Leviathon’s team continues its conflict with the Draft – the institution that controls and organizes superhero activities -- her relationship with him develops along lines that would be tedious and predictable if they were so gosh-dang thematically grounded: What types of intimacy can define relationships, and how do they interact with institutional control? This book refuses to offer any easy answers. It’s all kind of fucked up. And, to misquote Tolstoy, exploring the domains and degrees of fucked-up-edness is where all the fun lies.

Let’s take the question of intimacy. Nemeses are very explicitly presented as if their mutual hatred behaves exactly like love. After any superhero’s death, the funeral events traditionally include a Night Service, during which the venue is left symbolically locked and unguarded at night. This allows villains to symbolically break in so that they may pay their own respects. Everyone recognizes that nemeses, like allies, need to mourn. And the Auditor does mourn: I wish we had more time, she thinks during Supercollider’s Night Service. I could have hated you so much longer.  She feels hollowed out by his loss: A deep sense of loss sloshed around in my chest. Without Supercollidor to focus on, there was a great void left behind, a huge volume of hatred without a focal point. Replace 'hate' with 'love' and this could be the ending of any tragic romance. 

The Auditor is not the only one to feel this way. Leviathan is utterly undone by the loss of Supercollidor, spending the first several chapters of the book, Achilles-like, sulking in his office. During the Night Service itself, Doc Proton, a token hero left behind to guard the venue, can be soothed only by the intervention of Decay, his own nemesis, into whose arms he collapses in tears. Later, Leviathan explains the nature of this intimacy during a conversation about the combativeness developing between the Auditor and an ex-hero, named Decoherence. ‘The greatest divisions are a single degree from perfect understanding,’ he says. ‘She could be the great hatred of your life.’ And he says it with a degree of jealousy, because her recognizes that the intimacy between nemeses can be a genuine obstacle to the more conventional romance he wants to pursue with the Auditor. After all, he himself was not able to consider such a thing until now, after Supercollidor is dead.

But what does this kind of intimacy entail? Leviathon is not the best romantic partner, in ways that could be a reflection on types of coercive control in domestic relationships, but which I myself find much more interesting to interpret in light of his role as the boss of a vast institution. Don’t date your coworkers, and definitely don’t date your manager, amirite? 

Personal/institutional power relations are the other thematic pole of this book. To what extent do individuals have power over their own lives in a world controlled, surveilled, and manipulated by institutions? The Draft kidnaps any child with supernatural ability, and indeed will disappear non-supers as well, if they have useful skills. The deeper you are enmeshed, the less control you have, until eventually people become indistinguishable from the forces they serve. We see this process in action everywhere. ‘Mom’ – an aspiring leader of the Draft – has no private life outside of work, and no weaknesses that Leviathan's team can exploit to interfere with his quest for institutional power. The auditor of the Draft, who aspires (and fails pathetically) at being the Auditor’s nemesis , tells her at one point, ‘This isn’t about work. This is about you…’ to which the Auditor reflects, I wasn’t sure I even made such a distinction anymore.

The role of chosen names is a really lovely detail that ties into the nuances of this point further. Decoherence has adopted her new name after leaving the Draft – and her Draft identity of Quantum Entanglement – behind. A team of young heroes include Thundersnow, whose name arouses repeated comment, to which she always replies simply 'I’m Canadian'. A new teammate of Thundersnow's is transferred over from a previous team of fascistic bullies, among whom he bore the name Riot Shield. (A wealth of commentary on how purportedly good institutions like to whitewash appalling violence in that detail alone!) Now, to distance himself from that previous role, he calls himself simply Shield: pure protection, no fascism involved.

But how much of this nomenclatural flexibility represents actual control over one’s individual life, and how much is merely window-dressing for the deeper control that institution exert over everyone in their power? Thundersnow never says actually, call me Susan. She can choose her name, yes, but only as long as it fits the theme of superhero names, consistent with the role the Draft has chosen for her. The reason Decoherence is still involved in this whole mess is because she recognizes that the heroes of the Draft are victims as much as they are perpetrators of evil, and wants to persuade them that they can just leave (more on that in a moment).

Even the Auditor herself shows that this phenomenon is not restricted to Draft-affiliated individuals. When she attempts to make contact with her best friend from civilian life, she has to go back to calling herself Anna, and has to work through some Feelings at realizing that this name no longer fits. Only her institutional name is an accurate description of the person she is now.

At the Night Service, Decay warns the Auditor of the danger of dissolving oneself into one’s role. Her face is not known yet, he tells her. She is not a symbol of Leviathan's institution yet. She can still walk away. She can still detach herself, live her own life, be her own person. She refuses this path – only to be offered it later, by Mom. Except this time the opportunity is no longer a genuine personal choice. Mom shows her a spreadsheet, in which all the damage she has done acting for Leviathan is weighed against the future good she could do if she leaves . She doesn’t even need to join the Draft, Mom says – she can join an NGO and live an independent life, doing good to balance the scales she has so badly tilted during her time working for Leviathan. Like the names, though, this offer does not represent genuine autonomy. The very existence of the spreadsheet shows that any future good works a hypothetical ex-Auditor might carry out will always be under scrutiny and evaluation by the Draft. It’s just a more palatable version of the Draft’s desire to control every individual’s behaviour. 

A third invitation to leave comes from Decoherence – not as a representative of villains, like Decay, or as a representative of heroes, like Mom. Decoherence has no use for any of those: ‘Fuck all of them,’ Decoherence says. ‘Leviathan and the Draft are just opposite ends of the same fucking spectrum.’ Decoherence wants to be truly, properly independent, and she wants the Auditor to join her. Although Leviathan sees her as a prospective nemesis to the Auditor, Decoherence and the Auditor dance around the friendlier side of that spectrum in most of their interactions.

Love, hate, intimacy, control, institutions, autonomy – it’s all interconnected. It’s all fucked up. This book does not shy away from exploring how, and why, and it does not propose any solutions. To the very last sentence, all it can offer is the opportunity to understand the problem. 

--

The Math

Nerd coefficient: 9: very high quality/standout in its category

Highlights:

• Squishy, nuanced exploration of themes
• Pretty awesome superhero vs. supervillain spectacle
• Messed up romance

Reference: Walschots, Natalie Zina. Villain. [William Morrow, 2026].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

TV Show Review: Widow's Bay

Funny and Scary are Subjective

I started writing for this site way back in 2013, which may as well have been when dinosaurs were alive in internet terms. It's been one of those rare things in life that is just good, and I've gotten to (virtually, at least) meet some absolutely incredible, talented, and just plain good people over those years. It does my overactive imposter syndrome absolutely no good to share my frequently sarcastic ramblings with people who are actually talented and know what the hell they're talking about.

Not least among these is the guy at the top of the masthead, Arturo Serrano. Go read anything he's written, and then come back here for something not anywhere near as good (that Encanto review is probably my favorite thing that's ever appeared on this site. I'm so sorry for everything you have to read now). So when I watched and loved Widow's Bay, and pitched writing this piece, his response was that he wasn't really 'vibing' with it, because it's billed as a horror/comedy, and, well, it's not that funny, my immediate reaction was 'wait, why do I like it? He knows way more than me!". Therefore, I watched the rest of the show with a more critical eye. I might be wrong, but I still like it (he will probably edit this piece to say something like "I drink cold hot dog water" or something, but I stand by it).

But I get why - like I said, it's not really funny. Fear and laughter are two sides of the same coin - misunderstanding, or a lack of understanding, is the key to both. Much of horror depends upon the impossible - the killer with the slow, plodding, methodical walk still catching up or appearing around every corner. Charles Schulz said that misunderstanding is the key to comedy (or words to that effect). Like horror, we see something we don't understand (or the protagonist doesn't), but here our caveman brains decide it's not a threat, and humor results. 

Marrying these two is a hard task to do well. If it's not threatening enough, it's just a comedy (see: any number of Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright films), if it's too threatening, it's not funny. For my money, Widow's Bay strikes this balance very, very well - it just doesn't do it with jokes. Before I get to how, let's set the stage:

The titular Widow's Bay is an old New England island that was a home port for whalers. It's cursed by some ancient evil, and this first season takes us on a tour de force of not just the manifold manifestations of the curse, but the commitment the curse has to making sure it checks off every horror movie genre. Haunted by an ancient creepy woman? Check. Teenagers were murdered in slasher fashion and now the killer is back? Check. Creepy puritan family historical horror? Also check. Each episode is a different flavor, which is mostly fun, but makes for a weird tonal shift sometimes, and it feels like threads are abandoned in order to jump to the next genre. It makes you wonder exactly what the Lovecraftian horror lurking is up to, exactly. But there is a season two coming, so maybe all that ties together. 

Our protagonist is mayor Tom Loftis, played brilliantly by Matthew Rhys, following his equally brilliant role in 2025's The Beast in Me. This role is a complete 180, where in The Beast in Me, he was charismatic and sinister, he is now unassuming, insecure and tries to do the right thing, but does so in that way which is borne of needing everyone to like him. He is a widower, has a son in his late teens, Evan, who is doing boy-in-his-late-teens things like getting high and going places he shouldn't. Normal teenage rebellion is exacerbated by the fact that he lives on a cursed island he can't leave, only he doesn't know any of that, just that he hasn't ever left the island and his dad is pretty absent despite, ya know, being trapped on an island.

Alongside them - calling them 'supporting characters' would be an injustice - are the wizened old sailor, Wyck (Stephen Root), and his awkward assistant Patricia (Kate O'Flynn), and the cranky, chain-smoking old lady Rosemary (Dale Dickey). The character dynamics of all of these (plus a few others who are in truly supporting roles) lend to a lot of the comedy. Wyck is gruff, self-assured, well-versed in island lore and prone to believing in curses and superstitions - which, in this case, is a good thing. Patricia is awkward, and an outcast, even on an island with a trapped population, and she and Wyck end up being a great odd-couple pairing (not romantically). Meanwhile, Rosemary finds ways to be offended by literally everything they do, while still hanging around all the time. A good chunk of the comedy comes from simply letting them bounce off each other. 

As I mentioned, the comedy doesn't lessen the horror - and while there are slasher elements, or, more accurately, one slasher-adjacent episode, most of it is a slow burn and creepy. The fourth episode, Beach Reads, may be one of my favorite episodes of TV in recent memory. It's representative of so much of the show, where the ostensibly innocent has the unshakable feeling that something is off - like I said, misunderstanding, or lack thereof, creates a feeling of dread. I won't spoil it, or say too much, except that they did an amazing job of making an innocent-seeming book seem creepy, and the payoff is immaculate, littered with just enough clues and brilliant camerawork that makes you sit upright, and nervous about what is coming next.

Widow's Bay uses this against us, though, to set up the humor, and this is where I fully embrace it, and others might not enjoy it as much. I grew up on M*A*S*H, which means my humor and martinis are both very, very dry. Jump scares in Widow's Bay are all innocent, right when you think something bad is about to happen. Moments of tension are interrupted, not by knee-slappers, but by someone being intensely awkward. All of this dovetails together to make you not trust anything, so when (small spoilers) we spend a whole bunch of time (KINDA/SORTA SPOILER ALERT) with what seems like a sweet old lady, it feels like something is deeply wrong and is about to be revealed, but it turns out, she is, in fact, a sweet old lady. Instead of humor and horror working against each other, Widow's Bay uses them to compliment each other and work in concert, deepen the creep factor, ramp up tension and the fear of the unknown. Sometimes the tension is relived because it's funny, sometimes it's relieved because it's very much not. 

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The Math:

Highlights:

• Perfectly blends horror and comedy in a way few things have
• A great cast of characters, beyond the ones I've highlighted. They're delightful, and quirky, and the acting is great (I also love that Stephen Root and Dale Dickey were both side characters in Justified, which is always a way into my heart)
• Fun exploration of different genres. This is another thing I won't fault someone for not enjoying, but I didn't mind it.

Lowlights:

• If you're looking for a hide-behind-your-pillow, scare-you-senseless type show, this ain't it. The creep factor, and a feeling of foreboding are well-done, but it won't scare your socks off (and I'm a weenie)
• The same goes for jokes. It's not Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright that will make you ROFL or whatever the kids say these days. The comedy is dry, and dark.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 - well worth your time and attention. 

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, and will definitely publish something again one day, probably. He loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

TV Review: Phantom Lawyer

Lawyers, ghosts and lots of emotional intensity in the latest fantasy K-drama

Lawyers are awesome, but they tend to be, at best, background characters in speculative fiction. With a few notable exceptions, including Daredevil and She-Hulk, lawyers are not normally the heroes in fantasy adventures. So, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the premise of one of the latest K-dramas, Phantom Lawyer. Netflix’s Phantom Lawyer is a sweet, change of pace adventure about a newly minted attorney who can see ghosts. As a result, he quickly gets caught up in each deceased person’s need for justice. Despite its cozy comedy set up, each segment delivers plenty of adventure and drama, as well as a big emotional hit that will have you reaching for your tissues.

Newly licensed lawyer Shin I-rang is smart, kind, and personable, but he is rejected for employment by all of the law firms in town, despite his solid qualifications. He soon realizes his misfortune is due to the reputation of his beloved father who died years ago as a disgraced, corrupt attorney. (Put a pin in that because it will drive much of the narrative in the later episodes.) I-rang decides to open his own firm but can only afford an office building previously owned by a shaman. The space is haunted by the spirits of various ghosts who appear only to him and can involuntarily possess him at times when the ghost gets particularly stressed out. Although I-rang is initially reluctant to interact with them, he gradually builds connections with various ghosts who need resolution and justice before they can move on to the afterlife. With the help of a priest who was previously a shaman, I-rang begins to understand the strangeness of his encounters with dead people. Each ghost’s story is explored and resolved over two episode segments in the sixteen episode series. Most stories are murder mysteries but some ghosts die in other ways that are still entangled with a resolution in the justice system. I-rang is frequently opposed by the no-nonsense, high powered attorney Ha-Nyun. Over time she becomes disillusioned by her firm’s tactics and becomes intrigued by I-rang’s unique ability to access hidden information about the deceased. This leads to jealousy from her managing attorney whose father is a former close friend of I-rang’s disgraced father. Although, I-rang initially keeps the ghosts a secret, he eventually reveals the truth to his supportive brother in law who is a part time actor. The brother-in-law is primarily a comic relief character who uses his acting skills to help I-rang in various schemes to help his dead clients. I-rang also regularly enlists the aid of a progressive priest, Father Matthew, who is an ex-shaman and helps with managing the ghosts transition to the afterlife. Ha-Nyun and I-rang are both often aided by the support of the by-the-book police investigator Kim Hyun-Woo, whose quiet awesomeness makes him one of my favorite characters on the show. There is a very slow burn enemies to love-interest story between Ha-Nyun and I-rang, and both Ha-Nyun and I-rang bond over their own emotional trauma from the death of close family members.

The series is primarily a comedy but each victim’s story involves significant emotional intensity that catches you by surprise as the plot evolves. Unlike most traditional murder mysteries, the victims in Phantom Lawyer take an active role in seeking their own justice, often directly helping with the investigation and supporting I-rang when he gets discouraged. This self-determination keeps the story positive despite some very stressful circumstances. Each two episode segment involves the death of a completely different type of character and has a Law & Order type set up with a death and mystery. However, in addition to each victim’s story, the series has a larger story arc for both Ha-Nyun's personal tragedy and ultimately I-rang’s confrontation with his dead father. These big story arcs add depth to the series with both the extra layer of plot and the intense emotions.

However, despite the clever storytelling, the show’s primarily comedic tone wears thin at times and the obligatory hijinks sometimes slows the pacing of the story. If you are watching Phantom Lawyer with subtitles on Netflix, you may want to set the show to 1.25 and speed throughout any extended shenanigans and then slow back down to normal speed when the real action and emotional intensity resumes. Fortunately, lead actor Yoo Yeon-seok does a great job of delivering the physical humor of being possessed by a range of characters (from a grumpy ancient shoemaker to an angsty teen girl K-Pop star to an energetic grade schooler) while also pulling off intense tear-jerker moments. There are also some moments where both Ha-Nyun and I-rang make dangerous choices that seem particularly unrealistic given their day jobs as lawyers.

Despite some pacing issues, Phantom Lawyer is an entertaining foray into lawyers as heroes and the law as a heroic option in a fantastical story. The focus moves beyond the technicalities of courtroom arguments and shows each victim and each surviving family member as authentic human beings. The series doesn’t shy away from the sad stories and upsetting fact patterns that unfortunately reflect the reality of life. But, by giving the victims a voice and some onscreen self-determination, we get a story that is ultimately uplifting and satisfying, especially if you’re a fan of lawyers.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Balance of comedy and emotional intensity
• Skippable hijinks
• Clever storytelling with plenty of adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

The Recluce Reread: The Magic Engineer

Welcome dear readers to the third installment of the Recluce Reread! Today we’re going to talk about The Magic Engineer, which is the book that sort of answers the question you probably were not asking when reading The Magic of Recluce and wondering “where does Recluce get those wonderful toys?”. It starts here, some 300 years after Creslin and Megeara founded Recluce in The Towers of the Sunset. 

Chronology only matters to a point in the Recluce series and that point is just how much the reader cares how everything fits together. I *mostly* care how everything fits, by which I mean I like to see the connections between novels but because Modesitt jumps around so much in time through the 25 (so far) published novels that those connections are often little more than threads.

For example, The Magic Engineer is set 300 years after The Towers of the Sunset and the founding of Recluce. Creslin has already passed into legend and is spoken about in magely circles but also in the sense of “Recluce doesn’t have a Creslin” and there are thin hints about descendents. The Magic Engineer is also a good 1500 years after the Alyiakal novels, which are thus far the earliest set and still 650 years before The Magic of Recluce and the final books of the setting.

The novel begins very similarly to The Magic of Recluce. Dorrin is not Lerris facing the dangergeld (terrible name, by the way), but he’s not not Lerris facing the dangergeld. Those who can’t accept Recluce’s rules in their core will face exile, but those whose parents can afford to pay for Academy schooling, they can be trained to have a greater opportunity for success. That’s Dorrin, a young blacksmith who doesn’t quite fit in, doesn’t accept the answers that he is given, and really all he wants to do is just make his machines that he is insistent are order based but the magisters of Recluce say otherwise. So away he goes. 

I’ll confirm as I re-read more of the series, but this is likely to be my least favorite Recluce novel. It’s not that I dislike Dorrin, he’s a fairly standard Recluce hero, but I much less enjoy reading about Dorrin than I do most other protagonists. I liked it him far less early on than I did Lerris, impressive as that is, and only really settle in to Dorrin’s story once *he* is settled into Diev and doing the mundane work of smithing and trying to a) figure out how to make his giant engines and b) how to earn enough gold to be able to do so. As far as that goes, it’s a fairly standard Recluce story: Try to live a peaceful life, forced by circumstances to live in interesting times, feel forced to act, explosive conclusion. Rinse, wash, repeat.

I do find it interesting that Dorrin is the one who wrote The Basis of Order, the small tome (presumably small) that underpins so much of subsequent order teaching - though it only appears in a few books. Maybe it’s because it’s so prominent in The Magic of Recluce and I only read that a couple months ago so it feels fresh, important and ever present.

Otherwise, we get the founding of Nylan the city and more importantly (maybe), the origin of the black warships used in The Magic of Recluce and what seemed in that novel to be the true foundation of the power of the island nation.

But what I’d really like to read and am almost certainly not going to get is something set in and around Recluce in the 200+ years between The Towers of the Sunset and The Magic Engineer to see how Recluce developed after Creslin and Megaera passed away. I know not every period has the bits of explosiveness that Modesitt likes to build towards - but given that he tells stories that lives in the mundanity of the day to day, I’d like to read that story.


Related Short Story: Artisan: Four Portraits and a Miniature

This story runs concurrently with The Magic Engineer and is a series of glimpses into the life of another the not-a-dangergelders who started with Dorrin, Jyll, a painter. It starts with her inability to accept the Recluce life (from the perspective of the magisters, of course), her semi magical violence, and her gradual maturation through the episodes of the story until it intersects back with Dorrin at the end of the novel. 

I wouldn’t say so much that it fills in gaps as much as it just shows that other lives are continuing and weaving in and out of the narrative viewpoint that we are given in The Magic Engineer. It’s not one of my favorites from Recluce Tales


PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

Film Review: Toy Story 5

A treasure trove of worthy ideas wasted in a movie that has no reason to exist

In Toy Story 5, our girl Bonnie receives a computer tablet that now consumes all her waking hours, and the toys are worried that they’re going to be abandoned. Jealousy and misunderstandings ensue. I think it’s time to ask in what year the Toy Story universe is set, because if anyone at Pixar has kids, they should have noticed that the preoccupations explored in this newest film in the franchise have been discussed and analyzed to death since literally the last century, and this plot adds no fruitful arguments to the conversation.

Traditional toys worried that they’ll be replaced by a newer, shinier electronic toy was the plot of the first Toy Story, back in 1995. Just one year later, the world saw the launch of Tickle Me Elmo, the Tamagotchi, the Game Boy Pocket, the Nintendo 64, the Palm Pilot, and the Yahoo Kids portal. Then, in 1997, came the Tetrix Robotics Kit and the Digimon (the virtual pets, not yet the TV show). And in 1998 came Betty Spaghetty, LEGO Ninja, Imaginext, and the Furbies. All that happened before there even was a Toy Story 2, which had nothing to say about the Tamagotchi and its cousins.

So who is the intended audience of Toy Story 5? If it’s the nostalgic fans of the first film, it’s absurdly late to say anything about electronic toys to viewers who already moved on from the death of their Tamagotchis. If it’s today’s children, this film has nothing useful to say to them either, given that what they have to deal with is Minecraft giving them malware that can steal their data, Fortnite pressuring them to spend more and more on loot boxes, Roblox serving them on a silver platter to pedophiles, and ChatGPT teaching them how to kill themselves. This movie makes a big gesture of concern for the dangers of digital entertainment for children, but it shows no awareness of what those dangers are.

I’m not saying that the Toy Story franchise has used up its potential. But it needs to make a more serious effort to stay relevant. For example, toys in this universe are cursed with immortality, accumulating lists of past owners across generations. So there are much more interesting stories that could be told with this lore. The new gadget in Toy Story 5 is a supposedly kid-friendly tablet computer, and because toys have sentience, this computer can take its own initiative to use its browser, email, chat or camera functions, acting as an agentic AI without constraints. With that character there’s a lot that could say about today’s AI craze.

Or consider the small army of Buzz Lightyear dolls that are set loose on the world at the start of the movie and eventually learn that the sole purpose for their existence is to play with kids. Why can’t one of those toys wonder whether maybe there’s more to life? Barbie, of all things, did a deeper exploration of the meaning of a toy’s life than Toy Story 5 (and the fascinating questions raised by Forky from Toy Story 4 are completely forgotten in 5).

It seems that toys in the Toy Story universe are expected to resign themselves to a life of unquestioned subservience, much like the robots in Star Wars. Jessie the Cowgirl, who takes a more central role in 5, laments the fact that children grow up and forget their old toys (and makes the laughably boomer-coded observation that those new digital gadgets are making them grow up too quickly), but even after going through an extended reflection on the pain of repeated abandonment, she doesn’t question her assigned function, and even considers it an honor to be used as a literal plaything for an unknown number of lifetimes.

The core ethos of Toy Story may be the heart-warming “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” but friendship happens between equals, and the dynamic between a child and a toy that can never reveal it’s actually sentient is far from equal. All the fanciful imaginary adventures that the toys enact are decided by the child, with the toys forced to go along with them. Once you really give it some thought, where’s the fun, let alone the honor, in such a life?

Toy Story 5’s solution to Bonnie’s difficulty in adjusting to digital culture is to find her a new human friend who also likes traditional toys and doesn’t bully her on a public chat. That’s a more reasonable narrative choice than a flat “machines bad,” but it implies that a whole swath of “kids bad” is left unexamined. Sure, hurray for the handful of kids still interested in playing with toys, who would otherwise face the existential horror of immortality inside a shoe box, but when it comes to the many, many more kids whose playtime consists of interminable sessions of Candy Crush or Angry Birds or whatever it is that today’s kids are into, the movie just gives up on them.

The safety of children in the digital world is a very real concern, and Toy Story 5 doesn’t have anything to say on the matter that rises above tired Black Mirror-level platitudes. If you want a good animated movie about the absurdities of electronic life, try Ralph Breaks the Internet. That one’s from 2018, and the points it makes feel more relevant than this year’s Toy Story 5. Try to keep up, Pixar.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Microreview: The Nightland Express by J. M. Lee

A journey across the dividing lines of American society

In the antebellum Wild West, two teenagers eager for an excuse to run away take a job as horse-riding couriers. This job isn’t like delivering the regular mail: riders are sworn to an extreme level of secrecy, the route is haunted with hungry, spectral apparitions, and the horses never seem to grow tired even after covering a week’s journey in a matter of hours. Operating in parallel with the Overland service, the Nightland one uses its own, secluded stations, hidden at the edge of visible reality. As it turns out, there’s a whole other world alongside this one, and the creatures that inhabit it don’t like the rapacious westward expansion of settler civilization.

Not unlike the huge political rift that will lead to the US Civil War, and which lingers like a shadow over the entire plot, there’s a deeper rift forming between humanity and nature, and both forms of opposition emerge from the same rotten desire to possess, to snatch and claim and draw property lines around that which should have been free. Our two protagonists will find themselves in the middle of an ideological dispute that might break the world.

Fittingly, these protagonists have experience walking between two lives. Ben is a former slave who can pass for white, while Jesse was assigned female and wears male clothes. An important part of their inner development will involve learning to empathize with each other’s struggles despite them not being neatly comparable. There’s a recurring theme of mutual incomprehension taking the form of a cosmic wound, of the land itself suffering under the artificial divisions that humans are so accustomed to carving between one another.

The Nightland Express pays special attention to this theme of otherness and the ways in which the dominant settler culture fails to engage with the perspectives, the concerns, or even the basic fact of the existence of the inhabitants of the lands it seeks to take. When our protagonists ride through the hidden regions of the Nightland, the description highlights the effect of unfamiliarity: the same landscapes appear forbiddingly terrifying at first sight, yet endowed with a unique beauty in later encounters. The book’s prose conveys both sensations with a striking expressive strength.

There’s a fascinating idea implied by the antagonist’s secret plan to protect the spiritual realm from the depredations of settler culture. Without spoiling too much, the book seems to be making the point that, before Western civilization embarked on its invasion of other regions of the world and started suppressing their various spiritual traditions, it inflicted that violence on itself first. According to this idea, the reason why the West seems less connected to its own spirituality is that it first committed colonial epistemicide against itself. So the question at the core of the book’s plot is whether colonized lands can avoid becoming similarly alienated from themselves.

The events of the ending don’t cascade into the large-scale restoration of relations that one might hope for, mainly because the timeline has to roll into our known history (and there’s that pesky Confederacy that needs to be destroyed), but the last we see of our protagonists has them set on a trajectory of healing. The broken order created by colonization will take a long time to repair, but the repairing is happening, both in the visible and the invisible realms.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Lee, J. M. The Nightland Express [Erewhon, 2022].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

Ilona Andrews expands their fantasy and romance talents into the burgeoning realm of isekai in English

Isekai. Portal fiction. The very Japanese origin of the word suggests it is relatively new, even exotic, but it is a tradition that taps into a small but active stream in English SFF while using the enthusiasm of its Japanese taproot for basic concepts. Ilona Andrews’s This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is the latest iteration of isekai fiction in a mainstream English language format.

Online encyclopedias define isekai as a genre of Japanese manga, anime, light novel, video game, etc. It has characters who go into a different world. But that’s not quite right, since you might be thinking: What’s the difference between isekai and portal fantasy? Portal fantasy does all of that too. One can think of portal fantasy as a bigger umbrella category than isekai. Portal fantasy covers any time characters go from one universe to another, usually from our world to a fantasy-based world.¹ Examples are numerous, and the concept goes back at least to the pulp era of science fiction.

Isekai is a more specific form of portal fantasy. There are some strains and varieties, but the main thrust is that the protagonist is transported to another world. Sometimes they have to die in order to get resurrected into this new world.² A lot of the time, unlike some portal fantasy, they wind up getting powers and abilities, even godlike ones, by the act of transferring across to the new world.³

Some isekai have an explicitly roleplaying element to them. The protagonist finds themself inside of a roleplaying game, or a piece of fiction, sometimes one that they know quite well.⁴ This knowledge can itself be a superpower, but the thrust is, the character has been transported into a new world that can run on rules that can be manipulated.⁵ There are even subsets of this where the protagonist finds themself in the role of a specific character from the book/property whose world they are now in. There is a sub-sub-genre of this where the protagonist finds themself specifically in the body of a villain… a villainess in fact, and has to figure out how to avoid the sticky end that inevitably awaits them.⁶

So let’s get to This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me and see how this fits into isekai. Our protagonist is Maggie. Maggie has fallen into the world of her favorite fantasy series, one that has never been finished. She is in the city of Kair Toren, and she knows the plot of the two books by heart. She is immersed fully in the world of the books. The problem is, she is absolutely penniless. She is not in the body of a villainess or anyone else, and she knows that the world is in for a rough time. And so she decides that, in addition to survival, her goal is to stop the tragedy that the book unfolds.

Maggie does have a superpower, one that she does not expect. She dies early in the book… and then she is resurrected. This is not like Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. The world itself does not reset; the world keeps going on, and the resurrections are painful and take time. Maggie herself thinks about the gruesomeness of this, and whether she could come back from, for example, being torn to pieces. So she uses her extensive knowledge of the books and tries to bootstrap herself out of poverty and try to derail the beginnings of the plots that will consume Kair Toren in fire and blood. Along the way she makes some friends and gets wrapped up in intrigue and adventure. She also discovers a secondary superpower that is subtle but important: although she has read the book many times, she discovers that she can quote from the book, chapter and verse as it were. It gives an interesting metatextual twist to things. It also means that at points she doesn’t know some facts, because even the braided multiple POVs of the book don’t cover everything, so she is forced to guess and deduce some things about the plot and people around her because they were not in the book.⁷ As far as telling her companions what she is, she does not tell anyone that she is from the world outside the story. She is genre-aware enough to realize the problems of that. As it is, her ability as a seer means she has to try and keep her head down to avoid entities who might want to grab her for information.

And then there is the romance. This is an Ilona Andrews novel, and romance is a common subgenre in the novels they write. So there is no surprise that Unresolved Sexual Tension is shot through the book, especially when Maggie realizes that one of her companions and friends is not who she thought they were, and is instead someone far more dangerous and compelling. Given that the character in question is, according to the book, destined to marry someone else, this provides narrative tension as well.

And that is the real heart of this book and what it tries to do, and what it is in the isekai subgenre. Maggie knows the book by heart and even better than she should given that secondary superpower. What she finds is a conservation of narrative working against her. She does indeed try to stop the tragic events of the book, including even the “pebble” that rolls downhill to start the avalanche of war and rebellion and conflict, but at every turn, the narrative tries to assert itself and put the story “back on track” despite her efforts. It’s a fascinating use of metatext here, as Maggie tries to defy what happens in the books, only to be resisted and have to find a different approach or fight a new problem.

The story ends on a cliffhanger, with a situation seemingly resolved, but then, out of nowhere, the problem arises anew and puts our protagonist in peril. But that, too, is a narrative convention (and our protagonist knows it), which suggests to me that she is still trapped in a narrative structure that keeps wanting to assert itself despite her efforts. So this is not a novel that is going to satisfy if you are looking for the one-and-done approach. Instead, we have a series, and we still have a whole set of unresolved mysteries, and of course, peril for the protagonist. The novel stays entirely in Maggie’s point of view, which is an interesting commentary and choice given that she is in a world of multiple POV epic fantasy. I like that tension for the reader, and wonder if she will keep up that for the inevitable sequel.

Highlights:

• Isekai, in a English language SFF mode.
• Yes, this is a kissing book. Or at least slow-burn would-be kissing.
• Interesting metatextual elements.

Reference: Andrews, Ilona. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me [Tor, 2026].

¹ A notable exception to this is Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Out of This World and sequels, where there is portal travel from our world to a fantasy world, *and* to a space opera world. The space opera world may have a touch of science fantasy to it since it's not a rigorous “the net is up” sort of hard SF universe.

² That bit doesn’t seem to yet be popular in mainstream English versions of Isekai. However, the far out of print Through the Ice by Piers Anthony and Robert Kornwise (1992) does use this, having its young protagonist fall through ice and then get resurrected into a fantasy world. I thought it very strange at the time I read it, not knowing at all of isekai in any form. But in Japanese isekai, it would be bog-standard. Did Kornwise and Anthony read isekai at that point, or invent it independently?

³ The first time I came across that in mainstream English form was Dave Duncan’s The Great Game series, which explicitly has as its worldbuilding that if you transfer to another realm, you basically have it in you to be a god in that realm. The protagonist goes from 1914 England to a realm where he has the potential to gain prodigious power… but the gods already there have very mixed ideas about someone else joining their pantheon (especially the God of Death). The author’s foreword, 10 years after the fact, doesn’t mention isekai as an inspiration at all. But, again, by Japanese framing, bog-standard isekai.

⁴ And showing that this is old in English language SFF, I present to you The Incompleat Enchanter ‘verse of Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague de Camp. Harold Shea and his friends find that portal magic, and magic in general, is based on verse, and they wind up in a variety of worlds that they know—Norse myth, the Roland cycle, The Faerie Queene and other worlds that they recognize. There is even some directed targeting at one point, seeking a world with a magician powerful enough to handle a problem, and picking it based on their reading. Also a bit of Duncan here, as, except for portal magic, the protagonists seem unable to do spells with verse in our world… but in other worlds, they are indeed magicians with verse.

⁵ LitRPG enters the chat at this point, as well as its outgrowths and parallels. Being thrust into the world of a game is much older than that in mainstream English SFF, however. One can look to the 1980s and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, which runs on this premise. Or Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame novels, which have the characters transported into an RPG world. Although it is not a videogame, Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying has a protagonist who was brought across, portal fantasy style, but every time she dies, the world resets. Wexler is extensively deep into anime and manga, as seen in other books of his, and he is definitely channeling isekai tropes throughout.

⁶ And this is where Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil comes into the chat, because it runs right on this chassis in a mainstream English language form. Main character Rae is dying and makes a magical bargain… and winds up in the world of the books… but she is not the superfan; her sister is. So she doesn’t know everything, but she does know that she is Lady Rahela, and that in that role, she is due to die the next day.

⁷ And what of the book and its actual world? As revealed by Maggie and what we see, Kair Toren is a high-magic epic fantasy world with lots of intrigue, and yes, lots of blood. Think Martin’s Westeros or Elliott’s Wendar, but with the magic turned on to high. The two fictional novels have lots of PoV characters, extensive worldbuilding and backstory, and are exactly the kind of thick doorstoppers that someone could read and reread extensively and obsessively.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: Masters of the Universe (2026)

Lighthearted nostalgic adventure that doesn't take itself too seriously

Saturday mornings in the ‘80s were a sacred time for fantasy loving kids, a time when they could indulge in a range of fantastical animated adventures. Some cartoons were available in the after school hours as well. Long before cable gave us 24-hour kids and cartoon channels, and before streaming services gave us on-demand access to thousands of superhero shows, weekend and after school cartoons were the primary gateway to adventure. Among the curated selection of kids cartoons was He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The series, based on an existing toy brand, gave kids the animated version of action figures from Mattel’s Masters of the Universe collection. In full disclosure, I will note that I am not a He-Man (or spinoff She-Ra) superfan, although I watched some of both original shows in their original runs and have sometimes watched other iterations of the series, including Netflix’s She-Ra reboot. I mention this because the 2026 Masters of the Universe feels very intentionally grounded in that original sense of childhood nostalgia. Depending on your perspective, you may find this a joyous relief or an irritation. For me, despite the film’s many shortcomings, I mostly found it to be the former: a fun, optimistic surprise in a sea of otherwise perfectly appropriate and timely cinema bleakness and intensity.

In the 2026 adventure, Adam is the young prince of Eternia, a magical kingdom with talking animals and sorcerers. He is small for his age and hesitant to fight. As a result, he is pushed around by the other kids in their weapons training sessions and looked down on by his father the king. Despite this, he is friends with his strong friend Teela and is encouraged by his teacher, Teela’s dad, the head soldier Duncan. Adam’s home is Castle Grayskull, home to a sacred sword of power and protected by a mage known as the Sorceress. When the evil sorcerer Skeletor and his partner Evil-Lyn attack the castle, the king’s forces are overwhelmed. The queen, who is from Earth, is forced to send Adam and the sword to safety through a portal to Earth. But in the fall to Earth, Adam loses the sword. Suddenly (one time skip later), fifteen years have passed and Adam is going on Tinder dates and working in HR in Oklahoma City. Despite his average life, he is obsessed with memories of his home planet (although no one believes him) and is determined to regain his lost sword. When he finally finds it, it triggers an attack by a fantastical creature, which leads to a rescue by his now grown-up friend Teela, who takes him back to Eternia. Adam must use the sword and his own inner strength to rescue his parents, free his people, and retake his kingdom from Skeletor.

The major strength of this film is the lead actors. Nicholas Galitzine is believable and enjoyable as a likeable but insecure everyman who knows he’s destined for more than the drudgery of his day job. Camila Mendes, who did several seasons as Veronica in Riverdale, is excellent as the no-nonsense, sharp, grown-up-in-the-room in all of the scenes. Idris Elba is, as always, perfect as Duncan, who ranges from tough teacher to substitute father figure to defeated and depressed drunk to fierce soldier. Kristen Wiig is also funny as Duncan’s sarcastic robot companion. There is even a Dolph Lundgren cameo, where the former He-Man actor gives Nicholas Galitzine some cryptic advice about the way to be a hero.

There are many funny moments in this film, including the opening scene where Adam is telling his complicated life story to his eyerolling blind date. Although not all of the jokes hit, the story is, for the most part, amusing and very kid-friendly. Unlike other superhero live-action films, Masters of the Universe opts for comedy and camp as its primary tone. The choice is a bit unexpected in this age of edgy superhero interpretations that are either grim or cynical. Masters of the Universe is closer to the tone of the Barbie movie or the live-action One Piece series. But it opts out of Barbie’s cerebral social commentary sarcasm or One Piece’s balance of outrageousness and grim intensity. It’s most similar in tone to the 2017 live-action Power Rangers, a film that tried to balance a modern, edgy aesthetic with classic, campy, kids show nostalgia. Power Rangers was a film that started off edgy/cool in the first half and then jarringly dove into campy kids nerdiness in the second half. However, Masters of the Universe has a clear target audience and vibe in mind, and stays consistent in its tone of lightness, kid-friendly playfulness and self-aware nostalgia.

In fact, the film is very self-aware of its campy nostalgia. Adam reps the old Prince Adam outfit by wearing a pink button-down shirt and jeans in his non-He-Man scenes. He repeatedly acknowledges the goofiness of some of the things he says or does, admitting that many of his choices are based on a child’s worldview and childhood memories he wants to reconnect with. Although he is an adult, it is clear he is emotionally stuck in his childhood trauma, loss, and insecurity. In the original He-Man animated series, Adam’s fearful or lackadaisical attitude was an artificial cover for his alternate identity. In Masters of the Universe, he has genuine hesitation and insecurities. And when he transforms, everyone around him knows he’s the same person with the same insecurities. This evolution of the premise is an asset to the story, to humanize both him and his connection to his friends. And it avoids the always annoying trope of close friends not noticing that the hero and their clearly identical alter ego are the same person.

However, despite the appeal of the story and the fun tone, there are some elements of the film that are confusing. Given the intentional and thoughtful characterization of Adam, it’s odd to leave out any reference to his childhood upbringing on Earth. He talks about life on Eternia as if it is the only thing he knows. In other lost prince/princess stories, we get at least a quick explanation of their survival. Superman was adopted by the Kents; Emma from Once Upon a Time was raised in foster homes in the U.S. The absence of even a passing explanation for his survival was a distracting plot omission that felt like a missed opportunity to give this Oklahoman Adam some personal context. His bestie and roommate Hussein is a likeable but underused character who mostly disappears from the plot without an opportunity to get to know about his connection to Adam. Another strange choice is an extended detour into Adam’s day job at a human relations company where his obsession with swords gets him in trouble. There is a particularly protracted scene of his boss (an excellent Sasheer Zamata) lecturing him on sensitivity in a way that paints her as a semi-villain (she seems almost like a corporate counterpart to Evil-Lyn), and the scene is clearly meant to mock corporate sensitivity lingo. The fact that a consent joke is twice used as a derisive punchline is another strange choice. Later in a crucial moment on Eternia, Adam initially opts for negotiation and empathy when everyone wants him to fight, but he is soon forced to abandon that approach in favor of fighting. This throughline is a confusing theme in a film that is otherwise fun, optimistic, and likeable.

Like many films lately, Masters of the Universe is at least thirty minutes too long, especially for something that is primarily a comedy adventure. It is a film that has plenty of kid-friendly content and doesn’t take itself too seriously. The very last scenes and the first post-credits scene emphasize this lightheartedness with a big homage to the original 1980s cartoon in its final send-off. Although it deals with themes of empathy versus aggression and self-confidence versus insecurity, the overall story is mainly a fun reminder of childhood imagination and adventure. Depending on your mood, that may be just what you need.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Self-aware nostalgia
• Solid acting
• Kid-friendly content and humor

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Comic Book Review: Absolute Martian Manhunter

Lean, green and cosmic in a way you've not seen before

Illustration: Javier Rodriguez

I’ve not been a reader of comics featuring superheroes for the longest time, and certainly not DC or Marvel, but then my friend dropped a copy of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow on me, and the rest was, as they say, history.

Call it my own snobbishness at the idea of superheroes, my weariness of superheroes fighting for the status quo, or just a fear of how to get started with a medium that has more options than grains of sand on the beach. Anyway, I arrived at DC Comics only recently, and a friend recommended I start with the first collected volume of Absolute Martian Manhunter, written by Deniz Camp and illustrated by Javier Rodriguez. This volume covers issues 1-6. There’s a second coming in August 2026, which will take the story to the end of issue 12.

I’m delighted to say it was nothing like what I thought I was going to get. The artwork is really trippy, colourful, unexpected and full of emotion. The Martian Manhunter here isn’t the one you know from the Justice League, but a cosmic entity travelling by consciousness and protecting the emotions of the vulnerable from the physical disasters that unfold when we lose ourselves in fear or hate or despair.

This was interesting to me in a number of ways—by making this something that wasn’t about people in capes but about one of those same heroes appearing in an unexpected (to me) way, it gave me both a way back into these characters but also provided something novel, surprising and with a lot of room to do more than focus on a superhero to the exclusion of everyone else.

Absolute Martian Manhunter has the eponymous character inhabiting people to make themselves present on Earth, and they’re here investigating an imbalance in people’s psyches. This manifests itself as radicalisation—the kind that leads to riots and violence and hatred and death.

Yeah, it’s a little on the nose, but as a metaphor for examining what divides us and how you might overcome that, it’s a lovely little story.

This first volume is a complete arc, which felt great because it does a great job introducing this unusual take on the character, laying out his concerns but also introducing the human characters through whom MM is intervening in human affairs.

The main character, John Jones, is an FBI agent (one assumes pre-Kash Patel, given the Bureau’s competence in this comic) who starts to investigate how 24 people died in the same way but were killed by 24 different and unrelated perpetrators on the same night. Each attack appears carried out by a lone wolf—except, of course, they’re all done in the same way at the same time.

These baffling crimes are heinous and devastating, but also have an uncanny element to them which Jones can’t get his head around. That is until MM arrives in his head and turns his head upside down. Having a cosmic entity invade your consciousness will ruin your day, and Jones spends as much time trying to survive the arrival of MM in his psyche as he does investigating the how and why of these crimes.

This creates a tension in the story between Jones and MM that feels, if not quite a battle, then certainly a fraught journey of acceptance and challenge—especially around trauma and what we do with it even when we do want to talk about/process it.

Alongside this is the series antagonist, a White Martian who MM explains not as an actual White alien from Mars but as another cosmic power who seeks to destroy because that’s its fundamental nature. The White Martian is built of hate and corruption and violence, and to the extent it wants something rather than being a force of nature, these are the things it wants.

I found the political underpinnings of this interesting, suggesting that hate and violence and extremism are as much a viral meme (in the worst sense of “virus”) that eats its host alive regardless of the cost. In this sense there’s a peak transmission rate and infection rate that, ultimately, results in complete eradication, but this end point is of no concern, only the journey of violence and destruction.

AMM supposes that sometimes those who want to destroy have no other goal than destruction. In a world in which we constantly hear idiots telling everyone they’re “disrupters,” it’s hard not to see how such an approach finds so little resistance—because most of us are built to assume that people want something longer term—stability, peace, calm, predictability. When something comes along that wants none of these things and actively doesn’t care about negotiating, the future or how this all ends, well, our defences are pretty weak to that. AMM suggests there are ways of defeating such radicalisation and attacks, but they aren’t easy, and they’re not momentary ripostes but ways of being that require practice and vigilance.

Highlights:

• Incredible colouring
• Neatly done psychological story
• Cosmic horrors

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a really great take on a classic DC character.

Reference: Camp, Deniz, and Rodriguez, Javier. Absolute Martian Manhunter [DC Comics, 2026].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist, he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.