Film Review: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

The film opens big questions, but being an interquel constrains how deeply it can explore them

It’s hard to keep track of all the productions involved in the Avatarverse. The original 2005 Nickelodeon show is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The epically embarrassing 2010 live-action film is called The Last Airbender. The 2024 Netflix live-action series is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And now we have a sequel film (technically an interquel if you count The Legend of Korra and the upcoming Seven Havens), streaming on Paramount Plus and launched on a handful of movie theaters, called… Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.

I’ve been less confused trying to sort out all the Ghost in the Shell series and films.

The first impression I got from this new film is the refreshing return of the goofy sense of humor that distinguished the original show and is so noticeably lacking in the Netflix retelling. The core characters have reached early adulthood by this point in the timeline, but they still feel like the same fun team we met 21 years ago. However, this plot is heavily focused on Aang, with the rest of the team confined to admittedly cool-looking combat scenes but no story arcs of their own.

The plot begins with Aang following clues to the location of another frozen airbender, Tagah, who sparks Aang’s hopes for restoring the air nation. Tagah is interested in unearthing an ancient magical artifact that a previous Avatar used to grant airbending powers to normal people. The twist, we eventually learn, is that Tagah is a supremacist who wants to punish the world for the historical mistreatment of airbenders. This creates obvious problems: Aang has already founded Republic City, where people from all nations coexist in peace. Tagah wants to replace that with an airbending empire, so Aang will have to fight to prevent a new world war.

You may have noticed that this story retreads discussions that have already been explored in the franchise. Korra season 3 also featured the return of airbenders to the world due to powerful world-changing magic, and also introduced a radical airbender who plotted to overthrow the world’s political system (albeit for diametrically opposed ideological reasons). The film has an undercooked subplot about a faction of rebellious nonbenders who perceive elemental bending to be a tool of oppression, which retroactively foreshadows the Equalist movement seen in Korra season 1.

Exciting action choreography and beautiful background landscapes notwithstanding, there’s a nagging sense that this film exists to tick off a line in nitpicking fandom’s log of complaints. The plot seems to care a lot about clarifying an uncertain point of magical lore: if Korra season 1 established that an Avatar who knows energybending can restore the powers of a bender who has lost them, what prevented Aang from simply giving airbending to random people and rebuild the air nation? This film answers: no, you need special powers from the Lion Turtles themselves to do that, like for example the magical staff that everyone is looking for. That does solve the question that had been left open, but at the cost of oversimplifying the political themes of the franchise.

Aang’s peculiar situation has always lent itself to lengthy discussions about the nature of nationhood. He’s the only survivor of a genocide (until he meets the frozen airbender Tagah, but that guy dates from way before the genocide), and a big part of his mission as this incarnation of the Avatar is to heal that wound in the world. But the methods available to him carry their own complications. Korra shows us that, once Aang became an adult, it took him three attempts to conceive an airbender child, which I’m sure must have caused immense tension in his marriage with Katara, not to mention Lion Turtle-sized daddy issues for his children. The Korra series didn’t explore that famly dynamic deeply enough.

But also, why are Aang’s first two children not considered part of the air nation? If ethnic membership means anything, it has to be tied to ancestry. But in the Avatarverse, the nations are not exactly defined by shared ancestry, but by the ability to practice a magical art, to the point that, in Korra season 3, completely unrelated people from other countries who suddenly gain airbending are invited to join the restored air nation (and it’s a stain on Tenzin’s moral character that he only repairs his relationship with his brother Bumi after Bumi wins the magical lottery and becomes an airbender). The comic book The Promise adds another twist to these questions by introducing the character of Kori, an earthbender who politically identifies with the firebending side of her ancestry.

The elemental bending disciplines influence everything: visual art, clothing, urban design, military technology, even the respective cultures’ favored metaphysics. This is a conception of nationhood unlike anything seen in the real world. It would be like defining the Swiss people as only those who can ski, including anyone from anywhere who can ski (plus structuring all of Swiss society and culture around the visual markers and philosophical analogues of skiing). And this wouldn’t necessarily restrict Swisshood to Switzerland itself; we’re used to conceiving of nationhood as fundamentally connected to territory, but airbenders are nomads, so they’re not tied to a specific territory in the way conventional nations are.

In the film, finding the magical staff that gives airbending would put Aang in the position of choosing who will join the new air nation. This is a decision he has strong opinions about (remember how, in the comic book The Promise, he chastised fans of airbending culture for appropriating the arrow tattoos without having any airbending ability). Even if he’s the only remaining representative of his culture, it’s still worth asking: should one single person have the power to decide how an entire national identity is to be built?

All these questions are brought to the forefront in the film. Unfortunately, established characterization exerts a force against this potential for drama. Although Aang is a bit too eager to follow Tagah even when it endangers his friends, once Tagah’s true intentions are exposed, Aang remains morally immaculate, never feeling the temptation to use horrific violence to Make Airbenders Great Again. Part of this has to do with the need to keep the timeline in harmony with the established events in the sequel Korra series, but it’s also a waste of big themes that the film introduces and then dispatches unaddressed.

Overall this is a worthy addition to the Avatarverse. It can’t be emphasized enough: a core component of the appeal of this franchise is its goofy humor, and here there’s plenty of it. The animation is impeccable, and the music is in keeping with the real-world inspirations of the setting. I only lament that the story could only go as far as established lore allowed.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: Toy Story 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Book Review: A Fire Beneath the World, by Jas Treadwell

Demons and castles and the French Revolution

A few years ago, I wrote approvingly of Jas Treadwell’s most excellent novel The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach. The best part, I reported, was the delightful, opinionated, quarrelsome narrator, who lost no opportunity to make the most of the tools available to him, be they typographical—footnotes, capitalization, emphatic formatting—or more structural explorations of post-Aristotelian non-unities of time and place. Now, in the equally excellent sequel, A Fire Beneath the World, our narrator returns, and he is not alone.

Where Thomas Peach was set entirely in England, this tale turns its eye to revolutionary France. It splits its focus between English characters, familiar to us already from Thomas Peach, and a new set of French faces. Our friend the English narrator (as I call him in my head) handles the former, and the much more straightforward French narrator (as I call them in my head) handles the latter.

This split in narrators is a structural mirror of one of the more charming themes of the book: the attempt to split people into one of two types. Our English narrator ruminates upon this at some length, quickly dismissing the easy binary of men vs. women as utterly uninteresting and unfit for purpose, and instead landing upon (he asserts) a far more foundational, undeniable, and universal division—namely, whether or not a person supports the French monarchy or the French revolutionaries. Obviously. Clearly. I see no problems with this fundamental universal binary.

The English portion of the tale does its best to support this philosophy. On the one hand we have Miss Arabella Farthingay, a pro-revolutionary poet who is invited to appear in front of the National Assembly in Paris to declaim her verses in their honour. Orbiting around her is a mysterious swashbuckling rescuer of persecuted French aristocrats, known as Forget-Me-Not, a hero lauded across English society with appalling doggerel, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the 1934 adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon.

As our English narrator relates Miss Farthingay's story, the action eventually shifts to France, and our English narrator is not happy about that. You see, he does not speak French very well, and so unless the French people speak slowly and clearly, he has difficulty following a lot of conversations. And furthermore, he doesn’t much care for the French, actually. French druids, for example, built their stone monuments in straight lines rather than circles like Stonehenge, which is obviously very bad and inferior to English druids, who well understood the principle of the curved line. Modern French people are just as bad, inexplicably devoted to the swearing and keeping of oaths as a matter of honour. Good solid Englishmen know that a serviceable lie is an indispensable component of an orderly nation’s government and commerce. (I don’t quite know why this anti-French bigotry is so funny to me. Is it because it’s based on such absurd pettiness? Is it because it’s over two centuries out of date, and so its teeth are drawn? Is it even possible to draw the teeth of bigotry? Evidently yes. This was hilarious.)

The other half of the tale focuses on French characters, and for that we get a French narrator. This narrator has a great deal less personality than our English narrator, but does, at least, speak French, and so we can understand all the French conversations spoken by the French people. (The French narrator does not, however, speak English, so some degree of linguistic confusion is an unavoidable component no matter who’s telling the story.) We follow here the (mis)adventures of three adventurers: a young woman, who seeks to leave her small town and see the world; a scoundrel, who follows demonic guidance in return for escape from prison; and an ex-valet, whose previous employer was also not averse to more than a little demonic shenanigans of his own.

Our French characters both support and contradict the English narrator’s claims about the Great Division of people. In support: they defy traditional gender divisions. The young woman is so large and strong that she can believably threaten to squash the skulls of men who betray her. The ex-valet is so dainty and beautiful that he is frequently mistaken for a woman; and looming throughout the narrative is a mysteriously powerful government official who is addressed both as Monsieur and Madame in different circumstances. Clearly, the distinction between men and women is pretty useless as a way of splitting the world in two, exactly as our English narrator has asserted.

But in contradiction to the second half of the English narrator’s Great Division, we find that—in France at least—a great many of the French people do not actually care much one way or the other about the state of the revolutionary government. For some, the sheer weight of living crushes out any political opinions: denouncements and disappearances weaken the labour force; but the availability of labour to bring in the harvest is a moot point, because the endless rain is rotting grain in the fields. In the teeth of starvation, what does it matter who writes the laws and collects taxes you can’t pay?

Even among those who can manage the luxury of political identities, many adhere not to the monarchy, or to the revolutionaries way off in Paris, but to their own Breton brethren on the coast of France. Our English narrator’s great division of mankind falls apart utterly when it is put to the test in the country to which it applies most directly.

Knowing the English narrator’s opinion of the French, I suspect he would probably dismiss this failure to adhere to his principles as even more evidence of the deficiencies of French character. However, since he does not speak French well enough to ask the French people themselves about their political opinions, he remains blissfully ignorant of this counterexample. As, in fact, he remains ignorant of all of the French components of the plot. In the climactic pages of the book, revelation after revelation emerges that he lacks the background to understand, leaving him spouting indignant protestations of bafflement into (he imagines) our sympathetic, equally baffled ear.

But we are not baffled. Our view of the tale has not been divided—not by gender, not by language, not by political opinion, not by nationality. We have seen all of it, and the result is a delight. I can think of no better words to end this review with than our English narrator’s own footnote. It refers to the previous book, The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach, in its original place in the text, but it applies equally well here:

You must take matters into your own hands. Seek out the book-sellers and the circulating libraries—hunt high and low—And find [this] volume for yourself.—Find it, and read it. We dare say, the effort will reward the toil.

Nerd coefficient: 9/10. Very high quality/standout in its category.

Highlights:

• Two narrators, both alike in dignity (well, not really)
• French Revolution
• Demons

Reference: Treadwell, Jas. A Fire Beneath the World [Hodder and Stoughton, 2024].

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.

TV Microreview: Wonder Man

‘To thine own self be true’ is a superpower

Much like the 2005 movie Bewitched, the MCU series Wonder Man tells the story of the remake of an old production about a superpowered character, with the twist that the lead actor chosen for the role happens to actually have superpowers. Now, before you get too excited: just because Marvel decided to make a superhero story about the making of a superhero story doesn’t mean that it’s finally casting a critical gaze on itself. The show’s acknowledgment of the problematic cultural footprint of the superhero business doesn’t go beyond the briefest lip service. Don’t expect the level of awareness you find in The Boys, for example. Far be it from Marvel to bite its own hand. But what you do get in Wonder Man is a sweet character treatment of a talented, hopeful artist learning to get out of his own way, joined by a more mature artist who has used his talents in disgraceful ways and gets a chance to put them in the service of a nobler purpose.

First we meet Simon, a son of Haitian immigrants who first learned as a child the usefulness of putting on a performance when life got too cruel. After watching the old Wonder Man movie, he became enamoured with the art of fiction. Now he’s a struggling D-list actor who overthinks his roles and stresses out his agent because he can get annoying to film with. When he hears that there’s a Wonder Man remake being produced, he drops everything in pursuit of the lead role. But his complicated acting style is the least of his troubles: he also has superpowers, and they’re very hard to control, which would ban him from the acting profession if it became known. His arc is about deciding which side of him it’s wise to let people see.

Then we have Trevor, whom we met in Iron Man 3 and then in Shang-Chi. He’s trying to rebuild an acting career that he can be proud of, but his past misdeeds keep catching up with him. Under threat of sending him back to prison, the Department of Damage Control recruits him to gather information on Simon, who is considered extremely dangerous, but as the two become friends, Trevor ends up reevaluating his priorities and risking his own future to save Simon’s. His arc is about recognizing the one moral thing he can finally do, and daring to do it.

Together, Simon and Trevor are a lovely duo, the aspiring artist pushing the older one to rediscover his goodness, the veteran artist nudging the younger one to be more authentically himself in his craft. These two form the beating heart of the story, and the scenes where they nerd out about their love of acting are a pure delight. Fittingly, the theme of acting resonates with their respective problems: on Simon’s part, with the constant pretense that it takes to keep his superpowers hidden; and on Trevor’s part, with his secret mission to infiltrate Simon’s life. Their mutual game of masks is resolved when each realizes that there’s a time for vulnerable self-disclosure, and there’s a time to put on an elaborate act for the right reason.

It’s refreshing that, for once, a Marvel superhero doesn’t have to save the world from an all-devouring cataclysm. There’s also value in finding that there’s something worth saving in yourself.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Microreview: Anaconda (2025)

The Ouroboros of sequelitis eats its tail

Because every last bit of IP must be undusted for quick profit, this time we have a movie that just doesn’t bother pretending it’s about something more than squeezing another IP, and in the process successfully denounces itself. This “spiritual sequel” to 1997’s Anaconda both acknowledges that the original was ridiculously over the top and strives to beat it by being a hundred times more ridiculously over the top. It’s an impossible beast: a remake that is about how absurd it would be to film that remake. But it doesn’t have a commentary to make on its premise; this is no Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. Its gimmick consists in pointing at itself and smirking at the audience: Hey, isn’t it silly that Hollywood keeps remaking everything? Ha ha. Joke’s on all of us for buying the tickets.

Anaconda doesn’t try to comment on the tension inherent in its assignment, on the dual task of telling a story that is about its own inadequacy for telling that story. It doesn’t take the example of its worthier predecessors, like 2005’s Bewitched, a metafictional comedy about rebooting Bewitched, or 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, a neat rebuke to the executives who forced it into existence and simultaneously a beautiful case for its own existence. The whole point of the new Anaconda is that there would be no point in a new Anaconda, and when it goes ahead and does it anyway, it doesn’t know how to justify itself.

The in-universe excuse for the reboot is that two childhood friends who always dreamed of making horror movies have a midlife crisis and suddenly decide to fly to the Amazon jungle and film a new Anaconda before they get too old to try things. Not the worst of premises, but it feels strange to watch Jack Black, of all people, play the responsible, mature half of the duo, while the magically ageless Paul Rudd is simply impossible to believe as an unemployable D-lister. These two characters have been stung by the nostalgia bug, and constantly reminisce about their school days, when they made zero-budget films for the pure love of the craft. But their inclination for artistic purity doesn’t extend beyond their lines; the actual plot devotes a lot of attention to who owns the legal rights to remake Anaconda.

(Curiously, the new Anaconda is so disconnected from the plot of the original that you wouldn’t need those rights in order to film this one. It’s the kind of mildly tangential allusion The Asylum gets away with selling all the time.)

Much like the self-serving abomination that was Space Jam 2, the new Anaconda takes care to remind viewers again and again that it’s a Sony property. Accordingly, the defining ethical question that propels the plot is whether you respect Sony’s property. The other themes alluded to in the script (illegal gold mining, cruelty toward animals, substance abuse disorders, the pursuit of happiness) are secondary to the sacred status of corporate ownership rights.

Barely tolerable as a buddy comedy, toothless as a horror thriller, self-defeating as a metafictional exercise, the movie we get feels like something captured by its titular monster: a regurgitated, half-digested lump that is hard to ignore but much harder to look at.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Book Review: Enchanting the Fae Queen by Stephanie Burgis

The second of the Queens of Villainy series

Second in her fantasy series “The Queens of Villainy,” Enchanting the Fae Queen continues Stephanie Burgis' series set in a world of magic and some technology. While I have read other works by her before, I decided to jump in feet first into book two of this series, although I do own, unread, book one, Wooing the Witch Queen.

After reading a rather dark book, I wanted to go for something lighter. And so I found myself picking up what is, in fact, a romantasy in name¹ as well. And I want to talk about that for a moment before I even get to the book itself. Romantasy has, retroactively, been seen to being going back at least to Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks², But as far as I can tell, Romantasy became a thing in the early 2010’s with authors like Sarah J Maas. But in recent years, especially it seems in the age of Covid, that it has been pushed and expanded as a comfort read, and authors either squeezed into it or marketed as such.

I’ve read a lot of fantasy in my life, and what is now being seen as Romantasy, ex post facto, and what I have seen is that Romantasy is the rising trend in fantasy. I've talked about Grimdark in the past, which was the reigning ruler of fantasy for quite a while. And even now, there is still a lot of Grimdark out there.  But the new but not so new hotness is Romantasy.  Many of the secondary world fantasy books I am offered these days are pitched as Romantasy. Right or wrong, Romantasy is perceived as the rising subgenre. I myself have tried a couple of Romantasy books and bounced off all of them. The irony is that Romantasy has been pitched and shown often as a comfortable subgenre, a subgenre one reads for pleasure and immersion in the story of a relationship. But I'd to this point failed to really enjoy it.

And so we come to Enchanting the Fae Queen.

In some ways, this was also a challenge as well as a reach for something lighter. What would jumping into book two of a Romantasy series be like? Could it hold up for me as a reader of fantasy? Could I actually "get" Romantasy as a subgenre? I decided to go deliberately outside my comfort zone, even if it is ostensibly to a "comfort subgenre".  I knew the basic setup of the Queens of Villainy verse but was scant on the details. Could a second novel in a Romantasy series hold me? And so, not well armed at all, I went in.

Enchanting the Fae Queen features one of the soi-disant Queens of Villainy, Queen Lorelei. Originally from Faerie, she rules one of the three realms that border a human and very dangerous empire run by Emperor Otto. Otto is a young and dangerous empire running an empire that, from context feels vaguely mid to late 19th century. There seems to be a mixture of both German and French influences to this Empire Trains are relatively new, there are gas lamps, but technology has not progressed any further. Otto himself feels like a Kaiser Wilhelm II, young, impetuous, expansionistic, with a helping of intolerance that is both medieval and, sadly, positively modern.

Lorelei herself is the Queen of a Kingdom on the borders of this hungry hungry Empire, but the novel’s focus, as a Romantasy is on the relationship between her and General de Moireul of the Empire. They’ve had entanglements for years, but, now, as the Empire is rearing up yet again to try and make war on the Queens, Lorelei proves impetuous. She kidnaps Gerard and in the process launches them into a tournament in Faerie. Faerie has changed since the time she was once there, and Lorelei and Gerard not only have to work together, but something else, not only to even possibly win the tournament, not even to stop a war neither want, but just to survive. And, find a connection, together.

And thus a story unfolds.

As mentioned above, Romantasy’s conventions and focus are on the development of relationships, particularly romantic ones. As a result, I was left with a lot of questions about the worldbuilding that I do not think that the first book, Wooing the Witch Queen, address, either. That’s not what the book really is focused on, or what the book is for.

I did try to read the book with the protocols of a fantasy novel, and I did find that to be a somewhat frustrating experience. Even given that I came into the middle of a series, I was left with a lot of questions about how the world works that seemed to be not answered, or at least not really the concern of the writer. The use of magic, especially Fae magic, mind, and a secondary fantasy world kept the novel firmly in the realm of being fantasy, even if the protocols didn’t always quite fit. To give one telling point: This is a secondary fantasy world, but one whose geography is rather vaguely described and there is, indeed, no map.³ Now, mind you, in a world where portal magic among the Queens is not uncommon, the Empire itself doesn’t seem to have much of this.

But how does it read, overall, protocols aside for a moment? Burgis has a warm and inviting style to her writing. Yes, it is character focused, more in a moment about that. Burgis has a number of speeds of her writing, directing the writing and its flow to keep the reader engaged and turning pages. She narrows down nicely into details, especially how the characters are feeling and acting, during some trials, and handwaves and telescopes others once we get the point of what is going on and how the trials are proceeding. She uses mainly Lorelei as our point of view, although she also briefly brings us into other points of view as well. Burgis has honed her style to be very readable. I hesitate to use the word light, because Burgis is serious about developing her characters and relationships. She has a softer touch on worldbuilding and plot, but when it comes to writing characters, this is where her writing truly shines.

But back to protocols and focusing on those characters and relationships. It is reading the book with the protocols of a romance novel that one can better judge the novel’s merits. And on those merits the novel succeeded for me on much stronger ground. The development of the Lorelei-Gerard relationship is the backbone and superstructure of the novel and the story proceeds on familiar lines, and executed excellently. It’s the classic enemies to lovers trope, although Lorelei has had a thing for Gerard, opponent as he might be, for quite some time. Both of them, though, have strongly guarded and hardened hearts. Lorelei is self-described as a rake, an enthusiastic lover, but one who does not give her own heart in the process. She has and does cut a swath across the landscape and is known to do so. Gerard on the other hand has never given his heart to anyone. He is so focused on his job, his duty, his honor, that he has never found the place in his heart for another. Especially not the Fae Queen who has tormented him with tricks and gambits for years.

But, in the course of the aforementioned Tournament that the two find themselves in, the two’s relationship slowly starts to develop. It follows a slowly pattern of the two falling for each other, despite themselves, in a rising and falling pattern, with setbacks, declarations, finally getting together, and of course, in the end, the setback and finally the HEA (Happily Ever After).

The innovation, such as it is with a Romantasy like the Queens of Villainy series is that this happens in a fantasy verse. And yes, while Romance is the better frame and protocol with which to understand most Romantasy novels such as this series, the protocol of fantasy and the overall fantastic plot still applies and has to be accounted for. The first book in the series, Wooing the Witch Queen, is an HEA, but the characters are still here in the second book, and are secondary characters to the overall plot. The fantasy world and its problems still go on, the Empire is still out there, and in this second book, Otto and his plans are, I gather, have darkened since the first book.

What this all means is that the third and final book, Melting the Ice Queen, is going to complete the trilogy and resolve the fantasy plot. But, like the first novel’s relationship is clearly in an HEA and remains so, this novel and the Lorelei-Gerard relationship will remain stable and be nurtured, even as the third novel focuses on a new one, with the third Queen of Villainy. That relationship promises to be a queer one. I do want to mention that while this world seems queer-friendly, it will only be in the third novel that we get a queer relationship forward and featured. From what I understand, in Romantasy, queer relationships are rather in the minority at present. Perhaps Burgis’ third novel and the culmination of the Queens of Villainy series will help balance that. Romantasy, I feel, like any genre or subgenre, should be diverse. It is important for it to be so.

One more point. The title. The title of this novel, and indeed the titles of all three novels, are focused on the MC woman partner. Wooing the Witch Queen. Enchanting the Fae Queen. Melting the Ice Queen. The woman-focused and female MC focused main character titling is showing the importance of providing such framing for female readers. This series would be very different in outward appearance if they were identical inside but rather they were titled Wooing the Archduke and Enchanting the General. Although, as noted above, the third novel’s retitling would be something like Melting the Ice Priestess.

It would appear I have much to learn about reading the protocols of Romantasy, and writers like Burgis, whom I have read before, but in this age of Romantasy, are finding a home and receptive audience for the stories they want to tell.

--

Highlights

• Romantasy, second in a series. 
• Strong character beats
• Well written, engaging and entertaining 

Reference: Burgis, Stephanie, Enchanting the Fae Queen (Bramble, 2026)

¹ It is pretty clear that although Romantasy is a new term, previous works by Stephanie Burgis, such as Snowspelled, are, retrospectively, definitely Romantasy as well.

² Of course, I had thought that War for the Oaks was a progenitor of modern Urban Fantasy, which goes to show that categories have overlap, as well as the fact that there are books that subgenres desperately want to “claim” for their own.

³ Yes, I realize not every fantasy world has a map or even needs a map. And there are Romantasy novels with gorgeous maps. But we get to the protocols again, and how to read this book. And I think, although it is coming here in a footnote, that to read Romantasy, one MUST read and accept the fusion of both protocols and that not all the check boxes are going to be checked.  Or perhaps Romantasy is a spectrum, with more or less elements of fantasy and romance between various novels, authors and series. Or is Romantasy, like I sometimes think of Horror, more of a mode or color and not a subgenre at all? Is it a polder, a boundary land?  I am sure people with far more credentials than I are going to explore this in coming years, and it should. 

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

Not much changed when the Fire Nation attacked

The Avatar saga remains faithful to its tried and true formula: visually breathtaking, narratively uninspired

There are truly interesting ideas in Avatar 3 that elevate the themes raised by the first Avatar to questions of thorny significance to the story, and time after time, their resolution goes for the easy answer, the overdone cliché. The Way of Water could be forgiven for delivering very little because it promised very little. Fire and Ash promises a lot and still fails to deliver, which makes this entry in the film series a more regrettable (forgive the pun) misfire.

Let’s begin with the film’s central conflict: Spider, the human boy adopted by the blue aliens. After a sudden bout of cosmic bad luck, he ends up convulsing on the forest floor, with no more human-breathable air left in his mask and far from his stack of replacements. As a desperate last measure, our miracle child Kiri connects to the web of nature and reformats Spider’s entire body chemistry to allow him to breathe Pandora’s air. So far, so good: no more depending on a 24/7 mask to survive. However, Spider’s new metabolism opens the door to a nightmare scenario: he’s living proof that the human body can adapt to survive unimpeded in Pandora’s environment. If the bad guys figure out how to replicate the process, the entire balance of power in Pandora will shift in favor of human colonization.

Now Spider’s existence is a danger to everyone he loves, and his body is an invaluable source of biomedical innovation. The rest of the film has him ping-ponged between enemy factions that want to either cut him open for the benefit of Earth or cut his throat for the benefit of Pandora. But the movie chooses the wrong Na’vi as the mouthpiece for the latter position, and there are no lasting consequences for the personal ties that should have been damaged between Spider and his would-be executioner.

It has a jarring effect that the film brings us to this immense rift between Spider and the blue aliens, only to give everyone a happy ending where he’s welcomed by the ancestors as a member of the Na’vi without further issue. Let’s stress the point again: Spider was almost murdered by people he deeply trusts and loves, because they became convinced that his life put all of them in danger. And this betrayal comes after Neytiri has spent half the film insulting and neglecting him because she’s still grieving her dead son and Spider is a constant reminder of which people took him from her. After his near-execution, the relationship between Spider and the Na’vi shouldn’t be able to go back to normal, ever. At the very least, it should take more for him to take up arms in their defense again. Even his evil not-exactly-father, the half-Na’vi clone of the late Colonel Quaritch, shows him more respect in this film than his adoptive parents.

The other conflict in the plot, which the trailers gave much attention to but actually doesn’t affect the story that much, has to do with the Fire Nation Ash People, a tribe of pillagers who some decades ago survived a volcanic disaster and have since rejected the cult of the nature goddess Eywa. Now they live off piracy and worship the same fire that destroyed their old way of life. This is a fascinating concept that the film does nothing with. It’s one thing to present a schism in a pantheistic faith and create what is essentially a demonic cult; it’s much more compelling to do so in a setting where the nature goddess is demonstrably real and present in people’s lives. What does it look like to despise the natural flow of the life force when that force is visible and has a tangible will?

But also, what does it say about Eywa that she plays favorites between Na’vi clans? The Ash People’s backstory has them praying to be saved from the volcano, but Eywa refused to send help. In such circumstances it makes total sense that they’d form a new religion around fire, which proved to be the more powerful force, and that they’d turn to pillage to survive, both because they no longer have fertile land and because they no longer trust Eywa’s generosity.

Eywa’s will is actually one of the bigger problems with the plotting of the Avatar series. In the first movie, she saved the day via literal Dea Ex Machina, and Avatar 3 repeats the same trick in an identical situation. The critique of real-life environmental devastation is loud and clear: the humans of this future are too dim to notice the obvious intelligence of the space whales they kill for profit, but it takes a civilization-sized Idiot Ball to ignore a whole sentient biosphere telling you to stop.

When you introduce a deity into your setting, and this deity’s opinion matches your stance as an author, it’s very hard to avoid turning your story into a pamphlet. Eywa steers the plot at the times when it’s convenient, in the directions that help the author preach his message, and thus can’t function as a character in the way that the rest of the characters treat her. And the only time we’re told Eywa makes a questionable choice, i.e. letting the Ash People starve, it’s presented in a way that makes them the bad guys instead of Eywa. As often happens with supreme beings in stories, there are no lessons for Eywa to learn, no need for her to change her mind or grow. The story assumes she can do no wrong, even when it clearly shows it happening. Instead of being a character, she fulfills the function of authorial (forgive the pun) avatar that stalls or pushes the plot as needed.

Another character whom the story treats far more favorably than their actions deserve: Jake Sully, whose boot camp style of parenting will probably push Na’vi culture to invent psychotherapy on its own. Even allowing for the sad reality that the entire Na’vi people is in a war for survival, Jake has no excuse for the way he treats his children, and he’s repeatedly portrayed as heroic for it.

Avatar’s in-your-nose parable about colonialism and predatory greed has been repeating the same basic points for three movies, and doesn’t have any original perspective to add to the discussion. James Cameron has clearly exhausted all the tricks in his box. This film series should stop before its incomparably gorgeous landscapes can’t disguise the mediocre storytelling anymore.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Review: Bloodtide by Sophie Burnham

Sophie Burnham’s Bloodtide continues the Ex Romana trilogy started in Sargassa, peeling back more the story of Selah, her companions and rivals, and of the city of Sargassa herself

Sidewise Award-winning novel Sargassa by Sophie Burnham provided us with a setting and a vision of a world where the Roman Empire never fell. Part of the story of Selah, new Imperial Historian and the rest of her rivals, adversaries and contemporaries in the novel is finding out that the truth of history is somewhat more complicated than they believed, in the midst of a twisty conspiracy of imperial ambitions, secrets, plots and lies.

Bloodtide continues the story of Selah and the others in her orbit, in the fantastically imagined world of Sargassa.

From a plot perspective, in looking at Bloodtide I am going to skirt the big reveal of Sargassa, since it would not be fair to readers who have not read the first book in the series. Readers who have read the first book and are looking to see how Burnham can possibly follow up that big reveal don’t need to be reminded of what it was. So instead we will carry forward into the second novel and what it tries to do without referencing it.

Having assembled its characters as a rough and contentious group in Sargassa, Bloodtide for the most part scatters them to the winds. This second novel focuses less on Selah than the first novel, instead providing a lot of screentime to the other members of her somewhat contentious circle of colleagues and associates. Darius is in exile in the badlands, giving us a view of some of the rest of the continent and the price of his Javert-like obsessions for his investigations from the first novel. Arran and Theo, on the other hand, with the growing revelation that there is a lot more of the old solaric tech lying around than anyone ever suspected, go off to try and resurrect the power and communications arrays from long ago.

We get a greater sense of the scale of the revolutionaries and their opposition to Roman rule. Theo and Arran’s mission is predicated on a slow but smart bit of strategy—they realize that Sargassa casting off control by the Romans is a doomed enterprise, destined to be squashed quickly by the rest of the empire. But if they could coordinate across cities and towns by means of the solaric technology, then all the cities and settlements could rise up at the same time and make stopping the revolution much more difficult, if not impossible. It’s an excellent recognition of the tactics and necessity of coordination of a revolution. This puts me in mind of a Silverberg story where a revolution fails, and the revolters recognize, in hindsight, that they needed uprisings in more than just one city in order to have a prayer of success.

So, with Theo, Arran and Darius’s plotlines and adventures outside of Sargassa, Selah gets a lot less screentime, as do Tair and the plotline of the Iveroa stone and the spoilery revelations it contains. This means the often thorny relationship between Selah and Tair gets less play than, say, the budding relationship between Theo and Arran. Still, this is a novel with interesting and fascinating queer relationships, and a preponderance of characters who are not straight men. We get character development, growth and an intense look at these characters, just like in the first novel.

Like Sargassa, Bloodtide is not just queer-friendly; it is queer-forward. These are the queer-forward alternate history/future history SF novels you may not have known you wanted, but are here for you.

And then there is the titular Bloodtide, which is a large set piece of a flood in the city of Sargassa. All the characters who are in the city at the time confront what turns out to be a quite catastrophic storm for the city. Rain and flooding, and the inevitable stresses to civilized behavior that occurs afterwards. It’s a challenge for Selah and the others, not only for them to survive, but to help as much of the underclass as they can. (The Patricians, of course, are doing fine. Same as it ever was.) While the first novel made the social divide in Sargassa stark, here, in the midst of the storm that hits the city, the haves and have-nots, in the wake of a disaster, are even more starkly defined. I was reminded, and I believe the author intended it, of the wake of the utter disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Burnham does not pull her punches in depicting the devastation, which of course plays merry hell with the plans of our protagonists. It is a black swan event that none of them prepared for, and that they have to struggle to survive.

The Bloodtide can also be seen as a Chekov’s gun going off. In Sargassa we got the sense that the city built all the way to the shore was definitely susceptible to a storm and situation like this. In the first novel we have descriptions of lower-class areas of the city, Sinktown, that are prone to flooding in the best of times. And so we get not just tidal flooding, but a full-on hurricane and storm surge.

So is there another big reveal in Bloodtide? In a way, there is an extension of that big reveal, as in the final portion of this book we get a sense of more about it. While the novel has danced around the consequences of the world as it is now, a thing deliberately engineered to be misunderstood, the consequences of the reveal in Sargassa aren’t really explored. Selah and the others have, as you have seen, way too much going on to really think on what that reveal *means*. At the end of Bloodtide, however, we get a bifurcation of character knowledge and reader knowledge. Selah and the others come across information that they cannot quite decipher or understand, but the reader can definitely put the pieces together and come to a conclusion and a revelation that broadens and further extends the revelation in Sargassa. But it’s clear Selah and the others do not know what they have learned. The entire backstory is not clear, however; there are still questions as to the state of affairs, in addition to the unresolved character beats. But once again, the book remains relatively unique in its approach to worldbuilding.¹

My hope is that this sets up the final book in the trilogy and a broader set of revelations and things coming to a head. I’ve been quite entertained both by the characters and the fascinating and clever worldbuilding in the Ex Romana series, and I have high hopes for the third and final volume to stick the landing.

Highlights:

• Fantastic depiction of the set-piece disaster as the heart of the book.
• Excellent character beats.
• Deepens the worldbuilding of the first book and provides more context to the surprise of the first book.

Reference: Burnham, Sophie. Bloodtide [Daw, 2025].

¹ This makes it hard to compare this book to others as is my wont, because the books I can think of that tie into Ex Romana might inadvertently give a hint to the twist in the series and worldbuilding.

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

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: Zootopia 2

The city of talking animals reveals a wider world in its past and its future

Some movie premises, like “How did Han Solo get his last name?”, can be classified as “Nobody asked for this.” Others, like “How did the rebels get the Death Star schematics?”, are in the smaller category of “Nobody asked for this, but now that you went ahead and made it, it turns out it’s really good.” Zootopia 2 belongs in that latter category. There was no need to explore why we didn’t see reptiles in the first movie, because the class of mammals sufficed for its predator/prey allegory (also, the vast majority of reptiles are predators, so their presence would only have overcomplicated the plot).

(Also also, the talking animals eat fish. Are the fish sentient? Don’t ask.)

The worldbuilding of the first Zootopia was only as detailed as it needed to be, and that’s OK; that’s how storytelling is supposed to work. But now that Disney has decided to answer an unnecessary question, we’re lucky that the result is as good as it is. Zootopia 2 takes the first movie’s points about exclusion and prejudice and weaves a bigger mystery that involves racism, real estate encroachment, and the erasure of the history of marginalized communities.

Our protagonist duo is back: Judy, the overachiever rabbit with a compulsive need to prove herself caused by the mother of all impostor syndromes; and Nick, the socially isolated fox who only became Judy’s coworker because he literally has no other friends. (This is not me roasting them; the script has them explicitly saying this.) So, after a spectacularly disastrous unauthorized mission, they’re quickly ordered to get support group therapy to address the rough edges between them.

As it happens, this is a tense moment for the police department: the city of Zootopia is celebrating the centennial of its climate control walls that allow camels and polar bears to coexist. This is the pivotal invention that makes Zootopia and its marvelous diversity possible, and to highlight their importance, the exclusive gala that commemorates their creation also has a priceless historical document in display: the design notes of the engineer who designed the walls. The notebook has been preserved by a distinguished lynx family that for some reason is hostile to one of its descendants, Pawbert, who seems to not measure up to the patriarch’s expectations.

The plot kicks into gear when a viper crashes the party, steals the notebook, rapidly delivers a speech that convinces Judy of his good intentions, and ends up accidentally envenoming the police chief in a comically contrived set of circumstances that make it look like Judy and Nick were the attackers. So now our heroes have to go on the run from their own colleagues while they try to solve the mystery of why a reptile has showed up in Zootopia after a century of absence, why the lynx family is so suspiciously hostile to him, and what the design notes have to do with it all.

As police investigations go, this one doesn’t rely on brilliant deduction as much as miraculous convenience. For our heroes, clues fall from the sky as needed; the only doubt is whether they’ll survive the next slapstick chase through a swamp or a water pipe or a collapsing house or a Gazelle concert in the desert.

A handful of characters from the first movie make an appearance in the sequel: your favorite criminal sheep, donut-loving cheetah, car racing sloth, hyperanxious rabbit parents, and mobster shrew return for brief yet memorable scenes. The new characters are no less vivid: the new mayor of Zootopia is a former action movie actor horse with a hilarious catchphrase, one of the key informers in the investigation is a plumed basilisk with a perverse sense of humor, and one unlikely ally our heroes meet is a tomboyish beaver with a conspiracy podcast. And of course, the star that steals the show is Gary the viper, voiced with endearing sweetness by a perfectly cast Ke Huy Quan.

The day is saved by generous emotive oversharing, multi-species cooperation, rusty electrical equipment, the magic of snake antivenom, and… the Zootopia patent office? OK, a bit bureaucratic, but I’ll take it. The reveal of why reptiles left Zootopia and why mammals have such a low opinion of them has echoes in the real-world history of forced displacement and the insidious normalization of racism. It’s heartening to learn the true extent of reptile contributions to animal society, but it may deliver a mixed message to have a plot where reptiles are only welcomed back into Zootopia because they contributed to animal society. As a matter of principle, a group of people shouldn’t have to show proof of noble deeds before getting basic dignity and equality.

Zootopia 2 shows us a more complex side of its society, a deeper manifestation of the disguised prejudices that were already evident in the first movie. Even if the specifics of the story could have been planned better, the basic message of joy in diversity resonates loud and clear.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 2: Dragon Haven

To build a new society, you must understand what worked (and didn’t) about the old

Dragon Haven is, at its heart, a meditation on self-determination, both on the level of the individual, and society more broadly. (In fact, both Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven are organized around that idea, but I wanted to talk about other things last month, so we’re going to pretend that this theme is specific to this book.) When last we left our little band of adventurers, Alise had accomplished her heart’s dream, to accompany dragons in a quest for the lost dragon city of Kelsingra. She embodies the ideal of this book's thematic messaging: someone who rejects a role thrust upon her, creates her own role in the world, and thrives therein. At pivotal moments throughout this series, she will encounter people who compare the new self she has constructed to the old self she left behind. Although the comparison is complicated, in a Hobbian way, overall it turns out as well as is possible in the Rain Wilds. Alise is no longer the cultured society lady that she was at the start of the book: her hair and skin are roughened, and the man she comes to love is coarse and dirty. Nor does she grow into an elegant Elderling, the way the other dragon keepers start to do; and there are moments of tension that emerge as a result, a growing us-vs.-them sprouting between the dragon keepers and the still-humans. In every external metric, her transformation is a downward one. She loses money, power, even whatever physical charms she ever had. Her scholarship of those lost wonders is no longer valuable in a world with dragons and Elderlings returned, and Elderling cities rediscovered, with memory devices sharing their secrets with anyone and everyone who passes by. And yet, internally, she is happy and she is loved. And she has the strength of character to recognize those things as paramount. This is as close to a happy ending as you’ll get in a Hobb book.

The dragon keepers themselves have a less straightforward trajectory. They have no difficulties casting off their old life. Indeed, their old life cast them off first, by assigning them this one-way mission to take the dragons away. But people are people, and although they revel in the opportunity to build a new kind of life among themselves, nevertheless they reproduce, in microcosm, the same societal tensions that plague every society. Thymara, young and naive, basks at first in the feeling of having friends and peers, released from the strictures of a society that thinks she should have died as an infant. The other, older dragon keepers, clock immediately that this freedom from social constraint means that they can start getting down with each other. Back in the cities, people as heavily marked as them were allowed to reproduce, but here there’s no such constraint. Jerd, a young woman, sleeps around with most of the young men, before eventually settling down with Greft, the oldest and most cynical of the keepers. It’s made reasonably clear that this decision is not about personal preference or connection, but instead is because she becomes pregnant with (probably) his child. It’s not quite a life of hedonistic abandon, since the dragons keep them working pretty hard to feed and care for them, but it’s a lot more freedom than they’ve known.

But sex comes with consequences, and those consequences lay bare the problems inherent in building a new society. We’ve already talked about why they kill babies back in Trehaug. Jerd’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage is one of the most compelling demonstrations of how a society can get to that point. At every stage, I found myself nodding along: yes, I agree with Thymara that Jerd’s behaviour has directly resulted in her inability to pull her share of the work. Yes, I agree with Bellin that the work of caring for a sick pregnant woman falls on other people, and if you don’t have a committed partner willing to take on that task, then you are imposing it on other people who didn’t agree to be liable for it. Yes, if you die in childbirth and leave behind an infant who must be cared for, you have deprived the group of your labour, and left them with only a burden. There are reasons why casual unprotected sex outside of committed relationships is discouraged, and it’s not (only) thoughtless puritanical conservatism.

But what is the solution? So far, societies have tried constraining women’s sexual agency (Bingtown) or murdering babies (Rain Wilds). Neither seems like a good solution. These dragon keepers are not going to arrive at a better one on their own, but they have a much better understanding now of why the rules that they want to break so freely were put there in the first place.

Or rather, some of them do. Greft, Jerd’s cynical paramour, seems to think he has a much better understanding of human nature than the rest of them. In fact, his ideas about how society should be—based on power and enforced hierarchies—are fed to him by a Chalced spy who’s snuck into the expedition, and even that little detail is a beautiful example of the macrocosm rendered small into this group of explorers. Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced, even if that war means a single Chalced spy stirring up discord in the Rain Wilders.

Hobb uses Greft’s adoption of these odious Chalced ideas as a means to have her say in a conversation that will be depressingly familiar to fantasy fans over the age of, say 25: namely, the need for “realism” in one’s worldbuilding. But in this conversation, “realism” somehow has less to do with complications of exchange rates and currency devaluation and tariffs (unless you’re Daniel Abraham or Seth Dickinson), and more to do with the insistence that it’s more “realistic” to write a world in which women should be childbearing machines and settle down with men to protect them from sexual violence perpetrated by other men. I’ve had to wade through this Disc Horse myself in my own family, multiple times. Hobb, in her turn, allows it to play out between Thymara, who’d rather not choose a man, thanks very much, and Greft, who insists that she must. She represents the argument faithfully enough, but at the very end of that conversation, she does something very satisfying. Thymara says that she will not choose any man, and walks away. And in her mind, her dragon Sintara says, Now you are thinking like a queen. There may be hope for you yet.

In other words, Hobb ends the conversation by reminding her readers, We’re in a world with DRAGONS. Who cares about your stinking “realism”? It’s an elegant way of integrating the meta-discourse into the dialogue of her book, and I enjoyed the smackdown immensely.

Oh, yes, dragons! We’ve got dragons too! And like the humans, the dragons are working on building their own society. Because unlike their forbears, who were ruthlessly individualistic, these dragons require some degree of social cohesion to survive. Not all of them have the memories that a dragon needs to be properly draconic; some seem properly half-witted. Heeby, Rapskal’s dragon, seems more like a beloved pet in Rapskal’s care than the magnificent, overpowering marvel that a true dragon should be. And yet it is Heeby who manages to recover the power of flight first. The dragon who recovers what all the rest of them aspire to is the one who is willing to let go her thoughts of what she should be, and instead make use of what she has: Rapskal’s clumsy, good-hearted, unfailing encouragement. Yes, it’s undignified to run around flapping her wings, trying and failing over and over again. Yes, OG dragons did not do anything as pathetic as failure. But—in a choice reminiscent of what we saw with the Liveship Traders—these dragons cannot have it all. They need to choose which element of dragonhood they will preserve. Sintara chooses dignity, and stays earthbound in the mud. Heeby releases dignity, and flies.

And then there is Relpda, who is more animal even than Heeby at the start of the book. She’s the one that Sedric targets when he eventually builds up the courage to steal scales and blood in his wildly foolish and politically unwise agreement to provide dragon parts for the Duke of Chalced. To Sedric, all the dragons are mere beasts. He cannot even hear their voices as anything other than animal noises. But he drinks some of Relpda’s blood, more out of curiosity than any other reason, and so forces a connection with her. She did not consent to this act of blood-sharing, but the connection is forged nonetheless, and what follows is one of the most beautiful elements of the story. In contact with Sedric’s mind, Relpda awakens. And their relationship—which is the beginning of Sedric’s redemption arc—deepens during a deadly flood of the river, in which she saves his life (multiple times). Why? he wonders. Why would she save someone who had so wronged her? And she responds, Less lonely. You make sense of the world. To me.

That thought is so enlightening. What must it be like to be a stunted, half-conscious dragon? Sintara is frustrated and furious because she knows what she should be. Relpda didn’t know even that. But she knew she was lonely. And then along comes Sedric, and wrongs her in a way that is the worst possible way a human can wrong a dragon. And yet, in his presence, she is no longer lonely.

It’s the same setup that allowed Hest to ensnare Sedric in his net: Sedric was lonely. Hest made him not lonely, even though he is unkind and cruel. But where Hest takes advantage of that power dynamic and uses it to control Sedric, Sedric does not do anything like that to Relpda. Perhaps it’s because even a half-awakening dragon is immune to mere human manipulation. Perhaps it’s because Sedric’s deeply buried but still present decency manages to struggle to the front. Whatever the reason, the two of them develop together, and forge a new kind of relationship, one built not on domination but understanding and gratitude and genuine affection. This new society will not be like the old, either the purely human, or the human-dragon partnerships of the past. OG Dragons could never. But these ones can, and must. And do.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Dragon Haven [Harper Voyager, 2010].

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

Book Review: The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott

Elen’s story continues and finishes in a land of lost magic, royal intrigue and much more

The Nameless Land is the second half of the duology started in The Witch Roads. The setup of the book as described in the first one holds: Deputy courier Elen winds up escorting a royal prince to the north, but things do not quite go as planned, with intrigue, conflict and revelations about Elen’s extra-empire origins in the final chapter.

And so we continue on with her story. The novel really can’t be taken on its own; it really is pretty much written as a second half. While there are references, now and again, back to events in the first book (especially in times of explanation), the novel relies on you having the preceding situation freshly in mind in order to fully appreciate the intricacy of the plotting. That also makes it difficult to recount the specifics of this novel without a lot of foreground explanation.

So let it be said that the scheming and intrigues of the first novel, between and within the Royal Court, as well as the provinces of the Empire, get an additional factor, as Elen and the others find themselves heading into territory only Elen knows—lands outside the Empire itself, her origins. So, in this half of the duology. Elliott expands the physical playground by introducing new societies, characters and conflicts. She does a great job in hooking them into the existing worldbuilding and further complicating the plot. Elliott loves to contrast how the Empire does things versus those (and there are multiple values of that) who handle a world where the Pall is a threat. Elen’s extra-empire origins, a secret she has mostly held from everyone (even Kem), become extremely important in the main thrust of this book. Through her unexpected return to her roots, we get a rich sense of someone who has a perspective on what she’s seeing that she doesn’t always share with her compatriots, but shares with the reader.

Also, once again, we have some small sections from the Imperial investigator Luviara, providing an outside perspective here and there. And once again, Elliott shows that more characters than just the protagonist(s) can have their own arcs and developments. We find out what Luviara has really been up to all this time, and why. I must say,as much as I love Elliott’s worldbuilding, her mastery of character may be even better and stronger.

As a result of all this material that we get, the classic “stop asking questions and start answering them” rubric for this book in terms of its placement doesn’t quite fit the duology as a whole as one might expect if these were two separate books rather than one book split into two. What this means is that there’s a lot of run-up, especially counting the first book’s narrative, to the point that, when the final revelations of what is going on and what is to be done become clear, and Elen and the others are forced into decisive final action, it is a timebomb that goes off with explosive speed and power and narrative compression. This is not to say that nothing happens, but there is a continual slow burn, and bursts of action, up to when everything goes off. Elliott has plotted both novels very carefully and pays off the promises made way back at the beginning of The Witch Roads.

In keeping with that, Elliott has the space, will and interest to continue to explore her fascinating set of characters and include new ones. The universe is queer, diverse, with many women in varying kinds of power, and at the same time, thanks to the Empire, has a chance to criticize various abuses and frames of power, including patriarchal ones. Readers of the first book will see that Elen’s nephew Kem’s story and their attempt to hold onto and make their own destiny and autonomy are a strong strand within this book. Also, looking at the novel as half of a single work, one can also see that the story of Elen is, in the end, a romance. But to say more about that would be spoilery. Readers of the first book can be assured, however, that the second book does return to the romance of the first novel, unexpectedly but delightfully.

The novel doesn’t quite explain everything in the plot and background explicitly and completely, and does leave a lot of wonder and mystery in the playground of the imagination. We do get some answers and a rough sense of why things are as they are, as far as the characters know them. The reader can piece together a little more of the background of the world that the characters miss, but there is still plenty of mystery left in this world.

The obvious pairing for this book is another duology: The Witch King and Queen Demon by Martha Wells. Both are interrogating imperial societies, one pair as a resistance to a hegemon, and the others as people living in a quite flawed one—but one that has a purpose given the dangers of the world around them with the Pall¹. Both interrogate gender and gender roles within a narrative, although Elliott is far, far more direct about it than Wells. Both of the books feature fascinating worldbuilding, with a setting that doesn’t stand still. Here Wells has the better of it hopping in time and space with Kai in both books. Elliott, on the other hand, has a character with a wider perspective, but the considerations of past societies are as overhangs and problems of the past affecting and poisoning the present. Both novels, moreover, talk about the uses of history and narrative and how misunderstanding what happened in the past can lead to issues in the present. The novels aren’t quite in dialogue with each other, since they were written contemporaneously. However, in a time and age when questions about power, empire, control, gender, autonomy and more are prevalent in our society, The Nameless Land takes its place with The Witch Roads, and with Wells’s novels, among others, in exploring these themes and concerns of our society, our moment—and beyond.

I know there will be at least one more story set in this fascinating universe. Once again, Elliott has paired characters with a deep and fascinating setting, and while Elen’s story is clearly finished here, there is still much to see and many more potential stories to tell in this world. And the geopolitical situation at the end of this novel is significantly changed compared to the start. Elliott’s worlds are never static and never go status quo ante. I’m sure that will influence what comes out in any subsequent story. I look forward to reading it, and more of them.

Highlights:

• Ably completes the second half of the single story
• Much more detail about Elen’s homeland
• Strong character-focused narrative
• Alas, still no live Griffins!

Reference: Elliott, Kate. The Nameless Land [Tor, 2025].

¹ Given the other two societies we see in the novel and how they handle the Pall and its threat, is the Empire the best of a bad set of choices for dealing with it? I think Elliott is deliberately showing us a variety of possibilities here, and that there is no definitive best society. But even given it being terrible in many ways, I think the Empire is a preferable society for the average person to live in.

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