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AKC Courtneyyyyyy Culture Festival #225: Ota Yuki

The seventeenth generation feels really recent to me, but I realise that we've been talking about them since Doushitemo Kimi ga Suki da and Idol Nanka Janakattara arrived in 2022 and 2023 and featured prominent members of their generation amongst the senbatsu. Joining Yamazaki Sora, who has really come into her own as of late, Sato Airi, Hirata Yuki, and my fave, Hashimoto Eriko, Ota Yuki debuted in 2022 as a member of the kenkyuusei!

Yukitan!

Promoted to the regular members in 2024, we have yet to see Yukitan in the senbatsu, however, it is the opinion of this girl that this is long overdue if only because she shares the same favourite Detective Conan character as me, Haibara Ai, so perhaps it was not just me who was disappointed not to see her appear in last week's Meitantei Pretty Cure! That aside, Yukitan first appeared in the theatre as part of the opening act for the 2022 revival of Boku no Taiyou before going on to be part of the seventeenth generation's revival of Tadaima Renaichuu, Team A's fourth stage, where she appeared as centre for the song Faint.

In Yukichan, there's perhaps the first suggestion of how Team 8 have impacted younger girls auditioning. From the get go, she has declared her ambitions to tour with AKB48 across different prefectures, eagerly awaiting the revival of something that the former team were famous for. Yukichan might also not be the first member we've highlighted in our Wednesday columns to have had this experience, but she's the first I've noticed: having spent a year or so in the kenkyuusei, come 2023, she went directly to the "regular members," having never been assigned to a team. Perhaps there's a sense of longing that comes from that, a sense of achievement in having made it to AKB, but also a sense of forlornness that comes from knowing how AKB has changed. Yet, at the same time, this moment is a chance for girls like Yukichan to make AKB48 their own, so I'm really excited for that! With her role models being Kashiwagi Yuki and Murayama Yuiri, with her aspiration to be like Shinoda Mariko, I definitely think she can do it!

A tiny little story to sign off on: when Yukichan realised that eighteenth generation member, Kudo Kasumi, had caught her cold, she personally went to her house to deliver cold medicine. I think that's adorable!

AKB may be different from how it was before, but it's still no less important to me. Girls like Yukichan really do make all the difference.

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a bunch of movies!!

Gonna just catch up all in one post.

I Love Boosters (2026). Three professional shoplifters develop a grand plan to take down fashion maven and general asshole Christie Smith (Demi Moore).

This is Boots Riley’s sophomore outing. If you’ve seen his first film Sorry to Bother You, you know that you’re in for a colorful, satirical, absolutely bonkers time. If you haven’t, the closest other analogue I can think of is Everything Everywhere All At Once, except this is less about interpersonal relationships and more about the power of collective organizing.

It’s hard for me to talk about this film beyond the sum of its parts, so let’s talk about its parts. Riley LOVES color. There’s so much color. For a while Corvette (Kiki Palmer) and co are working in one of Smith’s own upscale fashion stores, which sell exactly one color at a time. The lighting is very colorful. The costuming is amazing and also colorful.

The score is incredible and may be my favorite part. You NEED to listen to the opening credits; it tells you basically everything you need to know about this movie.

The movie has a bit of a slow start, but it really kicks into gear when a brand new plot element arrives at about the halfway point, and by the end I honestly felt a little weepy, because how many movies are there about collective action???? Much less ones that are bonkers and fun and amazing?

Also Lakeith Stanfield is there. He's a [spoiler]. So you have that to look forward to. :')

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Is God Is (2026). Twin sisters go on a mission to murder their father, who set their mother on fire and left the sisters with burn scars.

First-time film director Aleshea Harris adapted her own play in this movie, and I will definitely be watching out for what she does next, because this is stylish and full of flair and ambition. The whole film has a sort of mythic feeling about it that reminds me a bit of O Brother Where Art Thou. The people we meet along along the way are each a necessary component of the sisters' journey, and each one feels a little bit uncanny. I love the use of text on the screen

The relationship between twins Racine and Anaia is the heart of the movie, and it's great. Anaia is more heavily burned, and Racine is her fierce and sometimes unwanted defender, a hot-tempered woman yearning for meaning who finds it when they're summoned by their dying mother, whom they had thought was already long-dead. "We're on a mission from God," Racine says at one point, calling out another great road trip classic. When Anaia protests, Racine says, "Our mama is like God, right? She made us."

The movie also has stuff about misogyny and domestic violence specifically among Black families, which I'm not qualified to comment on, but it too is wrapped up in heightened storytelling that I really enjoyed. Sterling K. Robinson is extremely menacing as their abusive father.

I will say that I was disappointed by the ending, both from a thematic and character perspective. But the ride up until then was great. One of my favorite movies of 2026.

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Carolina Caroline (2026). Caroline, a girl in smalltown Texas, falls in with a traveling con man, and they go on a road trip to find her estranged mother and do some crime along the way.

I watched this for my girl Samara Weaving, who stars as Caroline. However, in terms of movies about Kyle Gallner driving around committing crimes, I kept wishing I were watching The Passenger instead, which had a way more interesting relationship between its leads. I kept waiting for more meat to Caroline and her relationship with Oliver, and we just never get it. She's starry-eyed and a little naive, and she has abandonment issues. Somehow this leads to bank robbing. IDK man.

I wanted the movie to have more ambition. There are no surprises at any point, except maybe the decision to move from small-time cons at the beginning to suddenly robbing banks at gunpoint, a big tonal shift that goes unremarked by the movie. These aren't even bank heists, just regular armed robbery.

If you're hankering for a Bonnie and Clyde style thing, you could do worse, but maybe wait for streaming.

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Buffet Infinity (2025). Sometime circa the 90s, a sinkhole opens in the parking lot of an upstart new buffet, and in perhaps unrelated events, people start disappearing.

The most important thing about this cosmic horror movie is not the plot as such, but the fact that it is told (almost) entirely through TV commercials. This is a heck of a gimmick for a 90-minute feature film, and I will be honest, the movie did not quite pull it off. Towards the end it starts cheating, both with filmed segments that it's hard to imagine would ever actually go on TV (why not just film another take?) and a handful of scenes that didn't appear to be in-universe footage of any kind.

However, cheating aside, the movie managed to keep my attention through the entire runtime through however many, many 30-second to 2-minute clips. There are a few recurring characters, local businessfolk whose ads become progressively more unhinged and suggest more and more about the events, and I definitely had my favorites. (I ADORE Ahmed's terrible pawn shop raps.) The ads from the buffet also get more and more uncanny and over the top, but I think a big strength of the movie is playing on how so many real life ads already feel uncanny and fake; it just doesn't take much to tip that over into outright horror.

I can't say the ultimate reveals involving the L Ron Hubbard expy really worked for me. If anything, I think the movie should have had less plot and explained less. (See: Backrooms.) However, I kind of want to rewatch it from the beginning now that I know where all the plot threads are going, so I can better appreciate what it's doing.

Honestly, with a premise this unique, I don't think it matters if the movie is entirely successful. If "cosmic horror movie told through fictional ads" sounds like your jam, this is still absolutely worth your time.

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Horror movies! One on the big screen!

Backrooms (2026): I loved this!!! Admittedly, my reception has been coloured by the sheer delight of getting to go see it in theatre; I was able to book the perfect seat in an otherwise empty row, I treated myself to a big cup of mixed lollies in a fit of childlike exuberance, and all in all a great time was had while my husband generously managed the kids' bedtime alone. Under those circumstances the movie would have had to be very bad indeed before it would have dented my joy, but I do think it was genuinely good - especially for something made by a twenty-year-old youtuber.

Based on an internet creepypasta that I'd never heard of in my life but that is apparently hugely popular with Gen Z, Backrooms is about a struggling furniture store owner who passes through a wall in the back of his shop and finds himself in a liminal space of huge, labyrinthine office rooms that are just Not Quite Right: the architecture is all off-kilter, everything is faded yellow, and the space is completely empty aside from the scattering of random items in unlikely places throughout. His therapist gets roped into it as well, and two of his young employees. The ambience and sound design are key to the horror: not a lot of action happens, but the visual wrongness never lets up, and the awful noises made by the Mysterious Thing that stalks the backrooms had me clutching the armrests. If I get a second chance at an evening out then I am going to spend it on Obsession, but a part of me kind of wishes I could go back and see this one on the big screen again.

As Above, So Below (2014): My trip to see Backrooms was a second attempt at an evening out; the first one fell over, and As Above, So Below was my streamable-at-home consolation prize, plucked from a "You're obsessed with Backrooms, now what's next?" listicle. I can see their point, but the tone could hardly be more different and for me this one scratched a completely different itch. It's about a rogue archaeologist and her thrown-together team of urban explorers who blunder into a haunted hell dimension while searching the Paris catacombs for the Philosopher's Stone. It is ridiculous, corny, historically incompetent, and overall spooky as fuck. Someone clearly said, "Imagine if Indiana Jones was a beautiful twentysomething woman! And imagine if her tomb runs were even scarier and more deadly! No, don't worry about the plot, we're going for Vibes here, it doesn't have to withstand even three seconds of scrutiny! Also, I can get us approval to film in the actual real catacombs!" And then they took that as a mission statement and committed to it with their whole heart and soul. It was so dumb. I had such a good time.

The one misstep that I did actually take issue with was the choice to frame it as found footage. I get the vision, I do! But the script and the acting and the overall story are just way too campy to pass as subject matter for low-lit handcams. Absolutely no one is mistaking these people as real. They are actors reading lines. They are so, so obviously actors reading lines. They are having earnest dialogue about Nicholas fucking Flamel! The found footage conceit kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the camp, and the camp kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the found footage, and I think ultimately it would have been a much stronger movie if they'd just scrapped the handcams and accepted that nothing about the project was going to lend itself to realism. It should have been shot like the 80s-action/adventure-inspired brain candy it was.

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canon: e.asian: korea

A Shop for Killers, season 2! makes high pitched noises

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The Villisca Axe Murders: 1912 Tragedy

On this day in 1912, eight people were murdered with an axe in their home in Villisca, Iowa. Josiah Moore and his wife Sarah, along with their four children and two neighbor children, were killed in their beds by a person who has never been identified. And I mean never—the internet doesn’t even have a favorite suspect.

I used to live in Iowa, and I have actually been to the “Villisca Axe Murder House,” now a museum and historical site, and a frequent host to ghost tours. Visitors are free to leave their mark on the rafters in the barn, writing messages which range from the usual names and dates to oddly creepy warnings like “Don’t stand on your head in the kids’ room.” On my visit I was struck by how little has changed, though Iowa has traveled more than a century into the future: at the end of our tour, we were discussing suspects and expressing sympathy for the victims, exactly as people have been doing outside that house for over 100 years.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some creepy writing prompts, such as:

Midwestern serial. My personal favorite Villisca suspect is a serial killer riding the rails, as posited in the book The Man From the Train by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James. This is because there were a lot of similar axe murders at the time, all over the country, and even internationally. You could write a story about several killers with the same M.O., or one really prolific murderer who likes to travel. On the paranormal side, you could have someone killing in a pattern to cast a spell or harness a demon. You could even have a ghost train that carries your phantom killer on a never-ending mission.

Image credit

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ The Vampire Haven erotic romance series ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers

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flcl,
white noise

The Year Yuri Broke

I finished watching the adaptation of Nikumaru's Bad Girl over the week-end and I loved every moment of it, having first encountered it during late autumn whilst it was still airing thanks to a pop-up shop promoting it in Onoden. Up the staircase from the first floor towards the Cospla store, the maid café I have never visited, and a handful of other concessions, there were numerous pictures of the characters and highlights from each episode; I bought a little acrylic stand of Ruru-senpai and went to Comic ZIN to buy the first volume of the manga. I find four koma manga a little difficult to read, but adaptations of such material always seem to win me over, she said, thinking specifically of Asobi Asobase. I was surprised to discover Bad Girl's adaptation was handled by Yonemura Shoji, possibly most famous for writing a lot of your least favourite Heisei Kamen Rider episodes but also Sh15uya, which was good. I was also surprised at how easily the show gets romantic. Despite main character Yuutani Yuu's obliviousness regarding the feelings of others around her, her admiration and adoration of her senpai, Mizutori Atori, is never not displayed as anything other than romantic. I wasn't expecting that. I thought this show was going to make me work, but instead it's incredibly open about the way it depicts its relationships. I'm kind of surprised at how often we're seeing this kind of thing, if I'm honest.

A month ago, I was caught unawares by the opening of Kamiina Botan, Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana on youtube and it really had an impact on me. I tried to resist it because I thought it was trying to lead me astray, so I bullied Rei into watching it for me, and then I felt left out, so I started watching it too, and, like Bad Girl it really doesn't shy away from framing its relationships as more than friendships without forcing the issue, and again, I'm surprised. Previously, there's always been the accusation that introducing elements from yuri was solely to the benefit of a male audience. Relationships between women were oft referred to as "softer" or "gentler" during the '00s when we began to see a certain type of service in anime aimed at young males. I really am not a fan of "the yuri subplot," I think its dismissive of what the genre has to offer to reduce it to fanservice in shonen manga, but at the same time a lot of those depictions hit me in the heart when I didn't have anything else so I don't want to criticise them even if I believe we can do better now; what we're seeing in 2026, though... is this the year that yuri breaks fully into the mainstream? Despite the reality of being gay in Japan, it feels like more and more we're seeing shows that frame its relationships between women in a romantic fashion. In many ways, like the service of the moè boom, I benefit from these casual depictions, but I don't always feel good about that. Having said that, both Bad Girl and Kamiina Botan are pretty amazing, you guys.

Having reached the point where I am current with fansubbed releases of Wingman and having also watched all of the live action show—and surprisingly really enjoyed it!—I thought I'd return to another Katsura Masakazu adaptation, and whilst I didn't intend to, regardless, I found that I watched all six episodes of Video Girl Ai over the week-end.

There's a thread between Ai and Wingman. If anything, it could be said that the former is essentially the plot of the latter if you strip away all of the homages and references to tokusatsu; a boy with feelings for a girl is interrupted by the surprise introduction of a second girl intent on meddling in his love life. The situation is a little more complex in Video Girl Ai though, and there's a sense of realism that is leant into by Production IG's approach to the setting and surroundings of these moments between Ai, the heartbroken Moteuchi Yota, Hayakawa Moemi, the object of his affections, and Niimai Takashi, Yota's best friend and the boy whom Moemi is in love with—there's no threesoming their way out of this one as Wingman often seems to imply with its story. Video Girl Ai has a sort of sadness that feels real even in its more dream-like moments, and despite how forward and often crass Ai is, there is a genuine emotional root at the heart of the depictions of Yota, Moemi, and Takashi that reads far more like shoujo manga. I think this is testament to Katsura's versatility in telling stories.

Moemi!

Between Monday and now, I also read the first volume of the long out-of-print Tokyopop release of the FLCL novels by Enokido Yoji and was really hit by the things it makes explicit. The book covers the first two episodes, if I remember rightly, and it goes all in on the relationship between Naota and Mamimi in a way that is both tender and hurtful and real. I don't feel I need the subtext to be made explicit as to this, but at the same time, I'm also grateful for it. I think Enokido's prose handles the subject with sensitivity and delicacy, but also with honesty, which makes all the difference. "At times like this, young men glimpse, if dimly, how big the love they seal inside themselves can be," reads the narrative at one point, and I felt that, I could see myself in both these roles in the way Naota and Mamimi are trying to navigate adolescence and it really hammered home how FLCL is such a beautiful testament to the pain and the joy of being young. In the afterword, producer Sato Hiroki says that they were responding to the demands of otaku who wanted something "the old men who follow subcultures, all the Shibuya teen-agers, and the girls who read cute comics won't get." Instead, what FLCL is is a near universal experience. In its obtuseness, in its obliqueness, it is so emotionally honest that the surface details just wash over you and what you are left with is the impression of being young, of wanting to get out, wherever you, of falling in love for the first time.

Unsurprisingly, this is what to-day's entry seems to be about. This morning, around the corner from Earl's Court, I saw a brightly coloured Vespa parked in the dull sunlight of early morning.

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WE LIVE AGAIN

Watch on YouTube

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media: music

Music post

Apparently I have not posted about The Night Eternal since the start of 2025, which is insane, since in the whole intervening time they have been pretty much my favourite band after Iron Maiden. Their style - melodic, mournful heavy metal framed around themes of incredibly campy dark occultism - gets better the more I listen to it. In the last eighteen months I have played both albums to death and beyond, and now they have a new one slated to release in August!!! I'm so excited. Here is the first single they've just released, inspired - so the band say in their release statement - by Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time:

Watch on YouTube

And they're touring Europe with Messa! I am expiring from envy. I am sinking down into the netherworld to wallow in a pit of jealous, yearning darkness.

In other musical news, I've been getting back into classical lately. This is great because it gives me something to talk about with my dad, and also because there is SO MUCH glorious Christian music out there for which I'm now able to develop whole new nuances of appreciation. I've been aiming for variety, but I keep just wanting to relisten to Verdi's Requiem, which has got to be the most heavy metal piece of music in the world that contains not a single electric guitar. Go on. Listen to Dies Irae and tell me you do not feel moved to headbang even a little bit.

Other current favourites include Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht (so beautifully dark and dissonant!) and Chopin's Nocturnes. I've also been listening to the Brandenburg Concertos a whole bunch trying to force myself to Get(TM) Bach; I would not say I'm quite there with the Getting(TM) yet, but they are undeniably impressive.

A few nights ago I watched La bohème, the 1988 Pavarotti and Freni video recording. Growing up this was one of my sister's favourite operas (not mine - I was always more of a Mozart girlie) and it's so so funny to experience it again now and see the indelible imprint it has left on her fannish tastes. This woman LOVES herself a good pure, angelic woobie dying slowly and tragically of an incurable disease while the whole assembled cast look on and weep. Always has done, always will do. Meanwhile I am a heartless monster who was impatient for Mimi to just kick the bucket already. Musetta was so much more likable. I also very much enjoyed the scenes of the men clowning around, finding moments of joy in the midst of their desperate poverty. It's gritty, grounded storytelling by operatic standards. But I think next time I watch a full opera, I will go for something by Mozart.

Current Mood: tired

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Toku (and one general) Fandom Events

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Current Mood: mellow

Sapphic Summer 2026, Olympia/Glacia, Writing Poetry

Visionary, you
Gaze up at the stars, transfixed
Oh, to be your star

What is this I see?
Writing poetry, are you?
Enjoying yourself?

You're far better, dear
I am not a poetess
But I'll write for you.

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this is a movie post I guess

- Gutted by the death of Anthony Stewart Head.

- I've been watching so many movies lately. Many other life tasks and ambitions have been iffy, but an A+ in movie watching. Yesterday I saw Backrooms again. Still good a second time! Cosmic horror and impossible spaces are exactly my jam, but also it turns out the A24 vibe really works for it. I've spent a lot of time scrolling social media about it. Tomorrow I might go see Obsession again.

- The thing about the backrooms is their basic concept and visuals are very easy to replicate, so no doubt we're all going to be totally sick of them within two months, but in the meantime, this backrooms riff on the official McDonald's channel is a lot of fun. I can't say it makes me want to go eat a burger, but as an elder millennial some of the imagery definitely got me.

- As someone who likes both numbers and horror movies, it's been a hell of a time to be watching the box office. Obsession INCREASED its receipts for the second AND the third weekend, which is absolutely absurd outside of the Christmas holidays (when releases and days off shift a lot of patterns around). "Little horror wins big" obviously calls The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity to mind, but in terms of percentage increases the most recent comp is probably freaking E.T.. Incredible.

Meanwhile Backrooms obliterated all A24's previous records in the first weekend and is now, in week 2, their biggest movie ever.

- Speaking of Youtubers making good: The Future Of Horror Filmmaking Is YouTube ... If You're A Dude. Yeah. :/

- The Dog Stars doesn't look good, but Jacob Elordi looks good in it, so I'll probably still see it. ;__; And Margaret Qualley, too!

- The Dead Meat Horror Awards have released their list of movies, although not the categories yet. I did such a good job watching horror movies last year that there are only 2-3 here that I haven't seen and might want to. (Dangerous Animals, The Toxic Avenger, maybe Black Phone 2. Maybe Ick??)

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: somewhere
Current Music: 島宮えい子 - ディオラマ

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"Courtney wants to fight!"

I saw my lovely friend Katie for coffee on Friday after-noon and was delighted to discover Foyles on TCR now has a designated yuri bookcase. I had to stop myself from leaning against the counter whilst buying books and shouting, "Please let me curate your yuri section." I did make Katie take a photo of me by the bookcase in question however. It's such a narrow thing and it's just filled with whatever volumes they had in stock arranged by series and with very little care, but I'm so happy it exists. I would be remiss if I mentioned that Foyles hadn't introduced a yaoi bookcase as well but because my only interest in yaoi is narratives about pretty boys dressing as girls, I feel like I can't offer you a detailed report on this side of things.

It felt progressive when Foyles introduced specific bookcases for shoujo and shonen manga, but I've been spoilt by animate and HMV abroad, and whenever I've been in central, I've always found myself quietly yearning for some kind of collective space for yuri titles so I'm really, really happy and really, really grateful for this, and that sheer joy momentarily overrides my need to argue with everyone—especially Rebecca Silverstein—over what is and isn't yuri in my need to become the old-man-heading-towards-the-jukebox meme but for niche comic book genres.

Lately, I find myself really missing jelly sandals. Even though we've had a week of rain, I keep thinking about buying a new pair of jelly sandals, the type with a little wedge heel, the quintessential British summer shoe. I've also been reading the Higurashi missing scenes light novel, Kuradishi-hen, translated by 07th translations this week, which is full of small treasures. As well as this, I've been reading A White Rose in Bloom by Nakamura Asumiko, who I think is often more popular for her yaoi series. One of the things I like about this title is how it touches on traditions from English literature, the kind of books I read as a child—although this does make feel bitter anew about the fact I'm going to miss that Mallory Towers production!

Now that work is coming to a close, I'm pretty fired up about moving on and trying to get back into the swing of things. Like British summertime, however, that may change at any moment.

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maevedarcy: update

Quick Update

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Current Music: CHEMY×STORY

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Fannish Fifty #30: Some Gotchard Oshikatsu

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"I plan to live forever. Or die trying."

Before I had the cold (which is not entirely over, but is much better now) I had a few things I was going to put into a post. They are now extremely random, mostly belated, and not equal, so apologies for a motley post, but I did want to note:

1.

beccadg is having a lot of health issues and has a GoFundMe.

2. I saw two posts about Small Prophets, one talking about the influence of all the stopmotion children's animation in it, and another person saying that whatever you'd call the exact inverse of English folk horror, that's what Mackenzie Crook's work is. All of which smashed together in my head to make me go: OMG, he made Bagpuss for adults! (I mean, it's not, but also it is. And Bagpuss is also some sort of exact inverse of 70s folk horror, too. Artisanal children's TV in terms of being literally crafted by hand and its simple but beautiful storytelling structure.)

3. Before I got too ill to do such radical things as watch TV on my PC again, I managed to actually watch ep1 of Miami Medical (with Jeremy Northam and Lana Parrilla), and discovered that when you watch a full ep instead of just Lana clips, what's up with Jeremy Northam's accent is much clearer, in that it was never meant to be a US accent, just that his character had been working in Maryland for 10 years and the "I'm from Maryland, as you can tell by the accent" was actually ironic. Someone calls him "Mr Tea and Biscuits" in the next scene. (Most of the eps are there. Hopefully I shall be able to watch them sometime and all will become clearer than the random Lana snippets.)

4.

sovay pointed me to uploaded episodes of The Expert on YouTube, including 2 from 1971 that I had managed to miss featured... James Maxwell! \o/ I was even too ill to manage watching this on my tablet for ages, too.

In true JM form he was very nervy and awkward and also unfortunately too gentle and unmanly to survive a small push in the 1970s. Alas. He is such a delicate 6"3 baritone flower, lol. He fell over in the beginning of part 2 and next thing I knew they were doing an autopsy on him and now I'm too worried about where this is going to watch the rest (yet). (The channel also seems to have a lot of rare stuff - this is a never released on DVD or repeated item, so they must have a collection of their own, presumably.)

5. Bookending this, Michael Keating, better known to me as Vila from Blake's 7 died when I was too numbed from the cold to really comment on it - and then yesterday, the news broke about Anthony Head, too, and I was very sad to hear both & both by all accounts, lovely people too. Michael had apparently had dementia for some years and after B7 worked mainly in theatre, and also got very into rambling, but he didn't need to do more TV to leave an impact: Vila was iconic, someone he made a very likeable and relatable figure in the midst of all the rebels vs. Federation struggles. I'm watching Sesskasays react to B7 for the first time and, in these early stages, Vila is her favourite. Mine too. I love all the characters, and adored Jacqeline as Servalan, but Vila is my favourite. He's the 'small man' archetype out of a fantasy story, living in a snarky fascist space universe. How could he not be?

I was late to the party with Buffy (although I remember watching the Gold Blend ads as a child!) but as a newbie librarian, I borrowed the VHS tapes from our library, and Giles was of course immediately my favourite, and then Anthony Head was always marvellous in everything. I hadn't dreamed we weren't going to get a few more years yet of unexpected bonus ASH in random TV or radio. He was in DW (audio and visual), Jonathan Creek's pilot, Cabin Pressure, but 3 things other than Giles I'll remember him for, particularly:- his first TV appearance in Enemy at the Door, where he played the Martels' son Clive, trapped on the island after a misguided raid by the British army goes wrong; an outstanding performance in s1 of Spooks, where he played Tom Quinn's mentor, jaded and screwed up, in a tragic crash-and-burn guest turn (N.B. warning for all the things, this is Spooks); and at the other end of the scale, being absolutely marvellous and hilarious every episode of 5 series of Bleak Expectations as the villainous Mr Gently Benevolent, whether exercising his trademark evil laugh, reincarnated as a pigeon, reformed, unreformed, or cheeseboarding Pip (with a break for tea and biscuits). It got me through a rough summer in 2013. Washing up badly is not the same as washing up evilly.

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The Wild Hunt

On this day in 1948, songwriter Stan Jones released Ghost Riders in the Sky, which tells a version of the Wild Hunt legend.

As the riders loped on by him

He heard one call his name

‘If you wanna save your soul

From hell a-riding on our range

Then, cowboy, change your ways today

Or with us you will ride

Trying to catch the devil’s herd

Across these endless skies

A mighty hunter and a pack of dogs, horses, or other beasts racing across the horizon, making a terrible noise as they rush above you! What could it mean? Well, that depends on who you are.

First, let’s say you might be—well, someone who’d end up on Santa’s naughty list. For you, the Wild Hunt can be more than a vision. It’s interactive! We’re talking Ghost Riders in the Sky here, aka Jacob Marley as a cowboy. This type of Wild Hunt is a warning from beyond.

Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post on the Wild Hunt for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:

Doomed riders. You could focus on the sadder figures— the poor souls (literally) who are already in the hunt for eternity. Sometimes these people committed the usual infractions: murder, theft, or just too much drinking. But other times, these folks have done a Very Specific Thing they may have be warned not to do, like hunting on the sabbath, or some other odd thing like don’t get off your horse until your dog jumps down. Fairies (and the devil) love this sort of warning! You can make it as absurd as you want, that’s the point. And if your character fails in this one strange thing, they can be doomed to the hunt forever.

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Reading post

The Employees by Olga Ravn, trans. Martin Aitken: This Danish novella tells the story of a corporate space expedition gone wrong through a series of transcribed statements from employees aboard the ship. The statements are framed as having been given to a review team sent by the head office; no further context is supplied, except what can be pieced together from the statements themselves. The employees comprise natural born humans and lab-made cybernetic individuals called humanoids. Conditions are dire; both kinds of employee are effectively slaves, and devotion to the company has been deeply embedded in their psyches. Despite this, a rudimentary sort of rebellion is fomenting. The higher-ups have been rolling out a series of cheap, easily scalable technologies designed to paper over the catastrophic emotional wounds they are inflicting on their workforce, the latest of which are a mysterious set of objects from an alien planet that seem to exert some sort of lulling effect on people who get close to them. This ends about as well as anyone who doesn't sit on a board of directors could have told you from the start.

So basically, this story is a critique of late capitalist office culture. The message is not exactly subtle, but the trappings are so enthrallingly weird and creative that it ends up feeling like a lot more than the sum of its parts.

And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas: This is a memoir by an established travel writer and devout Anglican who spends a year trying to become a nun. My first temptation is to scrutinise whether she really meant to be a nun or had just scented another marketable adventure, but I'm intentionally slapping that impulse away, because the book is lovely and deserves to be taken on its merits. And regardless of her initial purity of intention, the experience takes Christmas to some very heavy places. A session of lectio divina near the start of the process stirs up the memories of a rape she's spent decades of her life pretending never happened, so while discerning a possible vocation and grappling with her religious identity, she also ends up having to walk this painful path of trauma healing.

I also suspect that Christmas' obvious unsuitedness to cloistered life is exactly what makes the book work: she makes a good mediator between the kind of woman who is capable of becoming a nun, and the kind of woman (hi) who is not remotely capable of becoming a nun but could stand to profit from learning more about their ways. Christmas' fantasies of a life spent in an aesthetically pleasing state of leisurely communion with God are promptly supplanted by a hefty chore load, a jam-packed worship timetable, and the demand for a total renunciation of self-will. It’s not the big picture stuff she ends up chafing against. It’s the petty deprivations, like the dowdy habits (Christmas considers herself a fashionista) and the annoyance of not being allowed to finish her game when the hour of recreation ends. I get this. I think almost all of us probably get this, regardless of our vocation. I would give my life for my kids without a moment’s hesitation but will I give my morning coffee? Will I close my browser window, right this second, and go do something that benefits them instead? Because that’s what convent life is set up to train nuns to do. And watching an ordinary, self-willed woman fail at it is somehow very inspiring: I couldn’t do it either, not properly, but perhaps I could start doing a little bit more of it here and there! And perhaps that would be better than nothing!

At one point Christmas shared a remark from a priest, that taking confession from nuns is like being stoned to death with popcorn. I think that image will stick with me for a long time to come.

Current Mood: tired

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