Video Game Review: Balatro by LocalThunk

You'll be seeing poker hands in your dreams.

I was skeptical of Balatro when I heard of all the praise it received last year. How could a roguelite game about making poker hands become something so lauded that it propelled the little indie title into the stratosphere? Not only has it succeeded critically, becoming a nominee for game of the year at the Game Awards (and winning best indie, best debut indie, and best mobile game), but also commercially, selling over five million copies as of earlier this year. The developer, LocalThunk made the wise decision to remain anonymous, so though I can't mention him/her by name, know that minus the music, one person made this entire game (who is now set for life, thanks to Balatro). Because of PlayStation Plus’ monthly offerings, I had the opportunity to check it out for free. I’d just finished up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and had Death Stranding: Director’s Cut next in the lineup and decided I needed a palate cleanser. Enter Balatro.

As aforementioned, Balatro is a game about creating poker hands. That is the main hook of the game. Simple, effective, and increasingly challenging. You make hands to reach a certain chip score. In order to beat a blind (level), your hands need to make enough chips to surpass the blind. Every round, Balatro gives the player a certain number of hands and discards to work with. You use these to ensure you have the best offerings when you put your cards up. If you’ve used all of your hands and still haven't met the threshold of the blind, it’s game over and time for a new run. Getting to the boss blind (a more difficult blind that gives the player a detriment) when you know your jokers aren't quite where you want them can be intimidating.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to creating better hands, there are ways to amplify your chip score… and this is where Balatro shines. That little joker that smiles menacingly at you from his white background on the title screen is one of only 150 jokers that can be utilized throughout the game. Many of those need to be unlocked through specific criteria, but can all show up throughout your run once you’ve unlocked them. The fun of Balatro comes from managing your jokers and hoping that you can find such strong synergy amongst them that you make millions upon millions of chips per hand. And when that chain of points goes off, boy is it a satisfying feeling (I had to turn the game speed up to four times, otherwise it was a bit too slow).

But wait! Yes, there’s even more. In addition to jokers, there are vouchers, tarot cards, spectral cards, and planet cards that can help boost the score of your runs in immeasurable ways. Vouchers are expensive (you use money earned from victorious rounds to purchase them), but effective. They can increase your hand size or discard count and are endlessly helpful. Tarot cards can do anything from changing the suit of a few cards, to adding a steel card to your deck (which multiples your Mult by 1.5), to increasing the amount of money you have. Planet cards are specifically for hand types, so you can upgrade how much a straight or flush gives you every time you use it. Spectral cards are tricky and sometimes require sacrifice, but they can pay off big time when you get when you want of it. Changing a dozen cards to a single suit or card number/face card can alter your run big time. Sure you’ve heard of four of a kind, but have you ever played a five of a kind? Full house, okay, but what about a flush house? Layered on top of all of this is the ability to choose your deck, each one offering different boons and blights that more layers to your run. Altering your deck to fit your run is an increasingly satisfying endeavor, and when you're on a roll, you feel unstoppable.

 

But that’s the thing about roguelites, right? When you have a good run, it’s great, but when you don’t… Well, then it can be irritating, grating, and sometimes can feel like a total waste of time. The higher you increase the challenge, the more elements get introduced that induce that time-wasting feeling. For instance, on Gold tier (the highest difficulty) they introduce rental jokers, after already introducing permanent jokers and perishable jokers. Sometimes this feels like artificial difficulty and can make a run feel immediately useless. After building up so much and getting past a few antes, it feels like a slap in the face when you run into jokers that will only help for a few rounds. If your build can account for it already, great, but if not, it’s game over. I feel like the player should fail because they took certain risks with their hands (like trying to discard for a Royal Flush and coming up short) or mismanaging their hands and jokers, not because the game doesn't give you the tools to do so. Though, anyone who has ever played a roguelite will know it’s just the way it goes. If you play these types of games, expect to be frustrated at times, most of which will have nothing to do with your own incompetence, but with the hand you’ve been dealt.

I don’t speak too much on the other aspects of the game because the graphics are simple, effective, and serviceable. The different art for new jokers is always fun to come across, but otherwise nothing here that will etch itself into your memory (though maybe your retinas) for years to come. The music does the job, though I honestly listen to other music soundtracks or sports games in the background. The sound effect for racking up points is a bit addictive and exciting to hear as it ding ding dings you into the millions. There is no story here, so the gameplay has to be enough for you, or it has nothing.

Do you like poker? Do you like a challenge? Do you like the rush of watching your poker chips pile up before you as you hoard them like Smaug in a gold vault? Sometimes frustrating, sometimes unfair, but despite this, still addictive, Balatro manages to be more than the palate cleanser than I thought it would be. In fact, it’s both. Sometimes you want to read some snippets of a coffee table book between two sci-fi epics... and sometimes that coffee table book is so interesting that you read it front to back. Be it your main obsession, or a game that you’ll pick up from time to time, Balatro deserves many of the accolades it’s earned, and LocalThunk all the praise for single-handedly creating one of the most recent roguelite fads.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 8.5/10

Bonus: +1 for synergistic gameplay. +1 for addictive fun.

Penalties: -2 for unfair runs that aren't the player's fault.

Nerd Coefficient: 8.5/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

TV Review: Bon Appetit, Your Majesty

Outlander meets Iron Chef in this addictive time travel K-drama rom com

When it’s time for your next guilty pleasure, Netflix’s Bon Appetit, Your Majesty has a tasty twelve course menu for your indulgence. The twelve episode series follows the adventures of a confident, modern-day French-trained chef, who falls through time to ancient Korea and lands in the court of a tyrannical young king who has a demanding palate for gourmet food when he isn’t tormenting his subjects. The new series is a romantic combination of the time travel elements of Outlander, the tyrant king and daily survival of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights, and the intense cooking competition of Food Network shows like Iron Chef, Top Chef, and Chopped. As the stressed chef tries to find a way back to her own time, she must survive the dangers of ancient life and the palace’s political intrigue, while being forced to prepare meals for an angry young king who will kill her if the food displeases him. Despite a fair amount of drama and bloodshed towards the end, the story is primarily humorous with appealing enemies to lovers, mistaken identity, and fish out of water story elements.

The story starts in modern day France where elite chef Yeon Ji-young (Im Yoon-ah), wins an international cooking competition and is headed back to her home in Korea. Her father asks her to get a copy of an antique cooking manuscript from an academic colleague. During her flight home, the ancient book pulls her through a time travel portal to Korea in the Joseon Era. She soon encounters an angry, pompous young man Yi Heon (Lee Chae-Min). Not realizing he is the king, she assumes he is from a movie set and he believes she is a witch / spirit creature due to her strange clothes and manner of speaking. King Yi Heon’s intention to kill her for annoying him is interrupted when an archer assassin shoots him and Ji-young reluctantly keeps him from bleeding out and cooks for him while hiding out in the home of a local girl who befriends her. When the king is rescued, Ji-young finds herself in prison for her disrespect to the king. But the king is intrigued by her unusual cooking and orders her to become his chief royal cook. However, he promises to execute her if she serves something he doesn’t like. Over time the two grow closer despite their bickering and they bond over food. However, due to the king’s past tyranny, multiple enemies are plotting his demise and Ji-young finds herself in danger as assassins target the king and those close to him. In particular, the king’s uncle, Prince Jesan (Choi Gwi-hwa) and one of the king’s consorts, Kang (Kang Han-na), are determined to overthrow Yi Heon.

The series uses elements of Korean history with King Yi Heon inspired by (and recognized by Ji-young) as a real life sixteenth century tyrant known for his cruelty due to the murder of his mother. The balance of upsetting, true history with the rom com elements creates an interesting contrast. In Bon Appetit, the king is grieving the murder of his mother by undisclosed members of the royal family (and with collusion of others). This occurred when he was a child and he is determined to solve the mystery of her execution. Due to his bitterness, he treats his own people with contempt and cruelty, taking land, executing or exiling dissenters and earning the anger of his political rivals who seek to dethrone him. Ji-young’s presence and influence over the king gradually creates an alternate history timeline as she persuades the king to be more compassionate. Despite the general elements of lightness, there are moments where otherwise likeable characters admit to having done terrible acts. Additionally, although there are several strong female characters in the story, the historical context makes it clear that women are treated as commodities and are offered as tribute or payment in negotiations.

The villains are, unfortunately, mostly two dimensional and lack subtlety. So viewers are subjected to the evil uncle’s villainous laugh and the consort’s perpetual sneer. Initially, there seems to be no clear motive articulated for their desire to overthrow the king. However, a consideration of the real life history as well as the show’s backstory adds some context for the escalating hate and reciprocal violence between the tyranny of the grieving king and his political rivals’ vengeance.

Against that historical backdrop, we still have a swoony rom com love story between the arrogant king and the spunky modern chef. Bouncy rom com music alternates between intense moments as Ji-young tries to convince the king that she is from the future and needs to find the ancient book to portal her way back home. There are funny moments where the king struggles to understand Ji-young’s modern slang and, despite his tyrannical tendencies, endures her lecture on consent when he unexpectedly kisses her. Ji-young also has her medieval bestie Gil-geum (Yoon Seo-Ah) who provides comic relief elements along with the comedic royal kitchen team who struggle to warm up to the idea of a woman as the head chef.

However, the true heart of the show is not the romance, or the political intrigue, it’s the cooking. Each episode is named after a particular dish or cuisine and Bon Appetit unapologetically treats viewers to a detailed examination of unique ingredients, thoughtful preparation techniques, and the emotional power of cooking as a means of human connection. When people taste Ji-young's cooking they enter a fantastical sensory realm where the taste of the food is conveyed through dramatic visual symbolism in a way that is reminiscent of the Food Wars anime. In an homage to Food Network shows like Top Chef and Chopped, Ji-young repeatedly finds herself racing against the clock and cooking with her life on the line. In fact, a particularly long food competition arc stretches over four episodes in which Ji-young and her team face off against three sharp Ming chefs with the fate of the kingdom at risk. Their competition leads to the invention of the pressure cooker and lots of dangerous adventures outside of the kitchen.

The two lead characters have great chemistry and the journey feels like an authentic, slow-burn redemption story. However, that kind of potential happiness is fighting against the truth of history and the consequences of hate. As the last episodes grow more grim and violent, beloved characters meet their end and it becomes hard to imagine how things will conclude. But this story is a fantasy that leans into the fantastical when it needs it. Bon Appetit, Your Majesty ultimately brings the tale to a satisfying, although stressful, ending that’s literally and figuratively a chef’s kiss.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Time loop, time travel, portal fantasy
• Tropey villains and supporting characters
• Gorgeous food explorations

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 1: Dragon Keeper

The character arcs are familiar, but it's all in service of building something new 

We are on to the fourth subseries of this fantastic saga! The Rain Wild Chronicles is, in a way, atypical of a Robin Hobb series, largely because it is strikingly lacking in misery and structural complexity. The character motivations are straightforward and driven by no more than the usual amount of discontent with the status quo; the main character arcs mostly avoid catastrophe, except inasmuch as a lively flood or brief skirmish enlivens typical fantasy plots; and the plot is a very simple quest structure. We don’t even get the Fool, in any of his many identities. At the end, the evil are punished (hooo boy, are they ever!), the good are rewarded, dragons kick ass, and. . .  fin. 

By now, I’ve reread enough Robin Hobb to recognize that the character arcs are mostly recycled from previous books. This is not a criticism; more an observation. Hobb evidently had a lot to say about certain types of personal journeys, and she didn’t say it all the first time round. Take Alise Finbok, the dragon scholar who yearns to study dragons, yearns so hard that she insists that a study trip up the Rain Wild River be included as a condition in her marriage contract. This is her only point of joy in a loveless marriage to a husband who is powerful and overbearing, who oppresses her and belittles her and makes her feel small. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to the Rain Wilds and observe the dragons, she is disappointed to find the creatures so different from how she’d expected them to be. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and manages to remake herself  into a new person in their company. She is thus freed from her asshole husband, and learns what it is to be loved and valued for her own skills and self and personhood. This is a lovely character arc. It is also in many ways a repeat of Serilla’s arc from the Liveship Traders. Serilla, recall, begins her arc as the companion of the asshole Satrap of Jamaillian, who belittles her, ignores her experience and political acumen, and tries instead to treat her as a sexual object. She finds her purpose in her scholarship of the history and politics of Bingtown. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to Bingtown, she is disappointed to discover that the life she’d imagined for herself there is not feasible. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and – with some false starts – manages to remake a new existence for herself, freed from the asshole Satrap, and – if not loved and valued – at least respected for her knowledge and experience. The worst parts of Alise’s story are really not all that terrible compared to Serilla’s. As I’ve said, these books lack the typical Hobbian misery that we see elsewhere, and Alise’s arc is shifted substantially upward on the despair-to-joy spectrum. But still: the shape of the arc is the same.

Likewise, Sedric, Alise’s childhood friend and the amenuensis-cum-secret-lover of her dastardly husband, gets his own dragon-fueled redemption arc that feels a lot like Malta Vestrit’s. But again, like Alise’s, it’s a bit gentler. Malta, recall, starts as the most glorious 13-year-old brat who has ever bratted, and ends as a full-ass Elderling, negotiating the fate of nations. Both Malta and Sedric begin their respective stories sheltered and selfish, accustomed to a life of pampering and wealth, and ready to make all kinds of foolish decisions to pursue that comfort without thinking through or properly understanding the consequences of their decisions. 

The particularly interesting contrast between these two arises from how respective horriblenesses are tempered. Malta is a literal child at the start, and whomst amongst ust has not indulged in 13-year-old brattiness? Sedric, by contrast, is a full-grown adult. He regularly travels internationally, and has a firm grasp on politics and trade. He knows the consequences of his actions, or should know, and that expectation of competence makes his behaviour much harder to forgive. Consider, for example, his decision to accompany Alise to the Rain Wilds, where he will acquire dragon parts to sell to the Duke of Chalced. These dragon parts represent the sole chance of saving the dying duke’s life, so Sedric expects to get a huge payoff upon delivery. 

What Sedric doesn’t seem to realize is that this is, on many levels, a terrible idea. Leave aside the ethics of butchering and selling sentient creatures for medicine, and think about the politics for a moment. The Duke of Chalced is dying. Dragon parts can save him. Dragons can only be found in the Rain Wilds. Last time Chalced tried to make trouble in that part of the world, Tintaglia fought them off, but Tintaglia is not here anymore.  So why in the world would Sedric want to (a) demonstrate to the desperate Duke of Chalced that life-saving resources are to be found in the Rain Wilds, and (b) do it at a time when Tintaglia is no longer defending them against Chalced? Sooner or later, the saying goes, there is always war with Chalced. Sedric’s actions are going to make it much sooner than later.

Malta’s brattiness is tempered by the fact that she’s a child. What excuse does Sedric have? In a word: Hest. Hest is Alise’s asshole husband, but he is also Sedric’s lover, and he is a classic narcissistic asshole. He glamours Sedric with  his handsomeness, his masterful exercise of wealth and power and taste; and he combines that glamour with a fair amount of manipulative emotional abuse. It is to please Hest that Sedric suggests Alise as a potential wife, and coaches Hest on how best to win Alise’s agreement for a marriage of convenience. It is to please Hest that he indulges in really foul semantic wordplay when Alise tries to invoke the clause in the marriage contract that dissolves the union in the event of infidelity. Oh no, says Hest, I’ve never slept with any other woman, right Sedric? And he is right: He’s not sleeping with women — because he’s sleeping with men. Sedric knows perfectly well that it makes no difference to Alise which people Hest is sleeping with. What matters is that she’s found evidence of infidelity and wants to invoke that contractual provision to dissolve her marriage. But because of her mistaken assumption that Hest is exclusively attracted to women, Hest wriggles out of the accusation. And because Alise has been friends with Sedric so long, she trusts him when he backs up Hest’s word; and so because of Sedric, she loses her opportunity to end her miserable marriage. Sedric is friendly, but he is not a friend.

As with Malta, Hobb does not insist that we feel sympathy for Sedric, at the start. The facts and actions and motivations are simply presented to us, and we are left to draw our own conclusions. Is Sedric a victim of domestic abuse, too enthralled to his abuser to do the right thing, for fear of the consequences for his own well-being? Or is he just a weak, sad man, who will prey on dragons and betray his friends to please an asshole he’s sleeping with? For my part, I am intellectually aware of the former interpretation, but emotionally I really lean toward the latter. Malta as a 13-year-old brat was gloriously, hilariously smackable. Sedric, as a full-grown failure of a man, is just sad. 

Let us turn now to the themes. Thematically, this book is fantastic. We’ll start with Tintaglia. Recall that we left the Liveship Traders trilogy with magnificent Tintaglia shepherding a massive tangle of 100 serpents to cocoon and transform into dragons, ready to take to the skies. We left the Tawny Man trilogy with the discovery and rescue of Icefyre, another adult dragon, mating with Tintaglia and ensuring another generation of eggs on the way. But the consequence of these triumphs is that Tintaglia abandons the Rain Wild dragons. When they were her only hope for the continuance of her species, she had time to help feed the pathetic specimens that emerged on the riverbed outside the Rain Wild city of Cassarick. But now, with a proper dragon at her side, she has no use for them. 

Yes, it is selfish. It puts the individual above the community. But this is how dragons are. They are not human. They do not have human-like loyalties to each other. And this ruthless, selfish independence works very well if you have the capacities of a dragon, if you can hunt and fly and feed yourself and defend yourself. Dragons are strong. Humans are squishy and weak. 

So humans must form societies to compensate for their squishy weakness, societies where they combine their capacities and work for the good of the whole, rather than the individual. This is especially important in an environment as harsh as the Rain Wilds, where people struggle to bear children, become disfigured with growths and scales as they age, and sicken and die young. However, this harshness of the environment, and the need to focus on the collective good, engenders harshness in its treatment of individuals. Any child born too ‘changed’ from the start is exposed at birth, to die. The reasoning of this regularly practiced infanticide is that these infants will only ever turn out to be a burden to society, sickening early, and unable to bear healthy children of their own. Why, conventional wisdom asks, must society welcome and support people who cannot contribute to the next generation? 

So life in the Rain Wilds is governed by these questions: How much of a burden of dead weight can a society bear? How much must an individual contribute before they are allowed to be a member of that society? Under what circumstances is it permissible to kill babies? It’s all very ‘Cold Equations’.

It’s an uncomfortable kind of conversation, and it’s not made any easier when we consider the case of Thymara, one of the primary viewpoint characters. Thymara is a young woman who ‘should’ have been exposed at birth. She was only given a chance at life because her father decided at the last minute to defy custom and expectation, and bring her back home, to raise her and train her in hunting and foraging and all the other life skills that Rain Wilders need to master for survival. It turns out that Thymara is an excellent hunter and forager. She brings in far more food than she eats. In her particular case, then, it would have been a mistake to leave her to die. Even if she never has a baby, and does not contribute to the next generation, her contributions are still a net positive to society.

But by even having this conversation, and pointing out that Thymara is a contributer rather than a burden, we are conceding an important point – namely, that it is reasonable to evaluate people’s right to live in a society as a function of their numerical contribution.¹ This reasoning needs only a statistical evaluation of expected value in the long term aggregate to justify and indeed require infanticide. Sure, in Thymara’s case, to be sure, there is no danger of her being a burden, because she grew up to be a good hunter. But statistically it was unlikely, so in the long run, just to be sure of optimizing the collective good . . . 

It’s the Tragedy of the Commons pitted against the belief that killing babies is bad. And every member of the Rain Wilds knows this. There’s a wonderful moment quite early on, where Thymara’s father points out how good a hunter she is, and his companions get all shifty and uneasy. Because every Rain Wild parent who’s ever left a child to die, after nine months of hope and fear and love and waiting, after hours of agonizing labour and the crushing grief at seeing one’s baby born with claws instead of fingernails – those parents are not comforting themselves with calculating expected values. These parents are not thinking well, in the aggregate, statistically these changed children consume more than they produce, so society as a whole is stronger if. . . No. Rather, these parents are looking at Thymara and thinking, if I had possessed the strength of character; if I had defied the rules, then my little one might be here today, like she is.

So: what does society do with these extraneous people, the ones who should be dead, the ones who cannot produce a new generation? Well, if you have a bunch of dragons wallowing on your doorstep, hemmed in by trees and flightless; sickly and stunted and unable to hunt, consuming far more than they produce, the answer is clear. You pull up your algebra notes, combine like terms, and offer the deadweights a job: Lead the dragons upstream, hunt for them, tend to them, and find them a new place to live, far away from here. 

This gives us the heart of the plot: two sets of outcasts, human and dragon, must work together to find a new place to live. And they both engage in this endeavour whole-heartedly. They do not feel like they have been cast out of their homes, rejected by their society – though they absolutely have been. The humans are the rejects of the Rain Wilds, and the dragons have been entirely abandoned by Tintaglia. Nevertheless, they see it as an opportunity to build a new future. 

But they approach this opportunity with a different end goal in mind. The humans are released from the constraints of the Rain Wild society, freed to negotiate a new set of customs, and figure out how far their new freedoms can take them. They envision an entirely different society, built from scratch, attuned to their own specific needs. By contrast the dragons don’t hope to build something new. Their entire abnormal life, stunted and sickly, flightless and wallowing in mud, has been an education in how the old ways were better. Yet they cannot recover anything resembling those old ways without the help of their human keepers, and so the very task of returning to their former greatness is going to require a certain amount of concessions to circumstances. 

Next month, we’ll see how those concessions work out, and what kinds of negotiations the humans and dragons must make with each other in their quest for a new home, and the new type of society they must build together.

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1 This type of reasoning is not restricted to fantasy settings. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced this week that  immigrants must now perform unpaid labour as a precondition for the right to live in the UK. ^↩  

References: 

Hobb, Robin. Dragon Keeper [Harper Voyager, 2009]. 

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Film Review: Him

Justin Tipping knows writers who use subtlety and they are all cowards

American football has been compared to the gladiatorial matches of ancient Rome, and not without reason. It is a bloody sport, bloodier than any other popular sport in America. Going further, it has been likened to getting hit by a car repeatedly; I myself have referred to it as “one team on one side, one team on the other side, and they all get permanent brain damage.” Such is the driving force of Him, released in 2025, directed by Justin Tipping and written by Tipping, Skip Bronkie, and Jack Ayers.

Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a young football fan who idolizes famed football player Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), and after the latter’s injury is inspired to play the game himself on White’s old team, the San Antonio Saviors. He becomes successful in college, but then suffers an injury of his own after being attacked by a man in a strange animalistic costume. As he takes the field again, despite warnings from his doctor, he is invited to White’s training compound in the middle of the Texas desert to become a better player. As he learns, though, White has made deals with unsavory forces and is pursuing this goal beyond all reason.

This is a brutal film. There are truly copious amounts of blood, delivered in ways that feel deliberately cruel, for none of the violence is accidental. It is a literalization of the idea that football is a blood sport. Cade is suffering for his own glory, for his duty to his family, and for what White wants to mold him into, and he is not the only one who suffers. As so many isolated compounds have warped into, this training facility has become so caught up in its mythology that it makes people do detestable, depraved things, the most visceral involving a machine that launches footballs through the air at a terrifying velocity. This group buy-in is the only way that these young men would tolerate such poor lighting, and what little there is is often in red.

I have read a number of other reviews of this film, and a running theme through them is that they don’t believe the film is particularly thematically coherent. The two themes that grind against each other, so it is claimed, are the theme of racism on the one hand (as the majority of the characters in this film, like the majority of NFL football players, are Black) and the theme of personal ambition on the other hand. I for one find that they can be squared if one looks at the film through the lens of racial capitalism. I am particularly indebted to Nathan Kalman-Lamb’s and Derek Silva’s book The End of College Football: the Human Cost of an All-American Game in my analysis here, and I recommend the curious read it post-haste. Long story short, they believe that the game should be abolished because it is both inhumanly cruel and because its structural pressures force young Black men into life-ruining violence for no real compensation. College Football, they say, is a relic of the plantations. And so with this film.

From this point onward I am going to spoil this film extensively because keeping it vague simply would not be satisfying. Those who want to see the film themselves are advised to stop here.

There are two characters who want something from Cameron: Cameron himself, and Isaiah. Both of these wants are filtered through and influenced by the reality of racial capitalism in which they are immersed. One force that shapes this is their own sense of masculinity; they are expected to be tough, to be ruthless, to sacrifice everything good in the world in the name of ambition. Cameron enters this training facility in a committed relationship, and is later brought to a pool where a number of scantily-clad women are there for his pleasure. He may or may not have had sex with one of them; when he expresses regret over infidelity to Isaiah, the latter says that he cannot care about the feelings of others on the way to football stardom. In the hands of a lesser story, this plot would simply serve as cheap titillation for straight male audiences, but here it represents a very real thing, as Silva and Kalman-Lamb discuss in their book. I refer to part of the bargain football teams implicitly strike with their players: endure all sorts of physical violence, and in exchange these young men can brutalize women as they please (as many sexual assault scandals at colleges and professionally bear witness to). This is seen again at a drug-induced ritual with the white team ownership, with several flashes of half-naked women (the cinematography is psychedelic). This bargain is made even clearer at the end, as Cameron, after killing Isaiah, strides onto a football field, his bare chest caked in blood, flanked by cheerleaders in revealing costumes. More revealing than their costumes are the masks that they wear, hiding their eyes, covering sockets with what appears to be flesh. In exchange for serving the white masters who own the San Antonio saviors, he is being offered women, white women at that, who cannot bear witness.

But women are not the only people Cameron is encouraged to brutalize. The entire system of this compound is not unlike a military boot camp, where young men are desensitized to brutal violence. One scene involves Cameron having to throw footballs at a target; every time he misses, a football is fired through one of the aforementioned machines at the face of another player. As one player is on the ground in incredible pain, the others, Cameron and Isaiah included, huddle around him and sing a team chant. Here, men are being encouraged to find camaraderie in one another, but only camaraderie in violence that serves the rulers of his society. In this society, it is the only way that men like Cameron are allowed camaraderie at all; namely, though hurting others.

At the end of the film, it is revealed that the initial attack on Cameron by a man in a strange animalistic costume was orchestrated by the Saviors leadership to isolate him, thereby making him an easy target for recruitment by the team later on. Cameron is forced to confront his role in the system of racial capitalism, specifically the fact that he is of the caste designated for brutal, degrading work, thereby propping the system up. He was chosen by accident of birth to suffer for others, as so vividly shown by the visceral display of interior human anatomy every time he gets an injection (and there are many injections in this film), or through the sequences where you see players without skin, but as collections of organs held together by bones. Through this X-Ray filter, you are forced to see the very real damage they are suffering - and by extension, the very real damage America consumes for entertainment, and cheers on with marching bands and fan clubs and broadcasts and trophies.

The scene where Isaiah reveals to Cameron that he is but one in a line of football players who have shared blood and ritual as part of the Saviors, followed by a fight between the two culminating in Isaiah’s death, bears a comparison to a scene in the recent film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk. In an ending changed from the novel, Peter McVries wins the titular competition and is congratulated by the Major, the man in charge of the brutal competition. Following the wishes of his compatriot Ray Garraty, who died not long before, he wishes, as is his prerogative as winner, for the rifle of a nearby soldier. The Major orders the soldier to give Peter his gun, upon which Peter shoots the Major dead. Some have wondered why the Major would not have seen this possibility coming, but I suspect the Major knew of this possibility much as Isaiah saw his death at Cameron’s hands as inevitable. By encouraging Peter and Cameron, respectively, to be violent, they validate the violence that has been inflicted upon them. By transforming these young men into monsters, they have justified in their own minds the monstrosities they uphold. I suspect that both the Major and Isaiah would be proud.

All of this thematic work is brought together in a bloody ending laden with symbolism. You have the rich white men in cushy suits serving as the arbiters of the dignity of a Black man who has been through hell. You have the rich white woman serving as an intermediary. You have a literal contract to be signed by Cameron, accepting a role in the system in exchange for his right to be cruel and to be applauded for his violence. You have the demonic sacrifice, complete with pentagram, showing how morality has been sacrificed to human greed. You have the violence these white men have encouraged bounding back towards them, which is as surprising to them as it is inevitable to us, and the one that gets the most screen time pathetically grovels as he realizes what has happened. You have all the minor functionaries, the cheerleaders and marching band members, all blinded with masks so they cannot witness the workings of this awful spectacle. But of all these the film has a stroke of genius with a chorus garbed in strange animal costumes deliver a rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner as a droning chant, with no melody and none of John Philip Sousa’s embellishments that can make the song beautiful but also a nightmare to sing. The genius is not merely in presentation, but in the fact that this chorus sings not one but two verses, one long-forgotten by most Americans. That verse reads:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

⁠That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,

A home and a country should leave us no more?

⁠Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave,

From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This verse is one widely considered racist, as it refers to the defeat of the British armed forces at the Siege of Fort McHenry, including enslaved Black Americans that they had freed. It is a verse that is a condemnation of Black freedom as anathema to the American national project. It is a direct threat to those Black people in British service, and a demand that they know their place. That is exactly what the owners of the Saviors are doing to Cameron in that scene: demanding he accept his inferior status, and in exchange he will get to be a monster.

Him is a far smarter film than many critics give credit. It is a searing indictment of racial capitalism in America, and how Black men are sacrificed in droves for the entertainment of the nation. The entire structure of football culture in this country is ultimately a massive arena for human sacrifice, and that bloody enterprise is only barely metaphorized in this film (nor are players the only sacrifices; each year, the American city with the highest rate of sex trafficking is the one hosting the Super Bowl). As hard as it may be to admit, there are many Camerons playing football, and all who love the game are sacrificing him for their amusement.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Fate's Bane by C. L. Clark

 A forbidden romance and an exploration of the complexities of duty.

Specificity is not always a virtue. Fantasy readers often disdain the generic medieval fantasy setting - and with good reason, given how overdone it is - but that doesn't mean that sometimes, a light hand on the worldbuilding tiller can be just as effective, or even more, than one that digs into granular details. Fate's Bane, the new novella from C. L. Clark, is a great example of exactly that.

The story follows two young women, one, Agnir, a hostage taken to ensure her father's good behaviour (read: not making war on the hostage-taker) and the other, Hadhnri, the daughter of the clan she's been taken into. Unsurprisingly, they fall in love. But Agnir is never truly one of Clan Aradoc, and Hadhnri cannot seem to see that her father will never let them be, and that Agnir is never so sure and comfortable of her place among them as she is in Hadhnri's affections. Clan Aradoc, and particularly their leader, expect of her the duty and loyalty of one born to them, but don't afford her the trust that would naturally go alongside it, denying her the weapon she yearns for as she goes into adulthood.

But in that imperfect childhood, the two girls-then-women find a magic that allows them to create, to influence the world beyond the realms of the mundane, the use of which brings them as close as their burgeoning feelings, until Agnir shies away from the risks that Hadhnri wants to take.

And so in the early part of the story, this tension is built up - two parts of the relationship with very different positions in the world, and thus very different outlooks, and very different ways of measuring risk and cost/benefit. Sitting within Agnir's perspective, it is easy to see all the dangers and problems that afflict her life that Hadhnri misses, blithe in her own security. And so, when Agnir's own clan steals her back, the reader sees easily how conflicted she is. On the one hand, she has all of her childhood experiences, the affection of Hadhnri and her brother Gunni, the food and shelter and care given, but on the other, the knowledge of how that situation came to be, and the ties that predate it all, to Clan Fein, her blood siblings and her father. To them she owes the loyalty of family, even if, after years of being raised elsewhere, they are nearly strangers to her. Clark makes clear - without belabouring the point, but in showing us in little snippets of life in these two clans - how clearly those blood ties and their sense of honour and duty matter to those in this world, these Fens. Agnir's divided self is set up and grounded just enough for it to feel a part of this setting, so that the story can then shift on to studying the (necessary, tragic) outcomes of that division of loves.

And that light touch embedding of the sense of this world's mores truly is one of the virtues of the book. It's a novella, and so such setting and groundwork as it does needs to be conveyed quickly, so the fact that Clark more evokes than explains stands it in good stead. I infer from words like "fens" and "seax" where and when in the world this is meant to be implying. Reference to the baneswood, and its stories, make clear the pagan nature of this culture, and so when outside forces come in wearing robes of a certain shape and worshipping a different god, it's easy to nod along and think "ah yes, the coming of Christianity to the British isles" and know roughly when and whereabouts this draws its inspiration from. It doesn't need more than roughly, because it is also very clearly a fantasy world - there are little shifts in culture, along with the clear magic, that take us a step outside of the bounds of reality. What Clark gives us instead of specificity, though, is coherence. We may not get a thorough explanatory guide to this place, but every single little detail we do get - the love locks courting couples share, the training grounds, the material culture, the clans and their quarrels - feeds into that sense of time and place, and helps to make it feel whole. It's a delicate line to walk, but one I think Clark has done phenomenally, in this instance.

Some of that is, of course, that the slightly abstracted historical period being evoked isn't the traditional-unspecified-north-west-European medieval. It's not taverns and wenches and kings and castles, and so gets points for rarity. But the skill Clark uses in sketching a sense of place in these clean lines with little moments of clarity is critical too. They know exactly when to give the reader a touch of something real, to ground the more nebulous whole and give it the semblance of greater depth.

It helps too, that the shape of the story owes a little to older traditions of "romance" as well as to modern, and that genre-shape helps guide how the story is read and make it feel of a piece with its setting. There are echoes of modern tropes, don't get me wrong. I recognise these lesbians from plenty of fiction. But there's also plenty of moments that draw on older myths and stories too. Which is to say that... happily ever after may not be the thing to be seeking here.

And, having read The Unbroken, I am not exactly surprised. Thematically, they're treading very similar ground here again, exploring how a person can have their loyalties owed in different ways to very competing people and powers. Both books examine the way that the deeper tie of family can be suborned and complicated by other forces, and that a person can quite blamelessly find themselves torn in two by the loves and duties they owe to the two different parts of themself. It's a very compelling theme, and one I think bears up under this repeated scrutiny. Interestingly, the story I found myself most reaching to for comparison however was one of the other yellow lesbian books of the same cohort - She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. There's a lot of thematic overlap between the two, don't get me wrong, but the particular love between someone raised by an enemy, and the child of the enemy, echoes really well between the eunuch Ouyang and Fate's Bane's Agnir. Both feel compelled to act against their personal desires in service of a duty greater than themself, and are pulled into a vengeance that can do nothing but hurt them. And both are extremely compelling for it. Agnir gets much less page time to get to a place of complexity than Ouyang does, but Clark does an excellent job of skimming where skimming needs to happen and lingering over personal moments to give us the shape of her personal feelings and dilemmas.

Again overlapping with Ouyang's story, as well as The Unbroken, Clark is clearly interested in thinking about power and powerlessness, agency and how that can be suborned or denied. Agnir is a symbol more than a person for much of the book - a token of her father's good behaviour and then, later, a symbol of the crimes of Clan Aradoc to her own people and those whose support her father seeks. Even to her beloved, sometimes, she becomes as much a token of rebellion against her family and their expectations as a real person with loyalties of her own. As with Ouyang and Esen, Agnir cannot seem to quite make Hadhnri see that she has ties outside of the ones that bind her to Clan Aradoc, and that what they have done to her has plenty of marks in the "bad" side of the ledger to balance out such good as there may be.

Much of this tension is built early and clearly, leaving an amount of the story's direction quite obvious to the reader. This is not a criticism - rather than the twists of an adventure novel, this again invokes older-style doomed romances, with the car-crash experience of watching two people bound by circumstances walk into a doom they cannot escape. Of such things is the entire tragic genre built, and for good reason.

It is not, however, a perfect book. I have two points to highlight that don't quite fit the otherwise excellent storytelling. The first is much more minor (though doesn't sound it), and that's the place of magic within the story. Despite the unexplained magic being the force that binds the characters to that tragic fate, its infrequent appearances within the story undercut its dramatic weight. Unlike so many of the other parts, here Clark's light hand doesn't quite do justice to the role that magic needs to play in the story, and leaves it feeling remarkably tacked on for what is, in essence, the motive force of the entire plot. And yet... I mostly couldn't bring myself to mind all that much. The character work is sufficiently compelling that it was easy to handwave in my head the course they were heading onto, rather than need it all spelled out. It's not missing, either, just a little thin, perhaps a casualty of the rather short length of the story and the greater focus (which has worked excellently) on character development. Given that it's a story that rides heavily on the strength of one character's own internal dilemma, this feels like a sacrifice that can be accepted, on the whole.

The second is more significant, but also one about which I've not quite made up my mind. For the majority of the book, the story follows a fairly linear standard structure. There are a few brief deviations into the mythic, but they are short and fairly closed off, and do not seem to say much to the shape of the story itself, rather instead to feed into the texture of it. But the ending takes something of a structural turn from all that. Clark opens up something of a wider possibility space for the shape the ending might take, and I cannot quite decide if this is a stroke of genius - leaning into the doom that has been shadowing the story the whole way to remind the reader that some stories cannot have a cleanly good ending - or a step away from that doom that undercuts some of its heft. Whichever way I find myself leaning, however, I cannot deny that the choice is an interesting one, and is one of the things that I suspect I will remember most clearly about the story when I look back to it in future. And I would rather that, I think, even if I come to a resolution that the ending does not work for me, I appreciate that it's such a distinctive stylistic and structural choice. I would always rather read a book that takes a punt than something more staid.

And I certainly couldn't call Fate's Bane that. In light sketches and deft moments of personal intimacy and turmoil, Clark has drawn out a story that manages to feel mythic and tragic, as well as with the more personal level of character work that is the best of what I like in modern story telling. It's an extremely competent novella, and one with a strong thematic core that helps give some of the lighter parts a greater narrative gravity and make it feel more than the sum of its parts. Alongside a prose voice that is distinctive while unobtrusive, and which feeds very neatly into the coherent atmosphere of this fantasy-but-slightly-historical world, the compelling chemistry and tragedy of the romance at the story's heart make this a novella well worth reading.

--

The Math

Highlights: Interesting setting with cohesive atmosphere, compelling main characters, interesting tension between duty and romance

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: C. L. Clark, Fate's Bane [Tordotcom, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

TV Review: Alien: Earth

What are little (robot) girls made of?

After half a century of increasingly questionable sequels, prequels and crossovers, there aren’t many scares left to extract from the iconic xenomorphs of Alien. But what can still be done with them is probe from new angles the questions the first film raised with regard to the rise of corporatocracy and the ways humans keep finding to predate on each other. In the case of the new TV series Alien: Earth, the most noticeable theme is the futility of subjecting life to a regime of property rights. You don’t truly own that which you can’t control, and you can’t control that which can set its own goals apart from yours. Even less can you be simultaneously a parent and an owner. You either help life grow or make it serve you.

Alien: Earth expands the worldbuilding of its franchise by adding more players to the dystopian corporate ecosystem: alongside Weyland-Yutani, i.e. the devil you know, we meet the newcomer Prodigy Corporation, which specializes in producing AI systems. We follow its immature founder, a narcissistic jerk with the most punchable face in the galaxy, for a handful of days preceding the planned launch of a service that promises to make human beings immortal by transferring their minds to artificial bodies. So far, this technology only works on children, because their minds are malleable enough. However, their new bodies have to be adult-shaped, because robots don’t grow. As you may imagine, this is a very disturbing, even traumatic experience for the first batch of kids recruited as testers.

Meanwhile, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship carrying specimens of xenomorph and other assorted adorables crash-lands on a city that happens to belong to Prodigy, so a legal battle ensues over who has the right to salvage however much is recoverable from the disaster. As it happens, Marcy, one of the kids who were put in those shiny robot bodies, has a brother who works as a first responder in that city, so she pleads with the Prodigy boss to be allowed to lead a rescue mission at the crash site. Her excuse is that it would give them a useful opportunity to test their new bodies in harsh conditions, but what she really wants is to reconnect with her brother, because the mind transfer project is an industry secret and, for all he knows, she’s dead.

Mayhem erupts soon enough, and a pants-coloring fright is had by all. Many throats are cut open, many limbs are impaled, many liters of blood are inadvisably conveyed from people’s interior to the same people’s exterior. Anyway, the Prodigy team manages, at no small cost, to get hold of a cargo of several xenomorph eggs (and other assorted adorables). You already know how the xenomorphs work. Much of the fun of the season lies in learning how each of the rest of the critters go about making breakfast out of any passing human. The breakout star is one spry little fellow that the Xenopedia tells me is called Trypanohyncha ocellus, but I’ve seen more fun people call it Optipus, and I personally prefer to call it Tentoculus. It’s adorable in exactly the wrong ways.

Once the team and their loot return to Prodigy headquarters, it’s time for the real drama. Some of the former kids are suddenly thrown into adult-sized responsibilities, while others are left to deal with adult-sized trauma on their own. It becomes clear that every step this company makes is calculated to feed the ego of the boss, who likes to project a personal image of a chaotic manchild so smart that everyone bores him, but his actual choices reveal the self-destructive reach of his arrogance. A game of mismatched agendas begins between full humans, humans with robotic bodies, and full robots, with the ending episodes adding a hundred more dimensions to the two original Alien films’ commentary on twisted forms of parenthood.

There are thin parts to this plot, but you easily forget about them when you watch the fantastic performances that this show boasts. The actors who have to play child characters in adult bodies prove great at speaking like children, moving like children, emoting like children. And the self-proclaimed genius who put them in that situation is deliciously detestable, ultimately revealed to have been a mistreated child who had to make adult decisions too soon but didn’t learn to break the cycle, and grew up to inflict a more sophisticated form of violence upon his substitute children. And I don’t even mean the obvious violence of separating a mind from its body (the transfer process requires killing the child), but the easier to disguise violence of turning people into instruments.

What with all the drama you can see this story has to offer, the most interesting relationship is the one that develops between the former kid Marcy and the xenomorphs. Her advanced electronic brain figures out how to communicate with them, and they become unexpected prison pals. It certainly helps that her body has no meat for it to munch on, but from her side of the dynamic, what connects them is that they’ve both been forcibly pulled out of the natural stream of life, and now they’re lost and vulnerable among people whose only sincere intention is to use them. Whereas the Alien movies showed us a being that usurps the role of offspring to prey on its lifegiver, the Prodigy Corporation is an impostor parent that preys on its children.

Finding innovative ways to address the core questions that define a franchise is a challenging trick to pull off. Alien: Earth passes stellarly the prequel test that Alien: Romulus failed and that Andor taught the master class on, in that it doesn’t resort to shoehorned references to tickle viewers’ nostalgia buttons. Instead, it creates its own space in the franchise and grows from there.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

6 Books with Fran Wilde

Fran Wilde is the award-winning author of A Philosophy of Thieves, out 30th of September from Erewhon Books. You can find her at her website, her Patreon, and on instagram and bluesky under @fran_wilde.

A Philosophy of Thieves: Robin Hood meets Parasite meets Six of Crows in multi-award winning author Fran Wilde’s thrilling, high-tech adventure heist wrapped in a futuristic fantasy where thieves are entertainment for the wealthy. Get your copy here.

Today she tells us about her Six Books:

1. What book are you currently reading?

LD Lewis’ Year of the Mer (April 2026). I’m reading it to blurb and — spoilers — I’m going to blurb it A LOT. This is a story that goes beyond a retrenching of The Little Mermaid, to explore deeper issues of generational identity, trauma, revenge, and anger. It has so much heart, and so many moments where my own heart is ready to crumble. I am so looking forward to seeing this book out in the world, wrecking havoc.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

LD Lewis’ Year of the Mer, see above. 

AND Alix Harrow’s new book, The Everlasting (10/28).  I would read a phone book cover to cover if Alix wrote it. But The Everlasting has a mysterious book in it that is so rare it might not exist, which is absolute Fran-bait. And a female knight, and fiction vs. reality plot lines and I’m so here for it.

OH AND Will Alexander’s just-out book Sunward (9/16). What began as a short story for The Sunday Morning Transport has bloomed into a resplendent space opera with so many fantastic moving parts (and sarcastic intelligences) that I want to hug it and share it and then grab it back and hug it again. Do I feel a tiny bit like a book auntie on this one? Yes. Yes I do.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I love rereading Frances Hardinge’s books - this year it’s Unraveller that I want to revisit. 

4.  A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

Alix Harrow’s Starling House and Frances Hardinge’s Unraveller.  The prose in both, the awareness of relationships and the heart-strings that wrap around your throat in both as the main characters fall deeper and deeper into the plot. I’m so here for that kind of utterly immersive writing, and I can still hear the phrases and sentences I wish I’d written in both. 

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting are two childhood books that have both had a lasting influence on my writing (each deals with adventures and fantasy, getting your wildest dreams, and setting out from the real world into a very different place). Oh and puns. Lots of puns. And whimsy.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is A Philosophy of Thieves and I think it’s awesome because: high-society performance heists, tactical ballgowns (with lots of pockets), industrial espionage, immortality, and many heists wrapped in a speculative trench coat. 

Thank you, Fran!

Read Paul's review of A Philosophy of Thieves here at NOAF.

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