Elizabeth Sandifer

Hm. I freely admit, this is a slightly tough and weird one for me to review. Not for anything having to do with the episode – just that I watched it twenty-four hours after moving house and socially instead of my previously standard Game of Thrones ritual of pizza and relative solitude. So I don’t know if my sense that it was an oddly disjointed and directionless thing was simply because I was disjointed, or because this was actually an odd and slightly off-kilter thing for an eighth episode. I suspect at least partially the latter – the odd structure of a Lannister-focused episode with a pair of Hound/Arya scenes bolted onto each end (via hard cut in each direction) harkens back to some of the weird and half-baked approaches of Season Three. And there’s a relative absence of driving and climactic momentum that jars for an eighth episode.

The most obvious thing to point to in that regard – and it’s a genuinely peculiar move – is that Jon and Sansa aren’t in it. The preview makes it pretty clear that we’re doing a single location battle episode for our penultimate one, which is good and exciting, but it’s positively bizarre not to include a scene along those lines that might gesture towards the sense of impending climax. Instead the plot leaves that out, which gives the episode an oddly hollow feel, especially since its only vague contribution to that plot is the thoroughly anticlimactic killing of the Blackfish, a move that both departs somewhat abruptly from the books and that raises the question of why the hell we set out on this particular plot line in the first place. He just turns a corner after a dumb line about how Brienne will serve Sansa better than him (as though it’s an either-or choice), and that’s apparently that for a character we went to great length to bring back after three years.

It’s not a total loss – the Jaime and Brienne scene is delightful, and the Jaime/Edmure scene is quite good as well (especially the use of the “things we do for love” line) – but the Riverrun material this week is at once lengthy and mostly tedious. Even Bronn and Podrick don’t really work. And yet a huge chunk of the episode is spent there. Not only that, a huge chunk of work across the season has been spent making it so that we actually remember who the hell Edmure and Brynden Tully are. And yet it seems for the most part to amount to nothing. It’s possible that the tenth episode will manage to find something to do with this plot that redeems it, but right now it seems utterly pointless.

And this isn’t the only moment that plays out weirdly. Daenerys’s return to Meereen is inexplicably limp, coming as it does after a two minute “and now the Masters welch on the deal from four episodes ago” siege that, while a fair amount of money was spent making it look nice, still feels ridiculously perfunctory.…

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From worst to best of what I bought. At the end is a list of my planned purchases for next week. Anything you’re gutted to see absent from that list, take it up in comments.

Wonder Woman: Rebirth #1

A hot mess, but potentially a forgiveable one – certainly I’ll continue with the first issue or two of the actual Rucka run, as I have historically liked his Wonder Woman. But this barely deserves to be called a comic – the overwhelming majority of it is simply an internal monologue on Wonder Woman’s part. And not an internal monologue with tension and drive, nor, for that matter, with much artistry. It’s mostly just a restatement of the fact that Wonder Woman’s origin story is thoroughly and completely fucked. Then Wonder Woman punches a mirror and goes to Olympus for answers, only it’s apparently not really Olympus and there aren’t any answers given. Or, actually, questions asked. Seriously, I don’t think Marvel and DC have managed a feat of synchronized suckage as bad as Rebirth and Civil War II since Zero Hour and the Clone Saga were bowing at the same time twenty-two years ago.

New Avengers #12

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this issue, but there’s not much that’s massively compelling about it either. The character bits are fun – Ewing does some excellent Squirrel Girl bits, a great Hawkeye beat, and some nice setup (it’s good to see the Maker back, for instance). But on the whole, it’s kind of dismaying for this to already be caught up in another crossover I’m disinclined to read, and I suspect this’ll be my last issue barring reader intervention.

Darth Vader #21

Solid rising action, with the requisite things you expect from Darth Vader. Vader intimidates and kills people, Aphra and Triple-Zero are funny, everything moves inexorably towards a conclusion. but Gillen’s Darth Vader arcs have all been end-loaded, and his last one looks like no exception. 

The Wicked + The Divine #20

Hm. I can’t say I’m overly thrilled with this issue, mostly because it handles the “how Laura survived” issue in a way I generally dislike, which is to reveal that what we saw was presented in an actively misleading manner. It’s not a bad issue – the entire “Nergal” section is absolutely hilarious, Cassandra is consistently delightful, and Matthew Wilson is doing some really cool, weird stuff with the colors. But as big reveals go, this one is at the moment leaving me a bit cold. Although I’ve high hopes that it’ll work out, because it’s Gillen and WicDiv.

Injection #10

The second arc ends with lots of chilling, meaty stuff, beginning with Ellis doing the classic detective “bring everyone together to explain the plot” resolution, and ending with a nice, disturbing sequence of strange horrors inflicted upon the world by the Injection. In the middle is some fun discussion of money, magic, and religion, and also discussion of sex with ghosts. I hope the break before this comes back isn’t too brutally long, as it’s an utter delight.…

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Kevin and James are joined by “their friend Thomas,” according to the episode description, which doesn’t sound suspicious and like it’s just going to be James putting on a funny voice at all. In any case, they talk about more classic westerns (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) before moving on to evolutionary horror with a discussion of one of the flat-out greatest Doctor Who serials of all time, Ghost Light.

You can listen to that right here.…

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Take your pick on who’s body posture is better here, Jack Gleeson or Natalie Dormer.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister,

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth

Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Melisandre

Kraken of the Dreadfort: Theon Greyjoy

Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon

Direwolves of the Wall: Bran Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

Shields of King’s Landing: Brienne of Tarth

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

Flayed Men of the Dreadfort: Ramsay Snow

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins. Meereen is empty.

The episode is in seven parts. The first is three minutes long and is set in the forests around the Dreadfort. The opening image is of Ramsay and Miranda running happily through the woods

The second is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from Theon watching the dogs devour Ramsay and Miranda’s prey to a plate of sausages.

The third is six minutes long and is set at the Dreadfort. The transition is by hard cut, from Jaime and Bronn sparring to Roose Bolton and his men arriving at the Dreadfort.

The fourth is six minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Ramsay smiling to an establishing shot of the gardens.

The fifth is five minutes long and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion smashing a cup to the fire.

The sixth runs four minutes long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Melisandre to a POV shot from Summer.

The seventh runs twenty-three minutes minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from Bran’s vision of a dragon flying over King’s Landing to, shortly after, an establishing shot of the city. It features the death of Joffrey Baratheon by poisoning. The final image is of Joffrey having landed on a snake and died.

Analysis

“The Lion and the Rose” demands to be read in comparison with “The Rains of Castamere,” a structural conceit straightforwardly inherited from A Storm of Swords and worn on the episode’s sleeve as Olenna laments the horror of killing a man at a wedding while palming the poison Littlefinger has smuggled her. In the book this marks the completion of Melisandre’s blood magic, the death of the last warring king save for Stannis. Here it is simply a bit of symmetry performed over the season break – the ostentatious death set piece previously associated with ninth episodes unexpectedly slotted into the traditionally sleepy second episode. This is tremendously clever – indeed, it’s by far the best trick the show has pulled since “Baelor” itself, very nearly justifying the tawdry spectacle of the Red Wedding.

The most basic comparison to make, then, is the fact that all told twenty-three minutes of “The Rains of Castamere” take place at the Twins, whereas that’s the length of the final part of “The Lion and the Rose” alone, with another nine minutes worth of King’s Landing earlier in the episode.…

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A tremendously effective tone piece of rising action. The decision to do a cold open to dispatch the episode’s headline event sets the tone well, and seems where you have to start in looking at the episode. First, the obvious criticisms, which are numerous: they literally bring him back after sixteen episodes with nothing more than a Missy-esque “well I escaped”; there’s nothing like room to actually build his arc this episode; it amounts to a Martin-esque “I BROUGHT YOU ANOTHER VIEWPOINT CHARACTER I HOPE YOU LIKE IT” of exactly the sort that the show historically does poorly (and for that matter so does Martin). Fine. But of at least equal weight is the sort of bloody-minded televisual efficiency with which it’s done. The Hound does Unforgiven and we got Ian McShane to be the walking cliche needed to do it. Fair enough. It’s hard to complain about an eleven minute western shot in Northern Ireland with Rory McCann and Ian McShane.

Aside from giving the episode a sense of oddness from the get-go, it sets an almost necessary theme; one that’s fairly quickly emphasized as we deal both with fellow religious fanatics (and Maribald is definitely a religious fanatic, even as he’s a somewhat more straightforwardly sympathetic one than the High Sparrow) and old wars. The relatively large number of parts and of hard cuts belies the tightness of the episode, with scene after scene of people preparing for battles and getting dragged into old conflicts. Things like the cut from Lyanna Mormont to the Kingslayer and Blackfish’s parlay and back to Jon Snow are elegant things. And it’s difficult to seriously call the Hound-Arya-Hound sequence at the end a set of arbitrary “hard cuts” even as they don’t quite fit into any of the standard categories of transition. 

There’s also a stripped simplicity to the majority of scenes. All of them have straightforward stakes and a clear structure of someone trying to get what they want. For once the profusion of short scenes is simply an episode moving quickly and with pace. Even the quiet scenes have great moments – Olenna’s “I wonder if you’re the worst person I’ve ever met” is fantastic, as (once again) is Natalie Dormer’s performance of “I am very clever and two steps ahead of everyone else in the room.” And the Yara/Theon scene is a small delight, with some of the best chosen nudity in the series’ history, a bunch of great lines (Gemma Whelan’s delivery of “fuck justice then, we’ll get revenge” is perfect) and a throwaway line about Daenerys that does a lot of larger structural work for the season. And the short Arya scene is quite effective, abruptly putting Arya in a very new sort of danger – she’s literally never had any sort of serious injury before, and seeing Maisie Williams get to do a very standard bit of Game of Thrones acting for the first time in season six is a delight. 

Seeing Jaime in a decidedly different place, at once taken down a few notches and put in a new position of power, is similarly rewarding, and having both Clive Russell and Jerome Flynn back after absences of varying lengths is satisfying.…

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Linking this excellent bit of discussion about the ending of Neoreaction a Basilisk seems apropos to start. Not everything observed there was conscious, but it’s all entirely consistent with my thinking, and is some of what I want to pick at with the TERFs essay. More broadly, one of the points I circle around in Neoreaction a Basilisk is that the way forward (even if toward the eschaton) comes through conceptualizing the idea of the erotic.

In line with this goal, then, it is my pleasure to introduce Eruditorum Press’s new sex and gender columnists, Daniel Harper and Robin Bland. They’ll be writing actual essay-stuff for us every Friday going forward. I don’t want to speak too much about what to expect from them, not least because I really want them to make the slot their own as much as Jack, Jane, and Josh (OK, I admit it, Daniel and Robin are shameless diversity hires) have theirs. But I will say that I brought them on board because I think they will write about sex and gender the way Eruditorum Press’s vision demands – as something pregnant with strange possibilities and terrors. And to begin in that mission, Daniel will be along in literally just a minute with a piece on the Fourth Doctor, Leela, and kink relationships. 

(And to answer the very obvious question, Last War in Albion will be switching to posting chapters in their entirety as opposed to attempting weekly serialization.)…

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Announcements about the future of Comics Reviews at the end. For now, the usual.

Civil War II #1

I really try not to be that critic. You know – the one who says provocative things like “Bendis can’t write.” Because, i mean, he’s a tremendously popular and bankable writer, and his strengths are obvious. So let’s try this – Brian Michael Bendis sucks at modern comics serialization. Like, he is actively really fucking bad at it. Consider Civil War II, a comic in the middle of which the Free Comic Book Day Civil War II issue simply happens. Or, rather, doesn’t. You literally turn the page from the future-seeing Inhuman sayng “we have to call the Ultimates” to Tony Stark being told James Rhodes is dead. The entire Thanos fight happens in a several-weeks-ago comic. And there’s not even a caption box or anything. It’s just a page-turn and pow, a fight with Thanos has happened off-panel. There’s not even so much as a caption box, which I suppose makes sense, since what would they tell you? “Sorry, we took out the primary actual plot beat of this $6 comic and published it several weeks earlier. We’d tell you where to find it, but it was actually an issue we only distributed for one day and don’t even have a digital edition of, so basically, if you missed it, it sucks to be you.”

I mean, seriously, why the fuck would you even do this? All of Bendis, Alanna Smith, Tom Brevoort, Wil Moss, Axel Alonso, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, and Alan Fine presumably at some point signed off on the idea that their major summer event should be published like this. Why? I mean, not only is it profoundly reader-unfriendly, it doesn’t even read well. It outright feels like there are pages missing in the comic.

Past that… they fridge a woman and a black man. Nothing happens that hasn’t been spoiled extensively in interviews for months. (Actually, that’s not quite true, but we’ll wait for the next review for that.) And again, the comic is six dollars. Six. Fucking. Dollars. An entire month of Netflix is only $2 more than that. Countless excellent novels are available at that price point. Whole CDs of music. I bet there are even markets where you can see Captain America: Civil War for that if you go for a matinee. Or you can buy a forty-page comic that’s missing its main story beat.

Invincible Iron Man #10

Oh, and it also casually spoils all the main plot beats of this arc. I mean, not that there’s any major suspense over whether the characters are going to make it out of this or what will happen to Tony’s company. That’s not how comics suspense works and never has been. But still, this issue neither seems to lead to Civil War II in any meaningful sense, and now Civil War II is here and proclaiming the status quo after the arc’s conclusion. Brilliant, Marvel. Fucking brilliant.…

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And so, after a long month, we come to the end of the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter. At the time of writing, we’re over $13,000, which means this little bit of trolling went up last night. The last stretch goal is at $14,000, which is very achievable, but definitely requires that we have a big last day. So if you want any of the cool and Kickstarter-exclusive print editions, well, you’ve got less than 24 hours to make that happen. If you need to be nudged off the fence, Andrew Hickey wrote a not-review yesterday. And Sam Keeper wrote a review as part of a new feature she’s doing on her blog. 

Anyway, shameless self-promotion aside, I wanted to thank everybody for their support on this Kickstarter. I really wasn’t sure how sellable this book was. The answer turned out to be “it will net you more backers than any Kickstarter you’ve ever done.” Which is amazing. I’m floored. Every time I think I’ve just about gotten used to the incredible generosity of my readers and the sheer wonder of getting to do what I do for a living, something happens that just blows me away again. I am honored and humbled. Seriously. You’re all fucking amazing.

But that said, it’s not over yet. So please, one last time, spread the word. Run up to people you do not know in the streets and tell them about it. Graffiti major landmarks with advertisements for the book. Arrange the entrails of your next victim to spell out the url. Or at the very least, blast the link out on social media. I know it’s awkward and shit, but really, it helps. Even if you can’t afford to back, and lord knows I get that, just posting the link to your Facebook or Twitter or whatever with a “hey, this cool Kickstarter closes today” really does get the word out. Social media is a huge part of Kickstarter dollars – about a quarter of the money already pulled in came via people linking on social media. So if you can, really, it’s massively appreciated. 

We’ll be back tomorrow with more Vaka Rangi and the weekly comics reviews, which will include not one but two Alan Moore comics. And stop in Friday for another big, cool site announcement. But for now, for the very last time, a link to the Kickstarter.

Thanks for everything.…

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We hit $13k, so it’s time for magick.

First, Gnon, Nick Land’s horror-God of immanent reality, representing the awful truths to which neoreaction is supposedly the only possible response.

But as Land admits, the name is specifically a stand-in – a compromise to forestall the tedious debate over Gnon’s identity. But what is the erased name that Gnon stands in place of? And what might this beast be trying to hide by making its name forbidden? The answer is obvious with just a bit of inspection.

Crisis averted. It was just a silly puppet all along.…

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