What's all this, then?

I've been watching Andor every week with friends, and honestly I've really liked the three episodes a week release schedule, it's made every week feel like an event, and the show has been mostly immaculate.

Mostly immaculate.

We got to the finale and I was asked what I thought...and there was a long pause...followed by a second long pause....and then, 'I do not think Bix should have been in season two.'

I hated, hated, that the final shot of the show was Bix With Cassian's secret baby. I thought that it horribly undercut his final hero walk through Yavin past the surviving members of Luthen's resistance accompanied by swelling heroic music. I've heard people suggest that it meant that Cassian's sacrifice wasn't in vain, and, like, it already wasn't. He succeeded. He got the plans out. He's the reason that Luke could take out the Death Star, that the Empire was defeated, that Anakin turned away from the dark side.

I've always hated the idea that having a biological child is the only thing that makes your life meaningful or gives you a legacy. It's why I hate the third season of Star Trek: Picard, a competently made season of television that I have borderline violent feelings towards.

I've been thinking a lot about Andor in relation to Arcane, two shows that were originally planned to go five seasons, had excellent, albeit very slowly paced first seasons, then were reworked to be over in two. Andor is admittedly the more sympathetic example, where the creative team were burned out and didn't feel like they could do five, whereas it seems like Arcane was cut down because it wasn't driving enough new players to League of Legends.

And, honestly, no one should play League of Legends, unless your idea of a good time is being called a slur by a child, in which case Go with God.

But Arcane tried to solve the problem by having fours seasons of plot happen in one, and ended up with a season of pretty rushed and occasionally incoherent television. Whereas I think Andor handled it much better; the four act structure, with every act skipping forward a year, really worked for me. I think it also helped that it had the skeleton of Star Wars to hang on, so that when the rebellion jumps from being Luthen and assorted lunatics running around the galaxy sticking spokes in the wheels where they can to a military/government in waiting on Yavin you don't find it jarring, it's like, Oh, yeah, this is where I came in in A New Hope.

And the pacing really worked when it came to the rising tensions of Ghorman, that it took years, but by the time the massacre happened not only did no one come to help, no one was ever going to because the propaganda arm of the Empire had successfully reduced the people there to some kind of inferior, unworthy form of persons who had had brought this on themselves.

Where the pacing didn't quite land for me was with the characters, the show rightly seemed to have some pretty clear ideas about where the characters would end up after five years, but because they only had twelve episodes the character development had to be sketched in broad strokes.

And, yeah, some of them were playing on easy; Luthen dies before seeing his new dawn, just as he said he would; Mon Mothma defects and is an open member of the rebellion, because we already know that's what happens.

Some of them just work; like, I don't need to see any more of Dedra and Syril's relationship to get it. And the endings both characters got were pitch perfect.

RIP Syril, you were this close to being a person; Long life, Dedra, no sympathy for fascism Barbie.

I did really appreciate the way the show showed both that fascism eats its young, and that it took so long for the Rebel Alliance to get its shit together because it was for the longest time a leftist circular firing squad.

But the story pacing v. character development thing brings me back to Bix. Like, it felt like there was a version of this show that went five seasons where Bix dealing with her torture at the hands of the Empire and getting her revenge is her season two arc, but because we have to wrap this up in twelve episodes that gets one scene, and then Bix is just kind of hanging around because her being there with Cas's baby in the final shot has already been penciled in.

The other bum note in the series was the way the Cinta/Vel stuff was handled. And, like, I've been noodling on this, because I don't hate that Cinta died in principle, but I do hate that in an otherwise immaculately written show it was like someone had gone 'Chat GTP, write me a dead lesbian storyline.' I also kind of hate that in the first season Cinta/Vel was written in that annoyingly 'plausibly deniable, live slug reaction, this has to edited out for hostile markets' Disney Star Wars way, only for season two to make it explicit only to kill the the non-white one, like, I have limited patience for straight people being very proud of themselves for reinventing the Hays Code.

I am a fucking hypocrite though, becuase I have been shipping Vel/Kleya ever since Vel eyed her up at the wedding and I was only delighted that she show ended with one of my favourite shippy dynamics: to whit, a literal drowned rat of a woman has somehow become the responsibility of another, differntly fucked up woman who emphatically did not sign up for this,

Anyway, I freakin' love this show. Like, I've got niggles, sure, but it's like.... it's like, Star Wars is never going to feel like t did when you were nine, because you're not nine anymore, but sometimes. when the stars align, it can feel like this.

The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo - So this is a horror-ish novella set in 1920s Appalachia where a trans man (not the language used, obvs) working as a sort of roaming nurse comes to a small town that's suffering a fit of religious mania that's manifesting both as hostility to outsiders and the town collectively trying to take their local gender nonconforming teenager in hand. And it was working for me as a tale of 'we have always been here/some places can be basically safe to be a weird kid in right up until they aren't.'

Then it took a turn towards rape revenge fantasy that I wasn't wholly onboard with, then a sharp right turn towards graphic monsterfucking.

So, uh, that was a bit weird.

Hot Summer by Elle Everhart - I don't like reality television. I don't think it's bad, I don't think liking it is some kind moral failing, it's just by and large not my cup of tea. That said, there is one reality show that I do think should not exist and no one should watch, and that's Love Island, a show that has a death toll.

So if you can forget that this is a lightly fictionalised version of Love Island (something I only could intermittently) and if you are lucky enough to have never seen the show and so not get hungup on 'Hang on, there's no way there would ever be a queer love story on Heterosexuality: The Show' then this is a cute enough contemporary f/f romance.

A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling - Obviously I read this because of the title, and the actual book doesn't quite live up to it, but this tale of a bunch of libertarians who move to a small town to prove that their ideas can work, and run smack bang into that fact that, like most things government does, there were bear control laws in place for a reason was pretty compelling, especially now that *gestures at everything*

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Hostile Alien Planets and Why You Should Not Get Trapped On Them. My new favourite Tchaikovsky; yes, more than the spider planet one, yes, more than the one narrated by the Good Boy. It's just that good.

I got outbid on some fancy Tchaikovsky special editions in the genre creators for trans rights auction, which was fine, good cause and all. But I saw Tchaikovsky talking about the auction on bluesky, and he said something like if you'd read his work he hoped you'd already know he was a a supporter of trans rights, and, like, it's always good to get confirmation that someone you're a fan of is a good egg, but I have read thousands of pages of that man's work and all I could have said about him with any certainty is 'I think that man likes bugs.'

Private Rites by Julia Armfield - 'King Lear and his dyke daughters.' I'm not paraphrasing, that's a line in the book. I really enjoyed Armfield's novella Our Wives Under the Sea, and her first full length novel has a lot of the same themes, to whit, queer women being sad while soaking wet. It is longer, so, um, there's that.