Comics Digest: She-Hulk, Batgirl and Robin, X-Men and X-tinction Agenda

I’ve been reading a lot of comics recently, mostly good, some not so much. This post is a quick overview on my impressions of some of the ones that stuck out more.

Uncanny X-Men #125 - #143

Uncanny X-Men really clicked for me starting from issue 125, with the Proteus story. It has pathos; character development; a creepy, psychotic villain; and great battles. The following Hellfire Club story was also great, and after that we go into the legendary Dark Phoenix saga, which isn’t as shocking as it would’ve been back in 1980 when it first came out, but still has a surprising emotional impact and really good character development for Cyclops. These issues develop the other characters a lot too; we get to see Nightcrawler find out Wolverine’s name for the first time, and Storm assume the mantle of leadership after Cyclops leaves the group, and Xavier try to come to terms with being in charge of a new, older, grittier X-Men team. The Hellfire Club story also introduces Kitty Pryde, and now I finally understand why everyone who read these comics likes her so much. She gives the book a big shot of cuteness, spunk, and fun. Her stories somehow manage to avoid all the usual pitfalls of stories about kid characters who work alongside adults; she’s not a useless whiner who the adults constantly have to rescue, but she’s also not a perfect prodigy who somehow operates on the same level as the older X-Men at thirteen years old. Her first big story is the also legendary “Days of Future Past”. Kitty does fight alongside the older X-Men here, but she can do it because her dystopian future self’s mind, with all her adult training and experience, is inhabiting her thirteen-year-old body. Issue #143 shows her fight an alien monster called an N’Garai when she’s alone in the mansion on Christmas Eve, and just come out on top by the skin of her teeth.

The narration can still be overly melodramatic, and the art still has that garishly colored late 70’s look, but the writing on Uncanny X-Men became a lot more interesting once we hit the 1980’s, and I’m glad I trudged through from issue 100 to get to this point.

She-Hulk (2004)

I started reading this because I wanted to try reading World War Hulk. As usual with Big Two event stories, reading World War Hulk requires me to read Planet Hulk, which requires me to read two to four issues of five other comics series including Fantastic Four, Incredible Hulk, She-Hulk, and probably also Howard the Duck. Luckily, She-Hulk is awesome. Similar to the case with Kitty Pryde, I finally get why everyone online thinks this character is so great.

She-Hulk is Jennifer Walters, a top-shelf lawyer who gains the ability to turn into a female version of Hulk. Unlike the version of Hulk we see in the movies, She-Hulk keeps her ability to think and speak when she transforms, but she is an over-the-top party girl with super strength, whereas Jen Walters is mousy and small. I haven’t figured out yet if her personality actually changes or if Jen just takes advantage of her alter ego to cut loose. In the first issue, She-Hulk loses her job at a DA’s office because she parties too much, and is also asked to leave Avengers Mansion because she parties too much, but gets a job for a law firm that specializes in superhuman law on the condition that she does the job as Jen Walters, not as She-Hulk. She accepts and takes on weird cases like a man who fell into a vat of atomic water at his workplace and became a superhero, and now wants to sue his employers. She even helps Spider-Man sue J. Jonah Jameson for libel.

Sometimes the meta humor regarding the “legal text” comics and the federal agency the Comics Code Authority gets a little too silly and unbelievable, but otherwise this is an awesome book with hilarious, weird storylines and fun characters. Jen / She-Hulk is funny, but also smart and competent enough to cheer for, and she bounces well off snooty senior lawyer Mallory Book, lovestruck superhero-loving fellow lawyer Augustus Pugliese, and her boss’s obnoxious supervillain granddaughter Southpaw.

I’ve seen a few people suggest bringing She-Hulk into the Netflix universe since she’s a lawyer. Honestly, I think that’s a terrible idea. She doesn’t fit the tone of the Netflix universe at all; there’s no way I can imagine her hanging around with Daredevil and Jessica Jones and the Punisher being a fun-loving party girl in jokey, weird superhero lawyer scenarios. She does deserve to be on screen, though. In a fantasy world where I ruled the MCU, I’d probably sneak Jen Walters into the next MCU Spider-Man movie somehow, then I’d do solo movies for She-Hulk, Squirrel Girl, and Kate Bishop, then do an A-Force movie where they come together with Captain Marvel, Black Widow, and the Wasp.

Robin: Year One

Robin is a lame character. I’ve always thought so. Half the reason I never got into the Teen Titans animated series back when it was on was that making Robin the leader of a superhero team seemed like such a dumb idea. I know that wasn’t fair and that any character can be good with the right writers, and Robin: Year One goes to prove it. It’s not lame at all. For the first time, I actually appreciated Robin.

You need some gritty realism to make a modern Batman story work–as a reader in 2018 who’s seen The Dark Knight and grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series, I’m not going to accept some cheesy all-American Adam West portrayal. At the same time, if you’re going to write about a twelve-year-old boy fighting psychopathic murderers, you’ve gotta handle it with a little humor and optimism, otherwise it becomes Madoka. Robin: Year One does a great job skating the line between these two things. Robin fights some nasty villains, and he goes through some real trauma and sees some horrific things, but he doesn’t break or crumble; he finds a reason to keep fighting.

Robin: Year One also has a great portrayal of Two-Face as a frightening killer, not at all the antihero or tragic fallen angel he sort of was in The Dark Knight and some of The Animated Series. The book goes just far enough that feels like a real psychopath and a big threat without coming across as just out for shock value. It’s a good reminder that Batman has lots of great villains, not just the Joker.

Batgirl Vol. 1: Batgirl of Burnside

This is a trade of issues 35 - 40 of the New 52 Batgirl series, after Brendan Fletcher and Cameron Stewart took over as writers and Babs Tarr as artist.

Since I really just got into this comic stuff myself, that sentence deserves some explanation. DC Comics rebooted their entire universe in 2011 with the Flashpoint event comic, where the Flash went back in time to try and stop his mom’s murder, changed the universe, fixed it, but kinda not really. Since history had been changed, that allowed DC to relaunch all their titles and restart from the beginning with all their famous heroes. This was called the New 52, I think because they started with 52 new series beginning at issue #1.

One of those was Batgirl, who was Barbara Gordon again. Barbara was shot by the Joker in The Killing Joke back in the late 80’s and had been Batman’s “girl in the chair” (a wheelchair) up to this point. One of the weird things about the New 52 was that history didn’t restart from the beginning of time, it restarted from some vague point in the recent past, so the writers could keep whatever they wanted to from the previous DC universe, and they decided that Barbara had still been shot and had been in a wheelchair, but her spine somehow healed and she was able to be Batgirl again. The first run of the New 52 Batgirl was written by a famous DC writer named Gail Simone, whose work is widely praised, but I haven’t read any of it because I do more Marvel than DC because of Marvel Unlimited. The reactions I’ve heard to Gail Simone’s Batgirl are mixed, and starting from issue 35 they basically did a soft reboot on the book with a new creative team.

I checked out the first issue of the Simone run, and it’s a lot like the Scott Snyder Batman stuff. The art is really similar, and the story is dark, dour, and in my opinion, a little bit dull. (That’s kind of a pattern for the New 52; now I know where the DC movies got that unfortunate creative direction from.) This run, on the other hand, is colorful and a lot more fun. It’s got a hip, youthful tone with lots of “college kids living in small apartments and hooking up on dating apps” stuff going on. It reminds me a lot of Scott Pilgrim without the video game and anime references. (Actually, there is one anime reference.) The story is pretty convoluted, but it’s enjoyably strange, with Batgirl fighting a crazed Insta-glam Batgirl impersonator and other hipster-tinged villains, and it concludes in a satisfying way. I love the art–it’s more realistic than Scott Pilgrim, with character designs that are still stylized but not quite as cartoony, and the color palette is less primary and more nightclub chic. I liked looking at it so much that kept me going even at a few points where the story got a bit slow.

Snotgirl

Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, this new series from Brian Lee O’Malley was almost worth the $25 I paid for the Image Comics Humble Bundle all on its own. Lottie Person, a fashion blogger who conceals the secret that she has horrible allergies and her nose is constantly running between shots, meets a younger up-and-coming fashion blogger who she dubs “Coolgirl”, and gets involved in a strange mystery when Coolgirl apparently dies before her eyes but then shows up just fine at a party a few nights later. Lottie also goes through a series of confusing emotions involving her ex-boyfriend and her ex-intern who he’s now dating. Lottie wants to hate his new girlfriend and tries to pull queen bee mean girl shenanigans on her, but keeps on getting confronted with evidence that his new girlfriend is a good person and feeling like the asshole in the situation.

Snotgirl is possibly even weirder than Scott Pilgrim. Like Batgirl, I love the colorful, stylish artwork, the strange plot, and the over-the-top characters. It would be easy to hate Lottie with how conceited and petty she is, but her paranoia about someone discovering her allergies and her numerous personality flaws, conveyed by a constantly running neurotic inner monologue, humanize her enough that I could feel sympathy for her even with all her flaws.

The Wicked + The Divine

On the other hand, you have The Wicked + The Divine, which focuses on a pantheon of twelve teenagers who’ve become living avatars for various ancient gods in an event that recurs every 90 years or so. The gods are treated like pop stars—they have fans, and hold concerts where they bestow their blessings on people in huge displays of mystical power. They wear outlandish clothes, act out, and are followed by groupies as they engage in feuds and romances and every kind of indulgence during the two years of life they’re allowed before being a god kills them.

Again, great artwork. I’m consistently impressed with the art in modern comics, whether Marvel, DC, or indie. It’s obvious that artist Jamie McKelvie was deeply influenced by big over-the-top musical acts of the Lady Gaga school when doing the art and designs for this series. And writer Kieron Gillen was obviously influenced just as much by the self-indulgent, self-important lifestyle of big over-the-top musical acts of any time period since the 1950s. And that’s sort of the problem: I had a hard time liking any of the characters, but I also didn’t dislike them in a really compelling way. They’re all hip and haughty and self-important and vain, except for Laura, the main character, who’s a slavish fan of the gods and worships the ground they walk on. (Appropriate for gods, I guess, but hard to sympathize with when they spend most of their time sniping at each other and talking about how great they are.)

After I was done reading the volume (I think the edition I have is actually an omnibus of the first two volumes), I found out that Gillen and McKelvie also created Phonogram, which Linkara reviewed, and he had the same complaint as I did about The Wicked + The Divine: the characters are hard to like because they’re so smug, vain, and self-important. So I guess it’s something they do on purpose. I don’t always need to like a character to enjoy their story. I maintain that Shinji Ikari is one of the best written characters in anime history, but he’s not exactly likeable. Frank Castle is another one; he has some admirable qualities, but I definitely wouldn’t want to grab a beer with him. But those characters are unlikeable because it serves the themes and plots of their stories. And with those characters, and all the other ones I can think of that I didn’t like but still considered well written, there was some hook you grab on to, where you could understand how someone could become like that either by taking a good quality too far or succumbing to a recognizable human weakness. I didn’t see any of those hooks for the characters in The Wicked + The Divine so far, and it made it hard for me to care what was going on.

I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen ideas like this done better. American Gods, for instance, which I just read for the first time about six months ago. Or Sandman. Even Top Ten had a story about the Norse gods in a modern day setting that was along similar lines.

So yeah, this one wasn’t for me. But between the art, a pretty well realized world, and a decent mystery story, I still found more to admire here than our next entry.

X-tinction Agenda

This is an X-Men event comic that happened across three books—Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and The New Mutants—over late 1990 and early 1991. It follows the three teams fighting against a plot by the mutant enslaving island nation Genosha to get revenge for what the X-Men did to them in an earlier Uncanny X-Men story.

From what I’ve been able to gather, the X-Men were patient zero for the Dark Age of Comics, when Rob Liefeld and his x-treme style took over and suddenly everyone was putting out books about brutal psychic cyborg mercenaries with gigantic muscles and names like Bloodblystr and Dethmaxx, who gunned down villains with gigantic weapons while protecting their shoulders with massive shoulder pads and carrying ammunition in dozens of pouches all over their bodies. (Incidentally, Liefeld was drawing The New Mutants while X-tinction Agenda was taking place.) As dumb as that aesthetic is, I actually don’t hate it. I kind of enjoy the insanely stupid thirteen-year-old boyness of it. Yeah, characters like Cable and the kind of ludicrously convoluted sci-fi soap opera antics that comprise their stories are ridiculous, but they’re kind of awesome too. I enjoy Kinoko Nasu’s work for a lot of the same reasons. X-tinction Agenda isn’t quite full-on 90’s x-treme yet, but it’s more than halfway there. It’s unfortunate that it only rarely lives up to the qualities I enjoy in that kind of story.

Part of the reason I haven’t enjoyed this very much is entirely my own fault. There’s a ton of backstory in the X-Men comics between Uncanny X-Men #143 and this that I didn’t bother to go read up on. I don’t know exactly what happened the first time the X-Men went to Genosha. I don’t know what happened between Archangel and X-tinction Agenda’s villain, murderous mercenary commander Cameron Hodge. I don’t know why the X-Men are split into two teams, the illegal X-Men and the government sanctioned X-Factor, or why Jean Grey is alive again, or why Storm is in a child’s body. (Maybe she’s a Deviluke and she used her ultimate attack?) I don’t know how Cable came into the picture or who any of the New Mutants are, which is pretty important for the emotional impact of some of the earlier issues.

I don’t blame the story for any of that. Of course, this is part of an ongoing story and it’s entirely my fault that I dove in at this point without getting the surrounding context. I do blame X-tinction Agenda for just how little actually happens, though, and how much time it spends spinning its wheels—it takes six issues for Storm and the New Mutants to get captured and for the X-Men and X-Factor to mount a poorly thought-out rescue mission and get captured. I blame it for failing to convince me that the villains are dangerous and that the X-Men shouldn’t be able to just knock them all down like bowling pins and rescue their teammates. I blame it for assembling a huge team of all-stars, so many that I have trouble even remembering who’s on the team, and then giving none of them anything to do except get beat up and captured by Hodge with no trouble. I blame it for an annoying subplot where Jubilee and two members of the New Mutants, Rictor and Boom-Boom, sneak around the back alleys of Genosha sniping at each other and whining about who’s the leader until they just happen to bust in at exactly the moment when it’s all going down so they can get their powers back. I blame it for putting all the X-Men and New Mutants except aforementioned annoying Jubilee, Boom-Boom, and Rictor in captivity and then letting their escape hinge on the motives of the Genegineer, the Genoshan responsible for turning mutants into mindless slaves, without ever properly explaining what those motives are. (Here I will blame the event for not explaining this, even if it was in the backstory. I know they didn’t have time to explain everything again, but the Genegineer’s motives are a crucial part of the plot, and it would’ve only taken a couple lines in the overstuffed dialogue balloons, where lines of dialogue are packed in so densely that they’re constantly winding around each other and slanting at weird angles, to remind us what they were. Plus, the first Genosha story took place like 40 issues before this, which is about three and a half years of real time if we assume 12 issues a year, and since the Genegineer isn’t a major character we wouldn’t have heard anything about him since then, so it would seem appropriate to give us a little hint.) I blame it for the ugly art that’s so scrawly and garishly colored that I take back the mean things I said about the art in the early Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comics, to say nothing of the comparatively beautiful artwork of the early 80’s Uncanny X-Men that I was complaining about above. I mean, look at this:

What the hell is even going on in the top half of this cover?

I do have one compliment for this story, for the one place where it lived up to the dumb insanity that all such work should aspire to: Hodge the main villain. He’s such a mustache twirling avatar of evil, that irredeemable, divinely ludicrous combination of Skeletor and Jeffery Dahmer that you need as a villain in a story like this. Plus, Hodge’s idiotic cyborg body, a giant mechanical spider crab thing with tentacles and a long neck that has his head on the end of it. It looks gloriously ridiculous. But the story was hurt a lot by his lack of formidable henchmen. The Genoshan Magistrates are all either regular people or no-name mutants that the heroes plow through without much trouble, but the story hinges so much on the X-Men being totally outmatched that in the end, Hodge himself had to come fight them whenever there was a fight with actual stakes, and to be able to beat a team of such powerful heroes, he had to be so overpowered that it defies belief. He’s somehow immune not only to all physical attack, he’s also immune to psychic attack, immune to adamantium, and able to phase through matter.

One final annoyance: the trade paperback collection and Marvel Unlimited have the issues in the wrong order. This is the real order:

1. Uncanny X-Men #270
2. New Mutants #95
3. X-Factor #60
4. Uncanny X-Men #271
5. New Mutants #96
6. X-Factor #61
7. Uncanny X-Men #272
8. New Mutants #97
9. X-Factor #62

The trade and Marvel Unlimited say to read the X-Factor issues before the New Mutants issues, but this is wrong. How do I know? Well, I first noticed because X-Factor #60 talks about things that happened in New Mutants #95 as if they’d already happened, but also, if you look at the covers, they all say “X-tinction Agenda Part X” across the very top, and New Mutants #95 is the one that says Part 2, not X-Factor #60.

Marvel Unlimited Personal Highlights

I’ve never been a big reader of Marvel or DC comics. Even when I did get into Western comics a while back, I mostly stuck to Vertigo and indies. It wasn’t out of any kind of principle, it was just because the formats of the big two confused the hell out of me and I could never figure out what to buy and where to jump in to these runs. I did some of the Batman standalone graphic novels, and I did read Alias shortly after the Jessica Jones TV series, but otherwise I stuck with books that were published and structured more simply than the sprawling universes and baroque jargon-filled formats of Marvel and DC.

After getting into the movies from Marvel and DC last year (yes, I was like the last person on the planet to get in on the MCU, which is a trend with me), and also going back and revisiting the DC Animated Universe with Justice League and Justice League Unlimited and now Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, I decided to finally try out some of their comics. I’ve done a little DC, but I’ve done mostly Marvel, because it has one huge advantage over DC: Marvel Unlimited, a subscription service where you can read digital versions of, like, all the Marvel comics. Like seriously, all of them.

Okay, not quite all of them. Alias is too hardcore for Marvel Unlimited, and some of the more obscure stuff is missing. But they have an insane number of comics available.

When I started, I thought I was going to go back to the roots of all these well-known characters and read them from the beginning. Yeah. That didn’t work out. I made it through about five issues of Amazing Spider-Man before the cheese and crude artwork got to me. Similar with Fantastic Four, and even Iron Fist’s early stuff in Marvel Premiere, which I started reading after I watched the Netflix series to see what a better interpretation of the character might have been like. I’ve managed to stick with X-Men by starting from the celebrated Claremont run, about a hundred issues into Uncanny X-Men, and leaving long gaps in between reading the story arcs so the cheese doesn’t have time to overwhelm me. For the most part, these older comics just haven’t aged well, but the best stuff from about 1980 onward is still good enough that I can enjoy it.

The modern stuff from the mainstream characters is, in a lot of ways, even harder to get into than the older stuff, because it all ties into whatever giant universe-spanning event that will change everything they’re building up to at the time. Spider-Gwen, for instance: I wanted to like it, but it was just too bound up with continuity references to other Spider-books. But I did manage to find a few titles, based on recommendations from various places, that I really enjoy. Some of them are mercifully taking place in enough of a backwater of the Marvel universe that the giant events don’t touch them. Others will have four issue arcs that I just skip, or read having resigned myself to having no idea what’s going on, where the characters suddenly drop out of their own lives to contribute to some tiny corner of a giant event story that was developing at this time. And very occasionally the writers do a good enough job incorporating the event tie-in into the main plot of the book that I can still enjoy those issues (e.g. Ms. Marvel). These are the books I’ve most enjoyed during my time on Marvel Unlimited.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

This is by far my favorite of the titles on Marvel Unlimited. I love the silly humor, weird characters, bizarre stories, and computer science-related jokes.

The series I’m talking about is actually two series. There was a 2015 series that broke off in the middle and continued from issue #1 in a second 2015 series that is still running today. Sigh.

Squirrel Girl, aka Doreen Green, is a great character, especially if you’ve had enough of angst-ridden anti-heroes. She’s upbeat, down-to-earth, and spunky. Many of her battles actually end with her talking it out with the villain after showing she understands their point of view, which is both hilarious and very positive. Her supporting cast is great too: her sarcastic friend Nancy and fellow animal-themed superheroes Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi have really fun interplay with Doreen. There are also lots of references to other comics, which are fun when you get them, but incidental enough that you can enjoy the story even if you don’t. I loved all the parodies in issue #5. (The first issue #5, from the 2015 series.) Based on the letters column, a lot of kids read Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which probably explains why I liked it if you’ve read anything else on this blog.

One note: if you’re looking in Marvel Unlimited, you need to choose “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015)” to get the first series. The second series is “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015 - Present)”. Sigh.

Cable and Deadpool

Basically all I knew about Deadpool was from the 2016 movie, and all I knew about Cable was what I remembered from the 1990’s X-Men series, which pretty much amounted to “he’s a time traveler”. I still enjoyed this, but not quite as much as some of the other newer books like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl or Hawkeye.

Since it’s Deadpool, the humor in this series can get crude sometimes, but unlike the 2016 movie, which was mostly Deadpool being crazy in an otherwise serious world, the world of Cable and Deadpool is seriously weird. It starts with a cult that believes turning yourself blue and shaving your head is the only way to achieve world peace, and keeps escalating from there. It has actual character arcs for Cable and Deadpool as the one tries to guide the world down a better path and the other just keeps doing his weird thing (guess which does which), but I didn’t pay attention to a lot of that since it required at least something of a grounding in these characters’ previous adventures, which I didn’t have. I still enjoyed it just for the action and for being so weird. Plus, Cable raises some questions about the world and politics that I found genuinely interesting.

Moon Knight

One of the few older comics I’ve been able to get into is the 1980 Moon Knight series. I started with the 2016 one, but I felt like I was missing too much backstory, so I went backwards until I reached the source.

Moon Knight is a pretty obscure character, and also kind of a confusing one. He was originally a mercenary named Marc Spector who became the avatar of an Egyptian god called Khonshu and started fighting crime. He has two other identities, rich entrepreneur Steven Grant, and cab driver Jake Lockley, which he uses to interact with the high society and low society respectively when he needs to fight some crime. Superficially, Moon Knight’s a bit like Batman; he fights street crime and themed psychopaths with boomerangs, truncheons, grappling hooks, and other throwing weapons, as well as his fists, and he has a fancy moon-copter piloted by his old mercenary partner Frenchie. He also has a wife, Marlene, who’s in on the whole Moon Knight thing from the beginning, and several friends from the street from whom he gets his information about what’s going on down there. This was what confused me about the 2016 series: it brings in all of these characters within the first few issues, and I had no idea who any of them were.

The tone of the book is also reminiscent of what little I’ve read of early 80’s Batman: surprisingly dark, willing to take on real-life issues, interested in issues like the psychology of crime and what makes a criminal, and willing to question its own hero’s sanity and motives. (I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that Doug Moench, the writer on the first Moon Knight series, has also been a Batman writer.) In the first few issues it doesn’t go all in as much as the later Moon Knight stuff, but it’s still pretty damn good for a pre-2000 comic.

If the art of older comics really bothers you, you probably won’t be able to read this as it’s pretty firmly of its time in that aspect. I’m not that into the art style in older comics, but I can tolerate it if the story’s good enough, and the storytelling conventions had become less obvious and clumsy by this point compared to what they were at the time of Amazing Spider-Man.

I discovered Moon Knight because people in the know kept saying what an amazing Netflix series he would make, and I have to agree, he’d be perfect. Unlike the Punisher (or Blade, who’s also been talked about for a Netflix series), I could even see Moon Knight becoming the fifth Defender, or at least interacting with the other Defenders. It probably won’t happen, but it would be amazing. If you’re interested in Moon Knight, you can definitely start from one of the later series (not the 2016 one, but the 2006 one is supposed to be a good starting point), but I’ve found the 1980 series good enough that you can start there too if you want.

Hawkeye

In the movies and the 1990’s Avengers cartoon, Hawkeye is the lamest Avenger. He’s a guy with a bow who wears a lot of purple. But in this 2012 series written by Matt Fraction and drawn by David Aja, he’s a lovable, dorky, hotshot nice guy. This version of Clint Barton reminds me a bit of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man from Spider-Man: Homecoming: a lot of his adventures are small-scale and involve him helping out people in the community with little problems (or problems that seem little when you habitually face planet-ending alien monsters, like Russian mob heavies with baseball bats). Of course, Clint has a grounded maturity that that version of Spider-Man doesn’t have, and he’s not afraid to look stupid if it means helping someone.

The books have a roguish tone, a bit like the more lighthearted parts of Cowboy Bebop or Firefly, which makes Clint feel like a modern Robin Hood. His sidekick / sometime replacement, Kate Bishop, is also a fun and cool character who gets to play the straight woman and point out when Clint is being a dork. Fraction wrote an independent series called Sex Criminals of which I read the first trade, and his mark is recognizable between the two as far as tone and style. Really fun series, and mercifully free of references to giant event comics. My main criticism is that the plot gets pretty muddled, especially towards the middle and end, but the fun of the characters carried me through. There’s a sequel series focusing on Kate Bishop that started in 2016 that I’ve just started. It’s a lot like Kate’s solo stories in Los Angeles towards the end of the 2012 Hawkeye series. Kate is a rich spoiled brat, skating by on audacity and calculatedly cutesy behavior. I enjoyed her LA solo stories, and the new series is good so far, but I could see wanting a break from Kate after a while.

The Pulse

I like this one in theory more than execution. Basically, after some stuff that happens between J. Jonah Jameson and Jessica Jones in Alias, she’s the one superhero that he can a little bit stand to associate with (even though when they first met, she conned him into paying her a bunch of money to go work at soup kitchens and read to sick children–which, by the way, is the perfect illustration of the difference between comics Jessica and TV Jessica. TV Jessica may be good at heart, but I can’t see her doing or even thinking of this). Jameson decides to hire Jessica as a special consultant to work with his reporting staff on a superhero-oriented column called the Pulse. At this point, Jessica is married to Luke Cage and pregnant with his child, so she needs a steady job and health insurance and accepts under those terms.

Some of the early stories are interesting, but later on the series gets embroiled in the Civil War event that was going on at the time and loses its way. I liked the idea of a comic focused on superhero journalism–it could’ve been really interesting to compare it with war journalism and investigative journalism, and delve into the everyday lives of people who follow around weird vigilantes. There were a few stories that did this well–the D-Man subplot, for instance–but it just really lost its way towards the end and became all about setting up Jessica and Luke to join the New Avengers, which I didn’t really care about. (Though Squirrel Girl becomes their nanny after the baby is born–that’s pretty cool.)

Jessica Jones (2016)

This series picks up with Jessica after the New Avengers era with the same creative team as Alias. The writing is awesome. So many times writers don’t know what to do with a character anymore after they have a baby, but Jessica still feels like her old self, and she handles being a mom exactly how you’d expect Jessica to handle it: she’s still a human wreck, but she does her best to do well by her daughter. Jessica’s now even deeper in the seamy underbelly of the Marvel universe, taking on SHIELD black ops and deep cover jobs, so the stories are larger scale and more focused on action than the stories in Alias, but Jessica keeps them grounded and human all the same.

I read Alias and The Pulse and mostly skipped over the New Avengers stuff, but I was able to follow the story in this series, so it’s a good place to go if you want to keep following Jessica Jones after those two series.

Ms. Marvel (2014)

Marvel has had a big push in the past few years to make their lineup of heroes more diverse in terms of race, sex, and sexual orientation. I found out about this when Ms. Marvel, which stars sixteen-year-old Pakistani-American Kamala Khan, made headlines in the mainstream media back when it came out. The letters pages of the Ms. Marvel books are stacked to the rafters with letters from people of all sorts who passionately identified with Kamala and loved seeing someone as non-white, non-male as her as the hero of Marvel comic.

That’s all cool, but it wouldn’t have nearly the impact if Ms. Marvel sucked. Happily, it does not; it’s a fun, sweet, earnest story, and Kamala is surpassingly lovable. It wouldn’t surprise me if the tone had inspired Spider-Man: Homecoming. Kamala is just as geeky and superhero-loving as Peter, just as blessed with quirky friends and family who support her, and just as determined to make a difference and do good any way she can. But being a Pakistani Muslim in Jersey City makes her story unique and different. She faces different challenges than Peter or any other hero, with her parents walking a tightrope between their conservatism and the reality of raising children in America. Yet even though her challenges growing up are different, their shape is still recognizable; her parents don’t want her going to parties and aren’t comfortable with her dating, and Kamala knows they would worry endlessly if they knew she was running around the city being a superhero.

Ms. Marvel is a great palate cleanser if you need a break from the heavy, dark flavor of the Marvel event comics. It’s still a superhero adventure book, unlike the mainly comedic Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but it’s lighthearted and fun while also having real stakes and serious character growth. It’s a great coming of age story that you can enjoy even if you’re not a Pakistani Muslim from New Jersey.

Note that Ms. Marvel has the same deal as Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: there are two Ms. Marvel series on Marvel Unlimited, a 2014 one and a 2015 one. The 2014 one begins with her origin story. Since Kamala’s a recent addition to the Marvel universe, you can pretty much get the whole picture on her just by reading the 2014 series.

Top Ten Favorite Movies of 2017

Since I’m not a professional film critic, I only saw like 12 movies this year, so I’m more ordering my ten favorite of the twelve than really picking ten favorites. Since I’m not a professional film critic, I can be subjective and biased about what goes on my favorites list, so it’s full of terrible genre movies and pretty devoid of the stuff that professionals usually put on their top ten lists.

There won’t be a bottom ten list because I only saw one movie this year that I disliked, The Dark Tower, which was previously discussed.

Spoilers abound for all of these, obviously.

10. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I don’t know if I’ve ever written about my history with Star Wars. It’s a bit complicated. I used to be a huge, huge, massive fan of the original trilogy when I was kid. I was old enough when the prequels came out that I considered them inferior to the original trilogy, and they, along with a few escapades in the EU, made me pretty cynical about Star Wars. I liked The Force Awakens, but I couldn’t see past the story flaws of Rogue One. The modern way of making blockbuster movies tends to produce films that, despite slapdash storytelling and thin characterization, leverage external factors for unearned emotional payoff: the thrill of seeing the Justice League team up, the rush of watching Batman fight Superman, the nostalgia of recreating the part in the first Star Wars where the guy with the lumpy face says “He doesn’t like you”. The response to these movies is starkly divided; one side protests that the story is barely coherent and the characters are all just a costume and a weapon, while the other insists that it made them feel things. The thing with feelings is that you can’t argue against them with logic, because they’re personal; but there are also limits to how much of an argument you can hang on them, because they’re personal. So arguments between these two sides get very heated.

The Last Jedi produced in me the most complicated set of emotions I’ve ever felt in a Star Wars movie. Its themes are amazingly subtle. Its characters are rich and, when the script isn’t deflating them with out-of-place gags, layered and human while also representing modern deconstructions of the high-minded mythical themes that the original trilogy took on. Even more than Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi established what a small and ragtag outfit our heroes are, and as the Resistance fleet dwindled, a real sense of fear and hopelessness set in. Mark Hamill brought us an old, gritty, broken Luke Skywalker ripe for a triumphant Dark Knight Returns-style finale, then gave it to us in a totally unexpected way. Old gritty Luke Skywalker doesn’t cut down waves and waves of First Order Stormtroopers like the Jedi did in the prequels, and he doesn’t use awesome Force abilities to wreck AT-ATs by himself (even though I really wanted him to), and he doesn’t take on Kylo Ren in an epic duel to the finish, but he does kindle a final spark of hope for the galaxy, leaving it to Rey to help it grow into a fire. Instead of Luke teaching Rey, he learns something from her, and Rey learns something from him, but not what anyone expected. (It’s how to squeeze gross green milk out of weird upright-sitting elephant cows. That’s what Rey learns.) The many shocking turns the story takes sometimes left me unsatisfied—I really did want to see old gritty Luke’s bad-ass feats of Force mastery, and I didn’t need Snoke to be someone we knew, but I did want to know like, who the hell is this guy?—but I always appreciated how daring and unexpected they were.

On the other hand, large parts of the Rose and Finn story felt meandering, pointless, clumsy, and sometimes just downright dumb. Why didn’t they just park somewhere else and not have the police after them? Wasn’t there some other more subtle way to add nuance to the conflict than Rose’s clunky monologue about arms dealers? Why did they think that releasing a bunch of space horse ostriches to run through and smash a casino was some giant F-U to the evil rich arms dealers? They presumably don’t own the casinos, so it just amounts to a minor inconvenience for them, and the amount of damage was so small that the casinos will probably have it cleaned up in two hours. It felt as if Matilda had plunked in a very serious monologue by the title character about child neglect and abuse, then showed a bunch of kids throw food at the evil principal until she runs away, and treated that as some big blow to child abusers everywhere. Actually, it had even less impact than that; at least the kids in Matilda got rid of their principal and ended her abuse of them. Finn and Rose just freed a few space horse ostriches and gave a poor abused stable boy a ring.

Those flaws brought Last Jedi down to #10 for me, even though I liked it more than The Force Awakens and a lot more than Rogue One.

9. Your Name

It was novel seeing an anime movie in a theater, but Your Name is also a good movie. Mitsuha and Taki feel real and flawed, and by the time their slowly unfolding love story reveals itself, it seems natural that they would have feelings for each other. Body switching and time travel romances have been done before (The Lake House, for instance), but Your Name executed its plot with unusual skill, and in its final scene, where a lesser story might have assured us that Taki and Mitsuha would end up together, it left things ambiguous—Taki has lost his memories, so there’s no guarantee he and Mitsuha will hit it off. Never mind that it’s similar to what Angel Beats did in its own final scene—it was great there, and it’s great here too.

Sadly, I have to be a bit of a downer on the animation. It got a ton of critical praise, but I didn’t think it was that much better than Clannad most of the time. But otherwise, Your Name was a strong reminder that anime can still deliver a well plotted and emotional story.

8. Spider-Man: Homecoming

Spider-Man is probably my third favorite superhero after Batman and the X-Men. (Uh-huh, you guessed it—I never really read comics growing up. My exposure to superheroes was all through 90’s cartoons, and those were the three best ones.) Though if you made me separate out individual X-Men, it’s hard to say where he’d ultimately fall.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is probably the closest the MCU will ever get to “cute”. It’s very warm and fuzzy and innocent. It does a great job showing the relationships Peter has with his friends, with Tony Stark, with his Aunt May (modernized from kindly old lady to cool mom), and even with Michael Keaton’s Vulture, who’s probably the best villain in the MCU so far aside from Loki. (It’s a low bar.) It does a great job showing how those relationships help Peter grow up a little and become a little closer to being the hero he, to my knowledge, never really becomes in the comics, but hopefully will become in the MCU. Tom Holland plays a perfect dorky Gen-Z Peter Parker. The smaller story focuses on character development and lets his Spider-Man grow from the fun treat he was in Civil War into a character with a real presence in the universe.

The tone of Spider-Man: Homecoming makes the Venom movie Sony is doing even more of a mystery. If they want to put it MCU-adjacent, how can they possibly square the Todd McFarlane darkness of a character like Venom with the sunniness of this movie? Hopefully Marvel will stick to their guns and keep Spider-Man lighthearted, though. Let Captain America deal with the dark stuff.

7. The Shape of Water

Surreal, strange, erotic, visually and thematically beautiful. Whenever people ask me what The Shape of Water is about, I tell them it’s a mute woman’s romance with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s also a good old fashioned fairy tale about being an outsider, like Edward Scissor-Hands, but instead of a single supernatural outsider coming into a homogeneous world, the human characters are also outsiders who connect with the creature because they sympathize with him on some level. They’re marginalized by early 1960’s America because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or disability. The villain, Michael Shannon’s character, has all the benefits that early 1960’s America can offer–a nice house, an expensive car, a sexy wife, two kids, carte blanche to treat the outsiders however badly he wants. But in the final act, when he stands to lose it all, he lashes out, becoming even more brutal in his desperation to protect his lifestyle.

6. Thor: Ragnarok

I watched the other two Thor movies the day before I saw this (Thor for the third or fourth time, Thor: The Dark World for the first time). Both were fine, but Thor: Ragnarok blows away both of them in every way. It has the same kind of grandiose story that The Dark World tried for, without the confusing structure and muddled delivery of The Dark World. It has the same kind of epic family drama as Thor. But it also has amazing, colorful visuals; great new characters like Valkyrie, Hela, the Grandmaster, and Korg; and tons of the same silly humor that Taika Waititi brought to What We Do in the Shadows. Both of the previous Thor movies, in my opinion, were victims of where the MCU was when they were made. Thor is an early MCU standalone, so it had to hew closely to the same formula as Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger. Kenneth Branagh is an acclaimed director who brought as much Shakespearean grandeur to the movie as he could, and I wish we could see what he’d do now with the kind of freer rein given to Taika Waititi. As for The Dark World, it was made around the same time as Age of Ultron when the MCU seemed to be going the same direction as the DCEU, towards convoluted stories and a grim tone. Neither movie is bad, but both were heavily restricted in what they could be by the editorial mandate, and couldn’t flourish like Thor: Ragnarok was able to.

5. Coco

As with Wonder Woman further down, I’m not Mexican, so I couldn’t take part in the thrill of seeing my culture represented on screen in a major Pixar film, but the movie is so good that you can appreciate it no matter what culture you come from. Coco is steeped in Mexican culture in its visuals, themes, and the lilt of its dialogue, which simultaneously helps outsiders understand that culture and adds a fascinating perspective to its universal themes about family, personal history, and identity. As usual with Pixar, it’s also wonderfully animated, funny, and heartwarming. The plot is so well constructed that I was nonplussed as I watched, wondering how you even write something that packs in all these themes, emotions, jokes, set pieces, and surprises and still fits into a two-hour movie.

4. Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman has two distinctions among the movies on this list: it’s the only one I saw in the theater twice, and it’s the only one that actually made me cry. (Both times I saw it, same scene: No-Man’s Land, of course.) Coco and Lady Bird both made me tear up, but only Wonder Woman made me straight up weep.

Since I’m not a woman, the power of Wonder Woman for me didn’t come from seeing a woman superhero on screen, though it was a nice change-up from the status quo, I’m happy for everyone who did feel that power, and I hope it will lead to more female-led superhero movies. (Gimme my Squirrel Girl, Spider-Gwen, and Kate Bishop Hawkeye movies now!) I’m still not entirely sure what was so powerful about Wonder Woman for me. My current working theory is that Wonder Woman is the first superhero movie we’ve seen in a while about a character genuinely trying to do good and save others in a real-ish world where that’s not always easy. The Avengers save people, but they save people from gigantic alien and robot invasions. In most of the other MCU movies, the heroes are fighting in personal conflicts, or they’re saving people from alien and robot invasions, or the tone of the movie is just too lighthearted and silly to give the kind of weight to a threat that makes you relieved to see random civilians rescued from it. Superman in Man of Steel saves like one family, and it’s solely to illustrate a point about his aversion to killing. Plus he’s fighting a personal conflict against an alien invasion.

Whereas when Wonder Woman charges into No-Man’s Land, we know from everything we’ve read about the horrors of World War I what she’s saving those people from. She’s saving them from slavery and rape and brutal treatment and death by machine guns and poison gas. Those are real, horrible things that happened to real people, some of whom were our own grandparents and great-grandparents. And she’s not saving them because it’s convenient or helps her accomplish her goal or because they just happen to be in the way while she’s fighting and her conscience won’t let her leave them; Wonder Woman goes out of her way and endangers her own mission to save those people, because she knows it’s the right thing to do and she can do it. She doesn’t fight the Germans because they’ve got the alien doohickey she needs, or because they’re Nazis (‘nuff said); she fights them because they’re doing something wrong. In 2005, when Christopher Nolan started his Batman trilogy, that was too simplistic to be interesting. In 2017, the shittiness of the real world made it inspiring.

Aside from that, Wonder Woman is well paced and plotted, and has a good message about why people fight wars and how you can’t just kill one bad guy and be done with it, which it just slightly undercuts when Wonder Woman kills one bad guy and then in the next scene the war is over. (Just slightly, because the Allies and Axis were already on the cusp of signing the armistice when the movie started, and the one bad guy was more impeding an inevitable peace than inexorably grinding on the war.) I only know the Wonder Woman character from the Justice League animated series from the early 2000’s, but the broad strokes are the same here: she’s a powerful, well-trained fighter who is guided to be a hero by a strong love and compassion for others, but doesn’t quite fit in with modern society, leading to some humorous culture shock as well as commentary on how our society views women.

3. Lady Bird

Whenever I get around to finishing it, I’ve got an upcoming post where I talk about Lady Bird. In that post, it will sound like I don’t like it. That’s because I’m using it to contextualize a discussion about what a “good” movie is, and purposely downplaying how much I liked it.

Lady Bird connected with me on a personal level like nothing else on this list. The main character is a teenage girl pursuing some rickety vision of grandeur she’s built in her head and decided her life, her hometown, her house, her friends, her family, all don’t fit into. She’s confused, but not in an aimless way. She’s confused in a very directed way; whatever she’s decided she wants, she desires with all her being, and pursues as hard as she can. The movie follows her through her last year of high school as her confusion leads her to desire and pursue different things she thinks fit into that vision in her head. Then she starts to recognize the real value of what she has, what she thought didn’t fit her vision of the life she imagined, even as she starts to gain some of the pieces of that imagined life.

Lady Bird is an excellent character study. This character is so real and richly drawn that I understood almost everything she did, even her oddest actions, as natural outcomes of her feelings and worldview. In that upcoming post, I will complain about Moonlight being overly verité and documentary-style for me to connect with, but Lady Bird is actually shot in a similar way. Yet here, it somehow added layers to the character, and every time I peeled one back and connected something she said or did to something I’d thought or felt, I understood her a little bit more, and my appreciation for the movie grew.

Even as I was writing this list, I wasn’t sure where I was going to put Lady Bird. I knew it was above The Last Jedi and Your Name for me. I started to slot it in after Spider-Man: Homecoming, but as I wrote the first paragraph, I realized I liked it more than that too. I realized I was trying to put it where I thought I should put a movie like this—a coming-of-age dramedy with Oscar buzz—based on what kind of movies I usually like. Clearly, I had implicitly thought, even if I liked this coming-of-age dramedy with Oscar buzz, I can’t possibly have liked it as much as Wonder Woman or Thor: Ragnarok. But when I started to really directly compare it with the other movies on this list, I realized the truth: there really were only two movies this year that I enjoyed more than Lady Bird. It feels weird and gross to like an Oscar movie that much, but I can’t deny it. I really connected with this movie.

2. Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner is a slow, depressing, ambiguous movie about a really complicated set of philosophical and ethical issues brought about by technology. This sort of sci-fi was common back in the 60’s and 70’s and then started to go out of fashion in the 80’s with Star Wars and ET and was mostly gone by the 90’s with Stargate and Independence Day and Men in Black. Blade Runner is also visually stunning, strange, and thought-provoking.

Blade Runner 2049 is also a slow, depressing, ambiguous movie about a really complicated set of philosophical and ethical issues brought about by technology. It’s also visually stunning, strange, and thought-provoking. It does this without retreading the first movie, and it does it in 2017, when the bar for a visually stunning movie has raised drastically, and when technology has advanced and changed in ways no one in 1982 could have imagined.

I don’t want to write too much more about this movie because I’ve only seen it once. When I see it about five times, maybe I’ll feel more able to get into the weeds on it.

1. Logan

What can I say about this that hasn’t been said? It’s the Wolverine movie we all wanted: dark, violent, bleak, thrilling, with a great exploration of what makes Logan tick and his relationships to others. It carries the dark tone and bleak world of X-Men and X2 to their logical conclusion, culminates the troubled relationship between Logan and Professor Xavier, and starts a new troubled relationship between Logan and his “daughter”, Laura, that plays out over the course of the movie. It’s a small story that hangs its tragedies on people and their flaws, and gets across the hopelessness of its setting through small details, like the cruelty of the agents pursuing Laura and the thugs that menace the farming family, unlike the over-the-top opening of Days of Future Past with its M-shaped scars and mutant body garbage dumps and murdering robot squads. The slow unfolding makes the few bright moments–the stay at the hotel, the dinner with the farming family—all the more tragic in how brief they are and how catastrophically they end.

I have a feeling people in a few years will look back on Logan with the same respect they now hold for The Dark Knight. Logan might even come to hold higher regard; it’s a more accessible movie, shorter, easier to follow, more minimalist, with more true to life dialogue and more focus on human relationships. It’s not simply that the Wolverine movies started from X-Men Origins: Wolverine and managed to come to this. This is a great film regardless of the other X-Men films. It’s an even better film if you’ve followed the arc of Logan’s character up to this point, but it’s great regardless, and it’s notably unlike any other comic book movie we’ve had so far. Logan changed the conversation around comic book movies from “Who else can we stuff into this universe?” to “How can we make stories that feel fresh from these properties?”, and even Marvel seems to have taken notice by choosing to let Taika Waititi put his stamp so thoroughly on Thor: Ragnarok.

On to 2018…

There are nowhere near as many movies I’m looking forward to scheduled for 2018 as there were for 2017. This is unfortunate.

Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War look pretty cool. So does Annihilation. A Wrinkle in Time looks…eh, weird. I don’t like Oprah. It also looks, from the trailer, like the movie’s scenes on Earth won’t have that rainy day New England coziness that the book had. The visual style is very different from what I’d imagined. It looks good enough that I’ll go check it out, though.

I made a foolhardy statement that I would not go see Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I may still keep. I’ve had low expectations for that movie from the beginning—the premise is straight out of a terrible EU novel—and now the movie was thrown out and reshot six months ago and is coming out six months from now. That sounds uncomfortably like what happened with Justice League, and Justice League was a total mess. I still had some fun with it, but that doesn’t mean I want more movies with that level of disjointed storytelling and bargain basement visual effects in the world.

I don’t know what to expect from Ant-Man and the Wasp. The first one was fine. I didn’t think it was nearly as hilarious as everyone said, but it was good enough. Unless the reviews are awful, I’m going to see it, though.

I have actually never seen The Incredibles all the way through, so I have no feelings on The Incredibles 2. I’ll probably go see it, though.

I’m really hoping for a couple surprises, movies that swoop in from the film festival circuit and really captivate me, like The Shape of Water and Lady Bird in 2017.

One meta-item for 2018: I have no idea how much time or interest I’m going to have in updating this blog, at least for the first few months of 2018. So, my gentle spambot readers, you may suffer a dearth of new material to crawl and attempt to post spam on.

That’s it! Goodbye, 2017.

A Combo Platter of Anime Reviews

After the Last Exile debacle, I decided not to commit to watching another show all the way through. Instead, I just watched a few episodes of a bunch of shows to see if they would catch my attention and induce me to keep watching. This is everything I checked out.

Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?

Based on the first episode and the episode descriptions I looked ahead to, this is a pretty by-the-numbers 2012-era harem light novel anime. The main character was murdered and brought back to life as a zombie by a demanding cute female necromancer. He meets a “masou shoujo”, who dresses like Sakura Kinomoto but hacks up monsters with a chainsaw. Apparently he meets a ninja later.

The first episode made me chuckle a few times, but after I watched it I felt like I’d seen everything I wanted out of this world and these characters, so I chose not to continue.

Kaleido Star

I had big ambitions to carry this one all the way to the end. I made it to Episode 7, I think. It’s a cute shoujo-style story about a girl who dreams to join Kaleido Stage, a Cirque de Soleil-style prestige circus. The star of the show doesn’t believe in her and gets in her way, but with the help of her friends, she manages to succeed.

The tone reminded of a more lighthearted Gakuen Alice, but the characters were nowhere near as strong. Even when Gakuen Alice had some boring plotlines, I kept watching it because I was invested in Mikan, Hotaru, Natsume, Narumi-sensei, and the other characters. Kaleido Star had reasonably solid plots, aside from the contrived drama in Episode 5, but I just didn’t feel as invested in the characters as I wanted to be. The animation is sometimes janky, and the humor is inoffensive but repetitive and uninspired. The show is good enough that I’d probably watch it under other circumstances, but right now I really want to erase the taste of Last Exile, and this didn’t leave a strong enough impression to do it.

World Conquest Zvezda Plot

I lost interest about halfway through the first episode and started looking at Twitter. Yes, that is mostly a testament to the mind-corroding power of Twitter, but World Conquest Zvezda Plot also just failed to really grab my interest. At some point I might go back and try to watch the first episode again to give it a fairer shot.

Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!

I watched the first four or five episodes of this. A few years ago I probably would have enjoyed its mockery of the isekei genre’s “real life RPG” tropes and jokes centered around cute girls who get horny about weird things, but I’ve seen too much of this style of humor now and it’s worn off. The gratuitous ass shots come off as skeevy, not funny, and I groan whenever the show resorts to jokes about the main character being mistaken for a pervert, which it does pretty much whenever it can’t figure out how to end a scene. It’s easy to watch and inoffensive enough (as someone who’s used to anime skeeviness and cliches) that I probably could have made it all the way through, but I wanted to aim higher.

Yuru Yuri

I watched about half of Season 1 a couple years ago, and also read the manga pretty extensively. Watching Episode 1 again, it kinda failed to get me, and the humor seemed really clunky, but I remember the same thing happening the first time I watched Episode 1 a couple years ago, and then again when I read Chapter 1 of the manga after that, so I think Chapter 1 just wasn’t very good and the series took some time to hit its stride.

The Ancient Magus’s Bride

This is where I finally hit it. I am enjoying this a lot. Very beautiful art, interesting world, and lots of feels.

Thoughts on “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" Season 7

I don’t think there’s been a season since Season 2 that was as focused on character development and life lessons as Season 7. Seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6 all started off with a big adventure story followed by a run of high concept stuff. Season 7 has been 100% hardcore character development from the get-go, starting with the low-key “Celestial Advice”, in which Twilight consults Celestia over her worries about Starlight’s future. I’m wondering if the imminent release of the movie has anything to do with this; maybe they’re saving all the adventure stuff for that. Regardless, it’s been really enjoyable for the most part. We’ve gotten to see the characters just settle down and go back to living their lives, instead of going on huge adventures, parodying zombie movies, getting sucked into comic books, turning into bats, going on disastrous boat trips, or anything of the sort. All of the Mane 6 have gotten a really solid episode focusing on them, along with satisfying supporting roles in other episodes. We’ve also gotten episodes focusing on Maud in “Rock Solid Friendship”, and Big Mac and the Cutie Mark Crusaders in “Hard to Say Anything”, and one where Starlight plays a main role, “All Bottled Up”, where she’s paired with Trixie, as well as two others, “Rock Solid Friendship” and “A Royal Problem”, where she plays a strong supporting role. Season 7 also follows up on the dragon and changeling stories that began in Season 6, with “Triple Threat” showing Dragon Lord Ember and Thorax, now leader of the changelings, meeting for the first time, and “To Change a Changeling” showing us how changeling society has evolved now that they’re out from under Chrysalis and no longer have to steal love.

The first three quarters of Season 7 pay off a bunch of plot threads from Season 6 (and earlier in some cases)—Starlight’s tutelage in “Celestial Advice”, Starlight’s friendship with Trixie in “All Bottled Up”, Celestia and Luna’s still not always harmonious relationship in “A Royal Problem”, the new leadership for the changelings and dragons in “Triple Threat” and “To Change a Changeling”, Pinkie and the yaks in “Not Asking For Trouble”, and Fluttershy’s new assertiveness in “Fluttershy Leans In”. Sprinkled in are slice of life episodes, which make up most of the last quarter of the season and are almost all really fun. “Secrets and Pies” gives us another full episode of Pinkie wackiness, which I feel like we haven’t gotten since “Too Many Pinkies” back in Season 3. “A Flurry of Emotions” and “Once Upon a Zeppelin” show us how things are in Twilight’s family now, and also give us an idea of what she actually gets up to all day in her castle.

The less good

It’s not a perfect season; we get a few “bad” episodes, in the usual Friendship is Magic sense of “bad”, a perfectly well constructed episode that lacks some je ne sais quoi compared to the best of the series.

Three episodes so far have fallen in this category for me: “Hard to Say Anything”, “Campfire Tales”, and “Daring Done?” The worst of the three (but nowhere near the worst of the series, let alone actually “bad” in a general sense) is “Hard to Say Anything”, which follows the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ efforts to help Big Macintosh with his crush on Sugar Belle, the baker pony from Starlight’s old village. He has a rival, Feather Bangs, a boy band pony who competes for Sugar Belle’s affection. The episode is just sort of tedious, and the Cutie Mark Crusaders got up to the sort of shenanigans that I thought they’d left behind them at this point. (I’m a little biased towards the Season 2-era Mane 6, but for me, the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ best is all during and after getting their cutie marks.) The episode does have good parts, though; most of the Feather Bangs scenes were really funny, and he surprisingly turned out to be a likeable character. Seeing Sugar Belle again was also nice; I’d forgotten how cute her voice is.

“Campfire Tales” is about the Cutie Mark Crusaders and their big sisters; trapped in a cave by insect attack while on a camping trip, the big sisters each tell a folk tale to pass the time. With the framing story and three folk tales to get through, there isn’t enough time to develop any of the folk tales in a really satisfying way. Rarity’s came closest, though; it had a real emotional arc and a Chinese-inspired aesthetic that I liked.

“Daring Done?” is another Daring Do episode. I’m not a huge fan of these in general (except for “Stranger than Fan Fiction”, which is hilarious because of Quibble Pants). This one adds Pinkie Pie and a more emotional Captain America: Civil War-style character arc for Daring Do, so it is better than “Daring Don’t”, but the good ideas somehow just didn’t come together for me. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more on re-watch.

These three were the episodes I enjoyed least from this season, but they were still pretty good compared to the worst of other seasons—stuff like “Power Ponies” or “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off”—and I have a feeling when I do a full re-watch of the series, with Season 7 coming straight after Season 6, these three won’t seem too bad at all.

Favorite episodes

Three of my favorites so far have been “Rock Solid Friendship”, “A Royal Problem”, and “Triple Threat”. I love when stories combine established characters in new ways, and all three of these episodes, along with some of my other favorites in Friendship is Magic, do that.

“Rock Solid Friendship” combines Pinkie Pie, Maud, and Starlight, as Pinkie pressures Maud to make friends with Starlight so Maud will move to Ponyville, without realizing that Maud and Starlight are already becoming friends on their own. Maud is always hilarious, and watching her interact with Starlight is a lot of fun and makes both characters more interesting. Pinkie was also utilized well and got to be a driver of events and learn a lesson even as a supporting character.

“A Royal Problem” combines Celestia, Luna, and Starlight, as Starlight takes on her first assignment from the Cutie Map and quickly realizes the friendship problem is between the two alicorn sisters. At this point, there’s no plot reason to have Celestia in the show at all, but that also frees the writers to fill in details about her character that wouldn’t have come up when she was Twilight’s wise and all-knowing mentor, and both this episode and “Celestial Advice” do a great job of it. Both this episode and “Rock Solid Friendship” show that Starlight has found a niche where her social tactlessness is an asset; only Starlight would have the audacity to do what had to be done to force the princesses to see things from each others’ perspectives. I also liked that Celestia gets to be nurturing again at the end, helping soothe Starlight’s fear of failure.

“Triple Threat” combines Spike, Ember, and Thorax, as Spike realizes he invited both leaders to visit him in Ponyville on the same day and tries to keep them from meeting each other, since he’s afraid the gentle Thorax would mix badly with the fierce Ember and the result could be a war of dragon vs. changeling. This sort of plot can get old fast for me, but Ember and Thorax find out about each other just as I was starting to think the jig was getting old, and I enjoyed that Thorax and Ember worked out their issues with each other directly, like rational people. This episode is also one of the funniest of the season. It had my favorite joke of Season 7 so far, when Ember can’t tell Twilight and Starlight apart.

“Triple Threat” is a funny episode, but Season 7 overall has been more serious than Season 6, and has one of the sweetest and most adorable serious episodes of the entire series: “The Perfect Pear”, which tells the Romeo and Juliet love story of Applejack, Big Mac, and Apple Bloom’s parents, Bright Mac and Pear Butter. Season 7 hasn’t been great for songs, but “The Perfect Pear” has “You’re in My Head Like a Catchy Song”, my favorite song of the season. It also introduces Grand Pear, the Apple siblings’ maternal grandfather, voiced by William Shatner. William Shatner actually does a great job; he modifies his voice enough that I didn’t even realize it was him until I saw the credits, so you focus on the character and not William Shatner. I hope they’ll bring back Grand Pear for another episode so we can see how he relates to his grandchildren after being out of their lives for so long. (The obvious Grand Pear / Discord meeting is optional for me; I’d rather see real characterization than fan service, no matter how fun it would be. Though I won’t say no to it if they do it gracefully.)

I also really enjoyed “Discordant Harmony” and “A Health of Information”. In “Discordant Harmony”, Discord tries to change himself for Fluttershy’s sake, only to discover that she liked him the way he way, while in “A Health of Information” Fluttershy has to unravel an ancient mystery to find the cure to a plague. They’re not as good as the four episodes I mentioned above, nor are they my favorite Fluttershy episodes, but I thought both had an interesting hook, and I liked seeing Fluttershy have real stories that focused on something other than her being assertive now (which, as I’ll discuss later, I have some minor gripes about).

“Fame and Misfortune”

After spending a fair amount of time reading the comment sections on the My Little Pony wikia and the forums on Derpibooru (and a little bit of /mlp/ on 4chan, so sue me), it’s become apparent that there’s a lot of burnout in the fandom. When people are burnt out on a fandom, they start to get hypercritical and lambaste the writers over weird things, or complain that the show isn’t some other thing that it’s never been but they’ve decided would be more enjoyable to them than what it is. I go through an anime burnout about once every five years, but since anime is an entire medium, I go enjoy something else for a while, then come back and expand outside whatever narrow subgenre I was inhabiting that I’d grown tired of, and that usually does the trick. Recently I got burnt out on moe, and I stopped watching anime and sought out other things, like superheroes and My Little Pony, as a change of pace. Now I’m starting to get back into anime a little, with shows like One Punch Man and Little Witch Academia and Last Exile that are a little different from the stuff I’d gotten sick of. (I have also enjoyed some moe shows—Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? and Gabriel Dropout, for example—but I don’t have the energy to sit through the ones that aren’t good anymore.)

A lot of My Little Pony fans online are showing signs of advanced burnout. They get hypercritical and turn minor storytelling inconsistencies into world-ending flaws that shoot an episode down into negative ratings. They complain that the show should be dark and gritty (Mare-Do-Well: The Dark Pony Knight Returns? Ponystar Equestria? Game of Pones?), or that it needs more worldbuilding (The Ponymarillion?), which would effectively turn it into a different show. Their most common complaints are about the characters, though, especially the Mane 6.

The Friendship is Magic staff are weirdly active on Twitter, and I imagine they see these complaints constantly: Twilight is too boring now that she’s an alicorn, Fluttershy learns the same lesson all the time and just needs to be assertive already, Pinkie Pie is just a dumb joke character who adds nothing to the story, Rarity is annoying and should go away forever, Rainbow Dash is the awesomest perfectest pony and doesn’t need to learn anything because she already knows everything so fuck you for writing an episode where she isn’t treated as the paragon of perfection that she is, and Applejack is there. In Season 7, they chose to write an entire episode addressing these fan complaints. It’s called “Fame and Misfortune”.

I didn’t put this episode in my favorites section because it’s not one of my favorites. The conceit they used of having Twilight publish the friendship journal from Season 4 is clever, and it has parts that I like a lot, and I think its message is important: no one is flawless, and no one can change their personality forever after suddenly seeing the error of their ways during a 23-minute storyline—even when you “fix” issues in your personality, they’ll keep recurring in different ways throughout your life. Before I saw it, I was planning an essay that would have made a lot of the same points it does about why some of these complaints sit on invalid premises. But it’s an “interesting” episode, not a “good” episode like “Rock Solid Friendship” or “A Royal Problem”. That’s why I gave it its own section.

I haven’t looked very closely at how fans reacted to it yet, but the reaction I’ve seen has mostly been negative, which makes sense since it’s an entire episode directly disagreeing with their complaints. I’ve also criticized some of the episodes and creative choices of the show. There is no such thing as a perfect work of art. Even if someone can come along and say “Such-and-such is a perfect show”, someone else can always come along and say (genuinely, not just to be disagreeable) “For me it had x-y-z flaws.” In the next sections, I’m going to criticize some more things. To me, the message of “Fame and Misfortune” was not “Don’t criticize us”. It wasn’t as broad as that. It was narrowly directed at a specific set of criticisms, mostly about the way the Mane 6 are written, that seem to come from an implicit belief that the characters should not have flaws, should always behave correctly (according to some measure of correctness), and should always learn their lessons for now and always after one 23-minute episode in which they learn how wrong they were. I’ve seen other instances where fans seem to think this; ask me about the roasting “Filli Vanilli” gets for how Pinkie Pie acts in it sometime.

At the end of the day, there is a difference between constructive, well-meaning criticism, and misguided or destructive criticism, and the creators are not obliged to take criticism to heart if it would, in their opinions, make the show worse. If they had written episodes like “28 Pranks Later” or “Filli Vanilli” the way some of these angry fans had wanted, the episodes fundamentally would not have worked as narratives. It’s not good storytelling to write an episode where Rainbow Dash’s awesomeness gets praised for 23 minutes. Just as Batman needs to keep feeling angry about his parents’ death, Fluttershy needs to struggle with assertiveness and Pinkie needs to have trouble being serious.

At the end of “Fame and Misfortune”, the Mane 6 find out that two young fillies resolved their differences and stayed friends thanks to the friendship journal, and the Mane 6 decide to be satisfied with that and ignore the riot going on outside. Combined with some statements I’ve seen some of the staff make on Twitter, it seems like they’re implying they’re sick of dealing with the adult fans and have decided to take the attitude of “Fuck you guys, as long as the little girls like us we’re fine”. That’s an understandable attitude to take, especially after they did episodes like “Slice of Life” just for adult fans and are still catching heat over everything. I also sometimes make things, and I totally get how tempting it is to only show things you made to people who will like it no matter what. I totally get how exhausting it is to argue with people who don’t understand what a work was trying to do, yet think they’re the world’s next Derrida and want to “well, actually” the creators on the symbolism, or people who blast the creators because after calculating the length of the Equestrian solar year it turns out there should be a leap second every three and a half seasons but they missed it, or people who will never be satisfied with anything because they’re actually burnt out on the show and would rather be watching Westworld but haven’t realized it yet. I see all these types and more. I struggle with the thought of putting my work out there for all of these reasons and more. But adult fans didn’t start watching Friendship is Magic because it was aimed at them; they started watching it because they found it good, despite not being aimed at them. I don’t know about all the adult fans, but for myself, I don’t need anything special from the staff. I just want them to keep making the best thing they can. Things have changed a little from Season 1 to Season 7, but in my opinion, every season has had more good episodes than bad, and the good episodes have been brilliant, and the bad episodes have been more “Eh, there was this small story element that kinda didn’t work for me, it wasn’t awful but it could’ve been better.”

“Shadow Play”

“Shadow Play” is like the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice of Friendship is Magic season finales. It’s a huge, sprawling, ambitious story that maybe, kind of, juuuust a little escaped the capabilities of what could be told in the time it had with the amount of backstory that had been established.

I was genuinely surprised and genuinely delighted that all the episodes we’d seen across the season about legendary figures of Equestrian history were actually leading to something. I liked the concept a lot. I also liked getting to learn something about how the Elements of Harmony came to exist. This was a very continuity-heavy, lore-heavy episode by MLP standards. I like the show we have and I definitely don’t want it to turn into the aforementioned Ponymarillion, but it’s nice sometimes to learn that these things have a history in this world and aren’t purely plot devices.

Part 2 of the episode, once the story has been established, was really good. Twilight is torn between listening to her idol, Starswirl, and her student, Starlight. She knows Starswirl’s path goes against her own beliefs, embodied in Starlight’s presence among them, but she listens to him because she spent so long idolizing him that she has a hard time accepting he’s also a pony and isn’t perfect. It was a great conflict, and all the more powerful because of what we saw in the movie with Tempest Shadow.

Unfortunately, the wind-up in Part 1 is where you can see the seams showing. It’s way too abrupt. They squeezed five scenes of the Mane 6 minus Twilight retrieving their legend’s relic, each of which probably could have been an episode concept all on its own, into about ten minutes. I wish this had been structured more like the story arc in Season 4, with each pony getting her own episode to establish her relationship with her legend and finding the relic at the end, then realizing in “Shadow Play” Part 1 that the relic could be used to summon the legends back to Equestria. At least setting up enough in the episode so that retrieving the relic didn’t require so much context would have helped; Fluttershy’s and Pinkie’s missions are the shortest of all, probably fitting into about 30 seconds apiece, and that’s because they each had entire episodes–“A Health of Information” and “Daring Done?”–to set things up beforehand. The season was pretty full of great episodes, but if I were supreme pony story dictator, I would’ve cut “Hard to Say Anything” and “Marks and Recreation”, along with “Campfire Tales” itself, so we could fit in episodes about Applejack and Rockhoof, Rarity and Mistmane, and Rainbow and Flash Magnus. (Rainbow and Spike’s race with the jerk dragon Garble, which ends with Rainbow tricking and robbing Garble to get Flash Magnus’s shield, would’ve made a perfect ending to the episode, teaching kids the lesson that it’s okay to deceive and rob someone, as long as they’re a jerk and deserve it and you really need what they have.)

Among all the two-parters in the series, I’d probably put “Shadow Play” in fourth place, behind “Twilight’s Kingdom”, “A Canterlot Wedding”, and “The Crystal Empire”. It was about as good as “Princess Twilight Sparkle” in the end. “Princess Twilight Sparkle” was a less ambitious story that stuck its landing, whereas “Shadow Play” is big and ambitious and doesn’t quite make it, but I’m giving it extra points for its ambition. It’s also interesting how “Shadow Play” is a total brony-bait episode, even though there’ve been signs from the staff that they’re sick of catering to bronies and want to focus on their original target audience of children. I’m sure children will also like the episode–I know when I was a kid I was capable of appreciating ambition in storytelling–but this is the sort of thing bronies online are constantly asking for. Stop sending us mixed messages!

Random Observations

“Fame and Misfortune” is the most obvious example of the rising number of meta references in Season 7 compared to earlier seasons. My favorite joke of the season from “Triple Threat” is another example: on one level, it works because Ember isn’t used to looking at ponies, so it makes sense that she’d have some trouble telling Twilight and Starlight apart. But out of universe, Starlight is intentionally similar to Twilight, so the joke also has an extra meta level to it.

I went back and forth on Starlight in Season 6, but she’s really come into her own in Season 7. Even though she’s superficially similar to Twilight, her arc as a character has interesting similarities to both Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash. Pairing her up with Trixie and Maud and Thorax helps her a lot too; while I’m a little disappointed that we never get a really strong connection between Starlight and any of the Mane 6 other than Twilight, I’m glad they found characters to mix her in with that could create an interesting dynamic. It’s no coincidence that two of my four favorite Season 7 episodes had Starlight in a major role. She’s not going to blow up my character rankings, but I’ve enjoyed watching her a lot.

Pinkie Pie has surprisingly gotten some good material in too. Her funny scenes at the start of the season weren’t that great, but she had a great subplot in “Rock Solid Friendship”, and she actually got to be a serious character again in “Not Asking For Trouble”, where she becomes the first pony to go inside Yakyakistan after reaching its gates in “Party Pooped”. Then we got another funny episode in “Secrets and Pies” towards the end of the season. Overall, Season 7 was a good season for Pinkie, even if we don’t count the movie.

I disagree with other fans who complain about Fluttershy in Seasons 1 through 3. I feel a strong personal connection to Fluttershy, and that has dwindled a little in Seasons 5 and 6 as she got more assertive and less shy and quiet. (There’s a scene in “Fame and Misfortune” where an angry pony in the crowd outside the castle yells “Fluttershy is just so painfully shy, it’s hard to relate! I mean, come on!” and another pony in the background wearing a Fluttershy T-shirt and hat, named White Lightning according to the wiki, looks down in shame and slinks away; White Lightning is me.) So I’m not thrilled with the direction she goes in Season 7, starting with “Fluttershy Leans In”, which seems to have the narrative message “This is Fluttershy now, she’s assertive”. I didn’t list it under “bad” episodes because it’s not bad. Nothing about the direction the writers have taken Fluttershy is bad or wrong; it’s a valid decision, even if it’s one that has made me feel less close to the character. What I’d like to see, now that “Fluttershy Leans In” has firmly established her new assertiveness, is some episodes that focus on her gentle and quiet side again, and show that it still exists even though she’s now assertive. “Buckball Season” did this really well (for Pinkie as well). Some of the other Season 7 episodes—“Discordant Harmony” and “A Health of Information”, for example—show her being kind in an assertive way, which isn’t quite what I’m talking about, but I’ll take it. Another nice direction would be to introduce another character who is as shy and quiet as Fluttershy used to be (White Lightning?), and let Fluttershy teach that character how to get by in life without giving up her self, the way Fluttershy has learned to.

Thorax has turned out to be a surprisingly good character. He didn’t get much development in Season 6, so I didn’t have a real opinion on him, but watching him in Season 7 has been a lot of fun, both paired with Ember in “Triple Threat” and paired with Starlight and Trixie in “To Change a Changeling”. It would’ve been way funnier if his brother was named “Abdomen”, though.

I still don’t quite get the fascination with background ponies, but I do now appreciate the “cameo” ponies, the ones that appear for one or two episodes or a few scenes, like Coco Pommel or Cheese Sandwich. Season 7 has been more focused on existing characters and less on new characters, but it does introduce Strawberry Sunrise, a pegasus who shows up to go “Strawberries are best fruit, fight me mf”, for a memorable scene in “Honest Apple”.

It was fun to see Iron Will again in “Once Upon a Zeppelin”, and I liked the joke where he says he’s learned from last time and satisfaction is not guaranteed.

Conclusion

Season 8 is coming next year, and apparently Hasbro is happy with all the bucketloads of money they’re still making on the show, so it’s entirely possible there will be a Season 9, and it seems they’re even talking about a second movie. Even though I’m slightly concerned about that mindset, the fact remains that Season 7 was on the whole extremely good. So far the staff has managed to consistently bring in strong writers who understand the characters and are able to bring them in good directions that keep them interesting without changing who they fundamentally are. I have a feeling some of what I consider missteps from Seasons 4 and 5 happened because the fandom was at fever pitch and the writers were trying to do what they thought the fans wanted, whereas their current disillusionment with the fandom may have actually helped them get back to basics in Season 7 and deliver a run of great character-oriented stories. Whatever the reason, I have high hopes for Season 8 and I’m looking forward to it.

The “Last Exile" Diaries

I first watched Last Exile back in the early 2000’s when it was on Anime Unleashed on TechTV (even before it became G4). I thought I had watched the whole show, but when I thought back, all I remembered was a bunch of scenes of Claus, Lavie, and Alvis being suddenly interrupted in the middle of a conversation by the commercial break bumper, and then a really loud commercial for The Screen Savers or some sort of credit adjustment service. Now that it’s on Crunchyroll, I figured I’d revisit it, especially since I’ve heard it gets really good later.

Thoughts on Episodes 1 - 8

Last Exile might get really good later, but my goodness, does it start out slow. The story pacing for the first eight episodes feels really strange. First we spend two entire episodes watching this huge ritualized airship battle while the main characters, Claus and Lavie, try to deliver a message to the airship fleet’s commander, Duke Mad-Thane, from his wife and daughter. After this, the pacing suddenly becomes really fast. Claus and Lavie return home and then, during a vanship race, run into a dying pilot, Ralph Wednesday, who hands off a little girl named Alvis to them for delivery to the Silvana, a legendary ship captained by Alex Row, a tall and dark man of few words with a cool cape. Claus and Lavie’s home is destroyed by star-shaped ships from the mysterious Guild, and they run away and manage to deliver Alvis to the Silvana, but then aren’t confident in how she’ll be treated on board and decide to force their way onto the ship to see her. The ship comes under Guild attack and Claus impulsively asks to be allowed to take out one of their specially modified vanships that has a machine gun, where a Guild noble named Dio observes him with interest and eventually goes out to fly against him. Lavie passes out from the g-forces of one of the crazy maneuvers that Claus goes through to evade Dio, so Claus isn’t able to shoot down Dio because he’s out of ammunition and needs her to reload. Finally, after the battle, the Silvana docks at a floating casino and Lavie and her new friend Mullin Shetland, who helped her and Claus back on Mad-Thane’s ship (the Claiomh Solais, just like the wand in Little Witch Academia) in Episode 2, ends up clashing with the captain of another ship called the Goliath, which brings them into a ship-to-ship duel that the Silvana easily wins, despite the Goliath’s attempts to cheat.

Whew! After the really slow first two episodes, the pacing for Episodes 3-8 goes breakneck, and you just sort of get swept along by it. That means the show stays exciting and made me want to keep watching, but at times I was really unclear on why things were happening. Claus almost seems like a stoner most of the time; he’s half-asleep, barely reacting to anything, doesn’t seem all there, and yet he very suddenly develops a deep and abiding attachment to Alvis, to the point where he risks death and gets the tar kicked out of himself all so he can see her and make sure she’s being treated well. Lavie at first is the more sensible voice of reason, who advises caution, but after acting standoffish towards Alvis, she also suddenly decides that she really wants to get on that ship and find out what’s happening. It also isn’t clear why the mechanics crew decides to beat the crap out of Claus when they later suddenly decide to be kind and helpful. (Tatiana’s influence, maybe.)

I do understand why it’s written like this. The writers needed to set up the world, which is actually pretty complicated. So far it seems like each nation has a ruler, with nobles who finance gigantic airships, and they go to war with each other, but the Guild, which seems to have highly advanced technology and live in the upper atmosphere, prescribes a set of rules for warfare. The nobles also live on floating cities, and the commoners all live down below on the ground, where it’s apparently hard to find good water or decent food. (Though Claus and Lavie’s food looks fresh enough.) The first two episodes are mostly setting up the world by showing us a battle, the rules, the Guild allowing infractions of the rules for mysterious reasons, the Anatoray nobles’ suicidal devotion to chivalry, and other foundational concepts. And with Episode 8 finally stopping and giving us a chance to breathe, I’m hoping we’ll get to learn more about the characters at a slower pace and maybe get some insight in hindsight on why they did certain things that they did.

Aside from the story, I absolutely love the art style. The CG used for the ships is really terrible (I’d like to blame the show’s age–it’s from 2003–but the CG in Fate/Zero looked just as bad, unfortunately). But I loved the steampunk art design and the sepia tone over everything that makes it look like an old photograph. There’s an artist named Range Murata who worked on this that I used to be a huge fan of, and now I remember why. Last Exile is from the early digipaint era, and some of the shows from that era look really awful today, flat and garish, as if they were done in MS Paint. Even Love Hina looks pretty bad compared to more modern shows. But Last Exile, like Haibane Renmei, overcame the pitfalls of early digipaint with an amazing art direction.

Episodes 9 - 14

Things continue moving at a fast pace in these episodes. Claus and Lavie enter a vanship race where they have to fix up a wreck and fly it. Dio enters just to fly against them, but through a series of circumstances he ends up on the Silvana with them just messing around. Lavie decides that she can’t be Claus’s navigator if he’s going to fly a fighting vanship since she doesn’t want to be involved in such a thing, and retires to join the mechanics group. Meanwhile, Alex Row enters into some intrigue against Dio’s older sister, Maestro Delphine, and bids in an auction on a relic known as the gate to EXILE, one of four mysterious items known fittingly as mysterions. Someone threatens his life over this, and he just barely makes it back to the Silvana with the gate.

The emperor of Anatoray demands that Alex surrender Alvis to the captain of the Urbanus, but Alex refuses, so they fight. Meanwhile, a little drama is going on between Claus, Tatiana, and Tatiana’s best friend and navigator Alister, who is getting disenchanted with Tatiana’s constant grumpiness. (She really is a grump.) Alister volunteers to be Claus’s navigator when Alex picks him to fly escort on a parley mission to the Urbanus, and Tatiana gets her back by picking Claus as her navigator during the battle. They end up crashing their vanship in the desert, and we find out that Tatiana graduated top of her class from the military academy and has apparently been lying to her parents about what she actually does, telling them she’s on a normal ship where everything is hunky dory instead of a weird black ops rogue ship that seems to be working to overthrow the government and establish a new world order.

Meanwhile, Lavie has a flashback while lying unconscious in bed, showing us how she and Claus learned to fly from their fathers. Claus’s father was a noble who decided he liked slumming it with the ground peeps, and came down to live next door to Lavie’s dad, who looks like someone you’d find in a sports bar yelling about the Browns on a Wednesday night. They were tasked to deliver a peace treaty to the Disith, but were killed. The episode hints that the Guild killed them on purpose so the war would go on. It also hints that Alex Row knew them and that he was the one who gave Lavie the goat toy that she later gives Alvis.

The show is still refusing to really explain anything, and the shine is starting to wear off. I’m still with the series at this point on the strength of its world, but I’m finding the characters are underwritten and the air battles aren’t nearly as exciting as someone thought they were. I had a rough time with Episode 12, where the Silvana and Urbanus fight for the entire episode. Every battle pretty much comes down to ships rendered in terrible CG flying around a snore-inducing sky filled with grey smoke and fog and clouds. Too often, the show substitutes vagueness for real story and character dimension. Even though Episode 13, which is just Tatiana sleeping in the desert having flashbacks and feeling sorry for herself while Claus actually tries to get them out of there, doesn’t tell us a whole lot about Tatiana; it just gives us random tidbits of her life before the Silvana, without enough details about the world to really understand the import of most of them. The show keeps on doing the same thing with Alex; everything he does is cloaked in a guise of mystery, and yet people keep following him blindly while he does weird, self-destructive things with no explanation. Someone on the writing staff seems to have thought they could make contrived backstory dumps more subtle and interesting by making them incredibly vague, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

The relative bright spot when it comes to characters is Dio. He at least is fun to watch, and mysterious in a more organic way, because of his weird behavior. Lavie, who was my favorite of the earlier episodes, has pretty much been demoted to side character. These two are the only characters with real panache. Claus is lifeless as a lead; he’s constantly half asleep, drifting through life without really driving the plot forward, no magnetism or ambition or determination or anything else that would make him interesting to watch. Tatiana is constantly grumpy for no good reason, and Alex is always being mysterious with his awesome cape. Personally, I think Mullin Shetland should’ve been the lead. He’s more lead-like than Claus is.

I really wanted to see more episodes like Episode 8 going forward. That episode was a lot of fun, showed us more about the world, and let us get to know Lavie a little better as we saw her unleash her rage and break a chair over a guy’s head. There haven’t been any more episodes like that. I’m still sticking with the show. 26-episode shows almost always start to drag around this point, near the Episode 12 - 15 mark. Little Witch Academia, which I loved, started to drag around this point. Evangelion had “Weaving a Story”, aka the most boring clip show imaginable, around this point. The problem is that those shows had some amazing self-contained episodes in the first half, like “Orange Submariner” for Little Witch Academia or “Both of You Dance Like You Wanna Win!” for Eva, that were great character episodes or interesting story concepts or just really funny. Last Exile has been a bit of a slog up to this point. I still don’t feel like I know any of the characters, except for Lavie, a little. It almost feels like the show is so eager to get its continuous plot out that it breathlessly charges forward and never stops to let us really feel like a part of the proceedings. I’m still giving it a chance for now, but the shtick is starting to wear thin. If it doesn’t start to pay things off within the next few episodes, or at least hint at how it’s going to eventually pay things off, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stick around.

Episodes 15 and 16

In Episode 15, Claus returns to the ship and everyone assumes he and Tatiana had sex. Lavie can’t look at him and won’t talk to him because, as is becoming increasingly clear, she’s in love with him. (Hoo boy.) Tatiana becomes all lovey-dovey and starts blushing and looking away whenever someone mentions Claus, the exact opposite of how she was before. (Kuudere.) Alex comes clean with Claus and tells him that he knew their dads and their vanship was actually his vanship, not their dads’. Sophia, the motherly first officer, is revealed to be the princess of Anatoray, daughter of the emperor. She is called to take back her position and tries to get Alex to ask her not to go, but he doesn’t care and tells her to leave, so she does. Before she leaves, she randomly kisses Claus on the lips (isn’t he like twelve years old?). We are also informed that Disith has fallen. I think the weird scene at the end of Episode 13 where sticks fell out of the sky was supposed to represent the fall of Disith.

In Episode 16, Sophia returns and becomes princess again. Her father tries to kill her, but her guardian, a former Guild member, stages a coup and kills the emperor first, allowing Sophia to take the throne with the support of the former captain of the Urbanus. They fight off the remnants of the Disith fleet, and the Guild decides to destroy Anatoray. Meanwhile, Alex decides he’s going to go off and kill Delphine finally since she killed his girlfriend / wife Euris, who it seems was also a princess. He gives Claus a chance to leave, but Claus says he’s saying. When he tells Lavie she should leave, she says she’s also staying, because he is.

I said last time I was going to stick with Last Exile, but I honestly don’t think I can do it anymore. The world and art are still amazing, but I can’t beat around the bush anymore: the story structure and character writing are absolutely terrible. I’ve given up the idea of the show actually becoming good; its sins run too deep at this point. The show keeps on dumping all these major events on us in quick succession without motivating any of them properly. Making Sophia a princess all of a sudden comes off as a bunch of writers who have no idea what they’re doing and needed something to happen so they could fill up another 12 episodes. And that’s how everything that happens in the show comes off, at least the things that aren’t needlessly mysterious. Now that we know what Alex’s motives are and what he plans to do, all the mystery seems totally wasted, because what he wants to do and why he wants to do it isn’t interesting enough to warrant all that mystery. If the Guild had actually been set up as a real power, that might have helped, but we know pretty much nothing about them except that they have advanced technology and white hair. We don’t even know what they supposedly did that made Alex hate them.

The way the characterization was handled in these two episodes was inexcusably clumsy. There was no slow build of respect from Tatiana, no decision to start treating Claus a little better; she goes straight from scorn to sopping puppy dog eyes. Since we’ve never seen any kind of relationship between Sophia and Alex, his refusal to ask her to stay has no weight. We don’t know what he’s denying or throwing away by letting her go. We have no idea what they’ve shared or suffered together, what their history is, and so it means nothing that Alex lets her go to us, because their relationship is nothing, and he’s not giving up anything. Subjectively, I also found the payoff incredibly uninteresting: all the female characters are in love with the male characters, and the male characters are oblivious. So we’ve spent 15 episodes of boring air battles and badly motivated plot happenings, watching a lifeless protagonist with no charisma, and in the end what we get is the first five minutes of every harem anime ever. This isn’t something they can just recover from by throwing in a flashback later. You can’t flub what should be large, profound moments in a character arc like this and then make them suddenly work by filling it in later. It doesn’t seem like they even intend to; the summaries of the next few episodes sound like action episodes, with Sophia and her fleet helping out Alex in his fight against Delphine.

I’m trying to remember where I got the idea that this show was good, and it’s not coming to me. If this was the first anime I’d ever seen, I might be transfixed by the art alone, but even that has its warts, with the awful CG ships mixed in with the 2D animation. The only character I was ever interested in was Lavie. I liked her spunk and her slightly cynical attitude. I liked being able to relate to her frustration in Episode 8 at the constant escalation of events. We’ve lost that at this point. There’s no one I can identify with, not even at a general human level, because everyone’s emotions change on a dime, no one has a clear motive for anything they do, and Sophia is suddenly making out with Claus. The story just keeps galloping along, and there are too many times I find myself asking what the hell is even going on. That makes it a struggle to get myself to watch this show anymore. I don’t think I can do it. I’m dropping the show.