Film Review: Slanted

A microcosm of race and gender that wanted to be far more daring than it is

Slanted is a film about identity. It is about Chinese-American identity inflected through the turmoil of finding yourself in your teenage years. It is about how America demands a very specific roster of traits to consider you truly included, and the most obvious of those is white skin. Through its history, America has demanded outsiders mold themselves to the white nationalist mold, and brutally punishes those outside it. This film is about one fantastical way of trying to transcend that dissonance, and the cost of becoming “American.”

Joan Huang is a Chinese-American student at a high school right out of the movies, with all the cliques and drama and entanglements we have been conditioned to accept. She is one of the few people of color at this affluent lily-white school that highly values conformity and submission, especially from its girls. Joan spends too much time on social media, and particularly is obsessed with a filter on one of said apps that makes her look white. As the culture of capitalism swoops down, she is offered the chance of a lifetime: a new experimental surgery that will turn her into a white girl. She uses this new procedure to seek the holy grail of teenage girlhood, according to Hollywood: the coveted status of prom queen.

Note that “according to Hollywood” bit in the last paragraph. This film is very much in thrall to the Hollywood genre of the “teen film”: high school is divided into mutually exclusive cliques, everyone is in a dog-eat-dog contest for popularity, everyone is seeking love and sex constantly as opposed to decent grades, and nobody can think about anything else. For example, Joan spends much of the film seeking the heart of a white boy at her school, who was tragically born without a personality, as part of her quest to join a clique that likewise has no personality. The film feels like, for no reason at all, it has a special obligation to a hackneyed formula that is already decades out of date and has been since subverted (I think that Spiderman: Homecoming was the closest film to my experience in high school in the early 2010s, for example).

The most striking example of this dated feeling is a scene where Joan is conveying her half-thought plan to become prom queen to her closest friend at school, using sheets of paper in a binder. I watched this film with my younger sister, who graduated high school in 2019, and she found the notion that this would be done on paper, rather than in a social media app, to be completely unbelievable.

Nor is the traditional “teen movie” the only genre to which this film pledges fealty. The other is the “immigrant movie,” where your unfortunate protagonist’s lunch, packed by her hardworking mother, immediately provokes disgust in her peers because it dares have a spice stronger than mayonnaise. Her parents are hard-working recent immigrants, stuck in menial labor and at the whim of rich white people. She speaks mostly in English, while her parents speak mostly in Chinese, but each understands the other language well enough. Her journey is that of what Northrop Frye defined as comedy, one where a character is ultimately reconciled with her society. At the end, she learns to be American, a newly accepted part of the nation of immigrants.

The film, though, never bothers to actually interrogate any of these notions that the narrative takes for granted, and the end result is a feeling of tonal dissonance. On the one hand, the way most characters behave is, if not “realistic,” normal enough according to Hollywood, all within the standard genre of the “teen film” and therefore part of what Hollywood considers to be “reality;” it is enough of a simulacrum of immigrant life that you can shrug and say “good enough.” But so many accoutrements of the setting, particularly her school, are exaggerated enough to feel like an inaccuracy, but not enough to feel like commentary. The school’s mascot is the wizard, and the posters for said wizard look unsubtly like a Klansman when viewed out of focus. The significance of prom is enshrined to the point that portraits of prom kings and queens past line a hallway, implying that the significance of this ritual is honored by the school administration too. The group of white kids that Joan is trying to fit into does a number of its routines completely in unison, such as when they take out their inevitably identical lunches from their packs. You have characterization that is totally at odds with worldbuilding.

The result of this is a film that feels like a machine-generated average of two other hypothetical, better films. One of them is a searing look at the insidious nature of everyday racism, where the smiling faces of Joan’s peers hide the fact they will never view her as one of them. This one would be very grounded, tragically real, with the race-changing surgery as the only speculative element, where the cost of assimilation is made viscerally real. The other hypothetical film is wilder, more exaggerated, going down past the point where One Battle After Another was with its Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor, and down to the far lands of satire where a school with a Klansman as a mascot feels earned. This hypothetical film would be biting, irreverent, and dystopian; it could have cross-burnings in the football field, lynchings conducted over Tik-Tok, and the prom queen receive the honor of being marshal at a Klan parade; in other words, it’d have to go all the way with the exaggeration or it would fall flat. Either option would be a film that would dare to say something: Is striving to be “American” worth pursuing to begin with?

The traditional immigrant story in the United States, where the newcomer passes through trials and tribulations and ultimately ends up a new American, is wrapped up in the “nation of immigrants” propaganda line that became common in this country after World War II as a reaction to the wave of decolonization sweeping the world. It was becoming clearer and clearer that Europeans had never had a right to rule Africa or Asia, and this of course raised questions about the white man’s right to rule the Americas. The response concocted was to portray this country as a land of opportunity for people from all around the world. The idea was that America’s strength came through its diversity and tolerance, and that all the anti-immigrant riots and massacres and poverty was simply human beings failing to live up to a quasi-divine ideal.

As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has shown in her book Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (excerpted here), the “nation of immigrants” line is based on a fundamental conflation between a settler and an immigrant. The settler caste of white people came to this continent to plunder and kill so they could create a white nationalist ethnostate where they would rule forever as overlords. European immigrants, often called “white ethnics,” could to a point assimilate into the settler caste (the most precariously placed being Jewish immigrants). Those from darker countries, on the other hand, are only allowed into the country at white allowance, and will (and do) face shockingly brutal violence if they ever step out of line, or are seen as a useful scapegoat. If America were truly a “nation of immigrants,” truly a “land of opportunity,” truly “tolerant” and “accepting” and “diverse,” it would not be murdering Palestinian children on a whim in Illinois, or throwing Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in concentration camps where they are tortured. No amount of self-soothing pablum can deny the fact that America has never been tolerant of immigrants, and has never viewed them as anything other than cheap labor. The “nation of immigrants” line is fundamentally a way for affluent white people to justify slavery and genocide as a price worth paying for cheap takeout.

I am a Filipino-American, and through this film I was reminded of a bit in Dylan Rodríguez’s nonfiction book Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, where he argues that the idea of “Filipino-Americans” as a people is a contradiction in terms. America has historically hated Filipinos, never accepting them, indeed willing to slaughter them like cattle, as Samar and Bud Dajo and Watsonville attest. Rodríguez is in the same school of a number of critical ethnic studies theorists who argue that America’s demands for assimilation are of a fundamentally genocidal nature, not necessarily through killing but through a mechanism similar to an Indian residential school. In Slanted, America, through Joan’s classmates, sees a character like her and wants to “kill the Asian and save the girl.” This line of theory, however, overlooks the existence of half-Filipinos like me (“tisoy” in Tagalog, derived from Spanish “mestizo”), who cannot just abandon America even if we wanted to. Back to Slanted, just by growing up in America, absorbing its individualism and its enterprise and its optimism, Joan has become something other than purely Chinese, but will still never be fully American. This is a dissonance, the type of chasm that Rodríguez failed to consider and the film never bothers to reckon with.

The film is ultimately unsatisfying because it is so wedded to genre conventions that rest on shaky assumptions, and never questions any of them. Joan is railroaded down a particular path of acceptance and is not given a chance to see that said “acceptance” is not worth pursuing. Sure, by the end she sees that the surgery was not worth the cost, but she is still buying into the myth that she can be accepted into the American white nationalist project. She still views acceptance into the echelons of the “popular crowd” at a school with a logo suspiciously resembling a Klansman as a worthy goal.

The film most clearly fumbles this with a side character, Brindha, an Indian-American (played by Canadian actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) who is Joan’s best friend and who goes along with her plan to become prom queen, but is clearly not buying into the whole charade in the way that Joan is. There’s a piercing scene after Joan has become whitened, where to gain acceptance from her white peers she rejects Brindha from a gathering. This scene vaguely gestures towards the “model minority” placement of East Asians as occupying a somewhat higher rung on the racial ladder than darker-skinned minorities, but never commits to it. The film is not interested in interrogating this notion, and represents no real alternative when doing so could have led to a far more compelling arc.

There is one place in the film that does have some depth, although not terribly much—that of predatory capitalism. The way that the whitening surgery is pitched to Joan is through an app with a filter that makes her look white on social media, and is done with a great sense of false urgency. The surgery, then, is ultimately a scam, as is omnipresent today to the point it has overwhelmed telephone calls. This more than gestures at the way predatory capitalism harms teenagers through social media, and specifically teenage girls. Indeed the gendered aspect of all this is the film’s strongest aspect. Take, for example, the hall of prom kings and queens; Joan is ultimately aspiring to be a picture among pictures, an object among objects, something to be admired and not respected. She is chasing white beauty standards to be a more desirable thing in the eyes of American patriarchy, as that is how it values its women (and the standards have broken out of containment, as skin whitening is common in Asia). Much of this wasn’t clear to me until talking about it with my sister at length, but this story would unquestionably not be what it is if the protagonist were instead a teenage boy. What becomes frustrating, though, is that so much of this plot could be told with a white girl and more regular plastic surgery. Sure, not every story with a nonwhite protagonist needs to be about race issues, but the film clearly wanted to be about race issues in addition to gender issues. Once again, the film gestures in a certain direction, but never actually treads that path.

The film doesn’t want to critique Joan’s reasons for wanting what she does, particularly the ones she isn’t necessarily aware of. Joan is subjected to a particularly gendered form of racial capitalism, where her value can only be expressed through the ways an Asian woman could be valued according to white nationalist standards. These are the standards that, while appearing trifling in a high school context, are the things that will press on her adult life from all directions. Her school life is a preparation for her adult life and she is being prepared for a particular role. Ideally, we’d get something like the portrayal of racial capitalism in 2025’s Him, which I have reviewed for this blog previously.

Ultimately, I am conflicted about this film, and frankly am unsure if I was the right person to review it, as I have not experienced its gendered issues. To me, Slanted acts like it wants to deconstruct genres, but doesn’t dare to dig under the surface. It still accepts the liberal idea of immigrant assimilation as fact, and views the ‘80s template of high school films as the only way teenagers could ever possibly live. It interrogates gender rather well, but only glances at race when race and gender are so intertwined. Ultimately, the critical project of the film feels incomplete. I left this film with a sense of wasted potential, of a daring film that could have been rather than the timid film that is. Both my sister and I agreed that this would have been better off as an A24 film, for it would feel less need to be commercial. In any case, Slanted simply does not think big enough about its subject matter to be a truly satisfying film.

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

Review: Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

Vintage body-swap, with vintage sensibilities

 Body swapping is a well-used trope, familiar in modern media, but dating back farther than you might think. F. Anstey had a father and son switch bodies, in his 1882 novel Vice Versa; and in 1931 Thorne Smith did it again with a husband and wife in Turnabout. In these cases—and in most of the more modern Freaky Friday versions¹—what makes the story work is that the swappers know each other. Indeed, body swapping is a useful narrative tool by which two acquaintences can further develop a high-stakes relationship by learning what each other’s lives are like from the inside.

Maud Cairnes’s Strange Journey (1935) does something different: The swappers are complete strangers. They’ve never met. There are no stakes to their relationship, because they haven’t got one. So instead what we have is a relationship that is created by the body-swap, and in fact could not have been created without it, because the two swappers come from decidedly different walks of life.  

Our narrator is Polly Wilkinson, a middle class housewife with an affectionate husband, two lovely children, and a whole haul of domestic, family, and social responsibilities that go along with such a life. Her partner in swappage, Lady Elizabeth Forrester, is a wealthy aristocrat with a strained marriage, living a life of unimaginable (to Polly) luxury. A country house; a town house; horses and jewels; cabinet ministers and internationally famous concert pianists swirl around her social circle. Throughout their repeated unintentional swaps, Polly and Elizabeth find themselves in a position to either cause trouble for the other, or perhaps smooth over difficulties that the other doesn't have the ability to handle. Polly finds herself determined to figure out what's wrong with Elizabeth's marriage and fix it, while Elizabeth uses her superior social acumen to help Polly organize events that are important for her husband’s career. In the end, everything resolves itself in this book exactly as you might expect from a respectable novel of this era.

If you allow yourself to take this book for what it is, which is a fluffy, light, quite surfacy romp, then there is a lot to enjoy here. The social circles of Polly and Elizabeth are very well realized, and each woman’s fish-out-of-water behaviour in the other’s body makes for some excellent situational comedy. For example, Polly and Elizabeth have different artistic taste: Elizabeth is refined, and adores atonal, discordant music and foreign theater, while Polly is basic: She likes Ronald Coleman and romantic comedies. So Polly in Elizabeth’s body ends up snubbing a concert pianist quite badly when she insists he play show tunes; while Elizabeth in Polly’s body makes a dreadful hash of things when she tries to organize a group outing to the theatre and selects a Romanian play that ends up being inappropriate for unmarried ladies.

The best of these hijinks take place during the middle portion of the book, when Polly is convinced that Elizabeth is responsible for controlling the timing of their swaps. After one particular swap that causes Polly to miss Christmas with her family, she grows indignant about it all, and decides to cause mischief for Elizabeth. Not much mischief, because remember that this book doesn’t go very far in any particular component, but certainly enough to pep things up entertainingly, if you’re in a mood to find a high-stakes bridge game sufficient excitement.

The most interesting components of this book lie in the treatment of class. Polly and Elizabeth are fish out of water not just because they are strangers to each other, but because they are from such distinct social classes. Elizabeth’s high-handed manner in Polly’s body surprises her acquaintences, but has many benefits: she puts overbearing relatives in their place; she can talk comfortably with Polly’s husband’s boss without being overawed. She’s not shy about extending invitations and being socially bold in ways that Polly would never dare to be. Polly, by contrast, makes repeated errors of behavior that are rooted in class, which Elizabeth’s acquaintances at first think are jokes, but later leaves them equally confused. When Polly is presented with Elizabeth’s jewel box while dressing for dinner, she is so gobsmacked by all the sparkly pretty things that she puts on as much as she can manage, resulting in much commentary at dinner that reveals she has dramatically overdone it. She doesn’t know that the correct term of address for herself is ‘Lady Elizabeth’ instead of ‘Lady Forrester, and she calls her father ‘Dad’ instead of the more refined . . . ---actually, I’m not sure what she should have used instead. Papa? Father? I’m not posh enough to know, but it’s clear that ‘Dad’ is incorrect.

(I am struck, however, by the fact that Elizabeth’s importation of upper class manners into Polly’s life has a general tendency to the good, while Polly’s importation of middle class manners into Elizabeth’s life does not.² This asymmetry of the class-based manners is, perhaps, less of a surprise when I reveal that the author’s full name is Lady Maud Kathleen Cairnes Plantagenet Hastings, daughter of the 15th Earl of Huntingdon. Plantagenet Hastings, good grief. )

 More striking still is a revelation that I think the book doesn’t take nearly far enough: namely, that Polly in her own life has no time to call her own. Every minute of her day is taken up with obligations to the house, the children, the social circle of neighbors and relatives who see everything she does and will be bound to ask questions if she needs to step out for an afternoon to arrange a clandestine visit with an aristocratic body-swap partner. She used to write to her friends from school, but over the years has had to give that up, too. She can have no secrets, no privacy, no life of her own—but it’s not until she tastes the freedom of Elizabeth’s life (a freedom made possible by a neglectful, straying husband who doesn’t care what she does, to be sure) that she realizes what she lacks. This is a very touching moment, and afterwards it is entirely dropped. It’s as if this description of Polly’s constrained life is only important for what it means for the plot’s requirement that Polly find a way to have a private meeting. The revelations about the concessions Polly’s made to her tidy domestic comfort are almost inadverdently revealed, and never explored.

Another consideration that is hampered by the ethos of its time is the ethics of sex in other people’s bodies. If the closest you want to come to mentioning the existence of sex is to say that a ‘foreign’ play is inappropriate for unmarried ladies to watch, it’s going to be hard to give adequate consideration to how Polly and Elizabeth must handle their relations with their husbands. When Elizabeth wakes up in Polly’s bed next to Polly’s husband, she immediately leaps from the bed and runs from the room. When Polly tries to reconcile Elizabeth(‘s body) with Elizabeth’s husband Gerald, she has to tread a fine line of signalling her openness to further intimacy, while taking great pains never even to kiss him. (This sends some extremely mixed signals to poor Gerald). She frets a bit about whether it counts as unfaithfulness to her own husband, given that her own actual body remains decidedly uninvolved in the potential romantic interaction, but in the end remains firm about never actually taking any action, even in Elizabeth’s body. And given the period and intended readership of the book, I don’t think she could have done any differently.

What concerns me more about this dilemma, however, is not whether such an action would count as cheating (yes, obviously it would), but whether it would be rape. And if so, of whom? Of Gerald, who most certainly did not consent to sleep with Polly, whatever she looks like? Probably.³ But also of Elizabeth, who is not on terms of sexual intimacy with Gerald and would not consent for her body to be used in this way if she were in it. Her absence from her own body is pretty parallel with being drugged or unconscious, or otherwise unable to consent to sex.

In sum, then, this book is decidedly of its time, which results in a lack of depth in its treatment of the quite deep issues it raises. It’s a light frolic, and enjoyable for what it is, as long as you don’t mind the author covering your eyes and putting her fingers in your ears at the difficult bits.

1 Star Trek has quite a few body swap plots: TOS Turnabout Intruder swaps Kirk and Janet Lester, an old lover; VOY Vis A Vis swaps Tom Paris and an alien of the week (although in this one the swappers aren’t well acquainted); SNW Spock Amok swaps Spock and T’Pring. ^↩
2 The asymmetry is also reminiscent of Star Trek TOS Mirror Mirror, in which Spock immediately detects that mirror universe counterparts have taken Kirk, McCoy and Uhura’s places, because, as he says, ‘It is far easier for […] civilized men to behave like barbarians, than for barbarians to behave like civilized men.’ ^↩
3 Once again, I would like to point to Star Trek’s mirror universe, this time in the context of the the DS9 episode Through The Looking Glass, in which Sisko is abducted into the mirror universe to impersonate his mirror self and convince his mirror wife to join a rebellion. The Women at Warp podcast was pretty quick to note that any sex between prime!Sisko and mirror!Jennifer would be rape, because mirror!Jennifer would think she is consenting to sleep with mirror!Sisko, not prime!Sisko. ^↩

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Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Body swap
  
• Class-based manners
  
• Hijinks and high-stakes bridge
  
• Missed opportunities for deeper thoughtfulness
  

References:  

Anstey, F, Vice Versa: or, A Lesson to Fathers [Smith, Elder & Co., 1882].
Cairnes, Maud, Strange Journey [The British Library, 1935/2022]. 
Smith, Thorne, Turnabout [Doubleday Doran, 1931]

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.

Microreview [book]: Assimilation, by James Stryker

An intriguing premise that turned out to be an explosive disappointment

Stryker, James. Assimilation. Momentum, 2016.

What if you died, and were floating on towards the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, your soul gearing up for a major change of pace as you are about to be reincarnated…but were sucked away from that light by being reanimated? (I’m not spoiling anything here, as this is like the first two pages of Assimilation.)

It might be a bit bizarre, but that’s just an awesome premise, if you ask me. Stryker had me at “about to be reincarnated”, in fact, even without the intriguing cryogenic pseudoscience that explains the mechanics of the main character’s reanimation. And I was even more excited when Stryker revealed that the soul in question, formerly belonging to a woman (mangled in a car crash), had formed quite a firm identity as a man, only to find itself back in the woman’s reconstructed body! It sounded mesmerizing to me—the sort of story that Self/Less should have been, adding a bit of Tiresias-style wisdom on the matter of biological sex and gender into the mix.

Yeah, it sounded mesmerizing, and parts of it were—but the extreme hostility shown by the character (Andrew) towards the idea of being a woman was nothing like Tiresias (who, you’ll recall, used his experience at having been both a man and a woman to conclude that women enjoy sex more than men, and for this answer was rewarded with a face-full of going blind from the irate Hera). Without presuming to know anything about the author, I can nonetheless conclude that he has neither interest in nor empathy for heterosexual women or their troubles. Is it really that awful to imagine being a woman that Andrew (trapped in his soul’s former body, and known to everyone as Natalie) has absolutely no interest in it at all? Stryker indicates that Andrew has lost all but the faintest memories of being Natalie, so it’s not like he’s bored of being biologically female. Speaking for myself, if Hera or Zeus or whoever cursed me to forget what it was like to inhabit a body whose biological sex was consistent with my own gender identity, then zapped me into a body that did not match said gender identity, I’m sure I’d be upset, but hopefully without oozing visceral disgust for everyone of the biological sex to which I’d been transplanted!

Moreover, the protagonist shows basically no empathy at all to Natalie’s son (or the admittedly kind of horrible husband). The kid looks at Andrew and sees his mother, but Andrew is so uncomfortable at this that he starts lacing the kid’s drinks with sleeping pills. Natalie’s former BFF, who has several of her own kids, comes in for particularly scathing monologue/description from Andrew, who, it seems, is openly contemptuous of women who choose to have children.

This brings us, finally, to the husband. Without giving too much away, I can say that the husband is definitely the antagonist, the greatest obstacle preventing Andrew from self-realization. And as readers, we are obviously meant to sympathize with poor Andrew while hating the controlling micromanager of a husband. Stryker stacks the deck with signals of the husband’s ‘evil’, and to a large extent they’re effective in preventing the reader from identifying with the husband. But the thing is, for most of the story the husband is extremely understanding, and only goes bonkers right near the end (or in other words, viewed from his perspective, he was extremely slow to anger, and only ‘snapped’ after an incredible accumulation of slights by Andrew/Natalie). Andrew is even worse than the husband, in fact, displaying an almost ludicrous single-mindedness about getting what he wants at any cost.

For example, in the beginning Andrew thinks all he will need to do is pacify the husband for six months before declaring himself desirous of a new identity…and can’t/won’t even do the bare minimum required to pass this threshold despite thinking it’s in his own self-interest to do so. Being with Natalie’s former BFF repels him so thoroughly he avoids her completely after a single queasy encounter, but keeps up a steady stream of lies to Natalie’s husband about seeing her all the time so he can instead do whatever he wants (despite the incredible danger of this, since the husband, in a sense, ‘owns’ the reanimated Natalie). To sum up—Andrew’s a selfish, irrational dick.

            

He monologues about how repelled he feels when Natalie’s husband touches him, no matter how fleeting or innocent the contact (and keep in mind, to the husband all he’s doing is touching his own wife’s body!). Probably many readers will assume this is a sort of homophobia on his part, a sense of discomfort at physical intimacy with a man given that he is identifying as a man internally (very much despite the female body). But later he falls in love with a man, so that certainly complicates the ‘homophobia’ diagnosis, leaving one more puzzle at Andrew’s core. And his reaction when the female friend jumps to the conclusion “Natalie” is pregnant was probably the most misogynistic thing I’ve read in years: to paraphrase, the idea of a baby growing inside him was so repugnant he was physically sick, etc., etc. (way to take a dump on gazillions of women and their experience there, Stryker!).

            

The story also takes aim at the very idea of cryogenic reanimation, introducing several other characters who suffered brain damage during the painstaking procedure and strongly implying (in the absence of a single ‘success story’) that radical personality changes are the norm, not the exception. So a remarkable (if decades distant!) technology is being denounced, Michael Crichton style, because of the risk that it might lead to personality change in some of the people who are freakin’ being resurrected? Stryker’s denunciation notwithstanding, cryogenic reanimation sounds pretty awesome to me, and I fail to see how being alive—and in a perfect, problem-free reconstructed body, no less!—could be worse than being dead. Stryker suggests the process would interfere with reincarnation, but this all really boils down to a “it ain’t natural” sort of objection, to say nothing of the (ahem) lack of compelling evidence on reincarnation. In short, Andrew et al should focus on the positives: they’re alive!

            

And speaking of being alive, the ending of the story, which I can’t discuss in detail for fear of spoilers, was a big, explosive disappointment. Still, at least Styker thoughtfully brought Andrew’s constant and rather shockingly selfish monologues to a merciful end…

In short, if you want to read about an intriguing premise, only to have the story derail into a frustrating pity party by one of the 21^st century’s least likeable characters—you’ve picked a winner!

The Math

Objective Assessment: 4/10

Bonuses: +1 for wonderful premise

Penalties: -1 for rampant misogyny, -1 for creating a main character so unlikeable he might be able to outdo Donald Trump

Nerd coefficient: 3/10 “not at all what I’d call ‘good’”

This is how we score stuff.

This review is by Zhaoyun, a regular contributor at Nerds of a Feather since 2013 and usually a gentle soul who dislikes scathing reviews but had no choice but to scathe in response to this.