Dobes Zone

 I'd reviewed this series briefly on my Letterboxd already, but I wanted to talk a little more in depth about the show.         In late 00's (or perhaps it was 2010?) a couple fansubbed episodes of Stop! Hibari-kun popped up on Youtube. I'd discovered them quite accidentally, I think via someone on twitter mentioning the show, and right then and there I was hooked. At that time, I wasn't really encountering a lot of trans media and hadn't yet started to think of myself as trans, but it definitely caught my interest. Sadly, it was only a few episodes and the updates stopped. I'd also found the manga, but it was also in a state of only partial fan translation. Flash forward to the present day, where I was happy to learn that not only was a full fansub completed, but the whole series is now available in a good crisp quality. It looks gorgeous and I'm so glad this odd little slice of queer anime history has been preserved. I'd love for there to be an offici...

       My choice to read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner started with my desire to re-read The Fall of the Kings, a book that I happened to pick up randomly at a book outlet when I was maybe 12 or 13. At this same outlet I'd also picked up Katie Waitman's The Merro Tree as well as The Essential Bordertown: A Traveler's Guide to the Edge of Faerie- a collection of short stories about the human world and the elfin world connecting. At this age I was totally rabid for anything SF/F and often brought home huge hauls of books from library book sales, where you could fill a bag for a couple dollars on the final days of the sale. It should probably surprise no one that a lot of my experiences with these books were formative and were some of my earliest experiences with queerness. Generally I was reading books that were only aimed at adults for the most part since I didn't really *do* YA except when I was quite little- barring some obvious furry bait choices like Redwall. The F...

     Mild spoilers ahead. More focused on themes than plot beats or infodumps about the characters though.        It's been too long since I've written a book review and I wanted to get in depth about an interesting book from a contemporary author. Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin is a book that takes on the tired trope of "what if only women survived an apocalyptic event" and revitalizes it with a transgender perspective. Considering that there were recent attempts to make a TV series out of Y The Last Man , a story which trots out this premise about "biological" sex that's been fucking tired since the 70s, it feels very necessary to have a trans take on the subject. I find too with a lot of SF/F (which is often adjacent or overlapping with horror) that a lot has absolutely regressed in the contemporary despite claiming some very by-the-numbers elements of progressiveness.      And I should note, regarding the 70's, James Tiptree Jr...

 2021 was a bad year in a lot of ways but it was a stellar year for me in terms of watching new films (or at least films that were new to me). I spent a lot more time doing solo watches as well as hosting movie streams over discord with a fun and friendly group of folks who share my passion for weirdo cinema. I'll admit that this year was not particularly one where I watched a ton of current releases but I'm hoping to catch up soon- still need to see Titane, Benedetta, tons of other stuff. So here in no particular ranking or order are a bunch of my faves from this year. I'm also listing at the end the movies I didn't enjoy. I'm not including short films on this list either but might consider making another post about favorite shorts by theme. You can also check out my letterboxd to see all the stuff I watched in 2021 and years prior. My Faves viewed in 2021 1) Shirley (2020) I started my year off strong by catching a digital screening of Shirley (paired with Leigh...

 Content warning: discussions of rape and CSA. Also spoilers about the series and how it ends. If you don't care about spoilers, give it a read.        Where to begin, really? I finally finished my watch through of Banana Fish, a series I'd started on some years prior but hadn't watched in its entirety until recently. I'd also read through a good portion of the manga and it's interesting to note that the anime is fairly faithful in its adaptation- just updating the setting to the contemporary and swapping the Vietnam war for the gulf war in the backstory.     At its heart, Banana Fish is a tragic romance between two teen boys from vastly different worlds- Ash Lynx, a former child prostitute turned gang leader who'd been groomed by a mafia don to be a successor, and Eiji Okumura, a gentle Japanese boy accompanying a journalist as an assistant. They meet on a story focused on Ash's gang and their lives get turned upside down as Ash is caught up in a...