November 2023 Monthly Update (Patreon)

It's been a busy month!

I went on a trip to New York for Thanksgiving. I figured the Macy's Parade crowd would be too much for me, but I did see a lot of cool stuff! I went to the Museum of Modern Art and I saw two Broadway shows with my Mom--Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along (featuring Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff). I really enjoyed both, Annaleigh Ashford killed it as Mrs. Lovett, and I was surprised how much Merrily transported me. Radcliffe did a fantastic job, it was so wild seeing him in person (albeit from waaay back in theatre) after a childhood of watching him over and over, but I also often forgot it was him with the chaotic, nerdy energy he bought to the character.

I also hit up some cool shops, like the toy shop in Little Tokyo, the Strand bookstore, and so on.

I've been swamped with work finishing up my current class and jumping right into the next one, and a friend "breaking up with me" via text sent my mental health into a nasty tailspin, but I'm managing. I'm working with an editor to get my book trimmed down and ready to try to submit to agents, and I've received good feedback from beta readers. I'm also trying to make some progress on the sequel again.

I've played through Little Goody Two Shoes this month- it's a horror game done in a 90s shoujo anime style about a girl named Elise who longs for wealth and an escape from her small town and starts exploring the creepy woods and dealing with monsters so she can make a pact with a mysterious being called "Him" and get her wish. You choose one of three girls to be Elise's love interest. It was a fun game, though it required you to be so impossibly precise in your movements I think it was more suited to keyboard controls than the Switch and I was terrible at the minigames. I chose Rozenmarine for the love interest for my first playthough (and did the other two in my second run via save scumming) but she was my least favorite, even though she was definitely the most "canon" one, and she was the witchy one. Just a little too shy and submissive to bounce off Elise well, though that was the point of her arc. Lebkuchen, the nun, surprisingly ended up being my favorite, I liked her teasing dynamic with Elise.

It also unexpectedly didn't put much of a twist on the whole "Satan, old hags and evil witches" deal it had going, though it also portrayed the Christians as bad and paranoid and horrible too, I don't think I've ever seen a story go so hard on both things! It had a great atmosphere though, even if it was straightforward.

I recently finished the second season of the French show Lupin, it was a solid good time and improvement on the first in how it handled its female characters. I also watched Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I was a fan of the comic when I was a kid, and this was great followup- rather than an adaptation, it was in conversation with earlier versions of the work and it did a great job building on what came before, and I loved the increased focus on Ramona really exploring her relationship with her exes rather than them just being enemies for Scott. It was especially great for Roxie, who was unfortunately kind of treated like a joke in the original (way moreso in the movie than the comic, but the comic still had the whole "it was a phase" thing from Ramona) but now the relationship is treated seriously and the conflict handled really well. I also loved seeing Knives get to make her own way and integrate with the band, and all the clever in-jokes. Some of the English voice cast was weak (on-screen actors aren't automatically good VAs) so I might rewatch it in Japanese sometime. But the music was awesome, the animation was awesome, rating: awesome.

This month I read Night's Edge by Liz Kerin, and really enjoyed it. It follows Mia,  a woman in her 20's who's living with a vampire Mom and basically her whole life revolves around not drawing suspicion towards her Mom and making sure to feed her Mom some of her blood every night--lest her mother fall back in with her abusive boyfriend and start hunting humans. But when Mia meets a cute girl, she starts to dream of a life outside her Mom... It was a really interesting use of vampirism as a metaphor for both living with a parent struggling with addiction and having an abusive parent (Mia's mom is literally draining her) and was just a well told, heartwrenching tale that got deep into the characters mindsets. I thought the ending was bit abrupt and rushed, but it did make more sense once I realized this was a duology. Definitely recommended, it's not often you see something really different done with vampires, but this definitely isn't like a lot of other vampire stories I've read.

Speaking of vamps, I also read the first volume of #DRCL, a manga retelling of Dracula that focuses on Mina as the protagonist and imagines the characters at an English prep school. It adds a lot of diversity to the characters (Quincy is black, Lucy is trans and only Mina knows, Seward is a Japanese exchange student named Jo Suwa, and Jonathan is a wheelchair user who seems significantly younger than Mina, though he's only shown up briefly in a flashback so far) and has absolutely breathtaking art. I'm curious where it will go and what it intends to do with all it's changes (especially Lucy), because right now it's mostly vibes and creepiness and the direction isn't clear. I do love it's version of Mina, she's a plucky girl who loves wrestling and has adorable freckles, unfortunately everyone besides Mina, Lucy and (probably?) Jonathan is a misogynist bully right now (don't they know that's Van Helsing's job?) (she's the first female student accepted into the school and they're NOT welcoming) but it will be interesting to see if and how they'll grow.

The other significant comics I read were Superman: Space Age (a retelling of Superman set throughout the late fifties to early eighties, really good stuff that makes use of the mythos to comment on the social upheaval of the time and has a good Lois which is how I always measure a Superman adaptation, I liked a lot of what it did with Batman though the ending with the Joker was pretty weak) and the newest Nagata Kabi- My Pancreas Broke But My Life Got Better- which had to rehash some previous stuff but as always was an interesting journey and I'm rooting for her. Other than that I've just been keeping up with my usual series.

Let's finish off with some pics from NYC! Warning, there's an NSFW pic from MOMA at the end, but it sure makes me laugh so I had to share:

Giant Aerial from Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

alongside this display! I love how they were specifically made to hold hands.

The display at Fifth Avenue!

Cute figures from Kinokuniya!

Some cool pieces at MOMA...

'

...including the dick chair.