Reviews for August 2023
Featuring Zelda, cool and new web serials, movies and video games. But not many.
Very short one this month, I was busy working on some nerd shit, as well as writing an upcoming full review for a novel. I did finish a rewatch of LOST’s first season, but I’d rather review that when I finish the entire show. Actually, here’s a freebie: the plot tightness is overrated, the character stuff is underrated. And despite very good acting, Kate is actually pretty flighty and unlikable from the very start.
2024 update: I’m retroactively adding the modern ★/* highlight system to the top of each old monthly review post, as it was a well received feature.
★: Time to Orbit: Unknown, Seventh Horcrux, Nope
*: Oppenheimer
If you missed the last month, here it is:
Tired, Retired
An ongoing Legend of Zelda fanfic, wherein Link, Zelda and Ganondorf are sent to the world of Skyrim after wishing their eternal battle would just stop.
There’s a lot of humor (though it’s the light, situational kind, where I have trouble finding any specific quotes to post here), but I wonder if the story has legs. It was already getting a bit old by the time I caught up.
Feels a bit like a fix-fic for Skyrim, with overpowered characters tackling the setting. I feel overall ambivalent about it, and don’t have much else to say.
Time to Orbit: Unknown★
Have you read The Martian or especially Project Hail Mary? Okay, do that if you haven’t.
Did you like them? You’ll like this. Did you hate them? You’ll hate this.
I refuse to say anything more about this story beyond the bare basics: it’s an ongoing hard sci-fi web serial about a protagonist with no information slowly discovering all the information. It gets my top recommendation, just make sure you get enough sleep. Good luck.
Seventh Horcrux★
I am Lord Voldemort, and I was one step away from conquering Wizarding Britain.
October 31st, 1981 began as a fairly normal day – arranging raids, crucioing incompetents, lazing about on my throne – yet it seemed that everything my followers did irked me.
Bellatrix crouched at my feet, sneaking glances and occasionally emitting dreamy sighs – exactly the sort of behavior that caused me to turn myself into a nose-less snake. Rabastan Lestrange was playing a game called Curse the Recruits, the recruits were screaming, Nott was paging through one of my Dark tomes, and Lucius had disappeared to go brush his hair or something. There were worse ways to spend Halloween, I supposed.
"M-my Lord!" a nasally voice cried, its owner scurrying towards my throne. "I have information on the Potters."
I paused for a moment, contemplating the Death Eater's words. The Potters were Dumbledore's minions, the ones with the prophesied child. They'd defied me three times. I should know; I keep a list of these things.
This is my seventh or so reread of this Harry Potter crackfic. Harry was completely taken over by Voldemort’s personality when attacked as a baby. Hilarity ensues.
This is the funniest fanfic I’ve read, maybe even the funniest written fiction period. It does all the right things: every sentence is funny, if not laugh out loud funny; it does have laugh out loud funny moments at just the right times, brick jokes are set up and paid off all over, and you get a new running joke every chapter.
I have to warn you though, this gets funnier the more you know about the Harry Potter books, so maybe you should do that before opening it.
Maybe the ending is a bit weak, and too serious after the cracky tone. But I guess nothing is perfect. If it had been, Rowling would have had no choice but to sue the writer of this superior product.
The Road Not Taken
A very short story about first contact, written in 1985, which already tells you a lot. Pretty funny, though it is very short and maybe used to be more groundbreaking before forty years of science-fiction. Recommended to people interested in anthropology, societal development, etc.
Nope★
There’s this scale for horror video games that we can apply to all kinds of horror media:
I’m solidly in 1. I lack the type of brain that allows people to get really scared at movies, and something like Alien is just kind of boring to me. Nonetheless, I have found the two Jordan Peele films I’ve watched really engaging. Some of it has to do with the fact he keeps movies interesting regardless of the reason most viewers are actually there for (Get Out obviously has some things to say about race, and this one has a lot to say about Hollywood and exploitation), but the rest is the director’s ability to, maybe not scare me in the moment, but write scenes that stick with me and make me afraid afterwards.
There’s a specific scene in Nope that did actually get me, and would have probably fucked me up if I was more normal in my reactions to horror media. While I don’t want to spoil you, it involves being stuck in a very tight spot. I’m not even claustrophobic. The sound design is also excellent and helps the atmosphere a lot.
Wholeheartedly recommend this movie. I have seen a lot of criticism for the main character’s strong, silent type personality, but I thought he was fine, I like that he was competent and proactive, and he punched a jumpscare that one time.
Also, don’t watch the trailers. I’m looking at them now and they would have spoiled some of the best moments. Many such cases.
Something to Atone For
Pretty-mediocre-to-awful Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel self-insert fic, with the writer inserted into the body of Doyle, who gets prophetic dreams and dies horribly in the first season of Angel.
Mostly he drives around and saves characters, but this writer seems plagued by a dearth of imagination—that’s basically all he does, without any long term plans, or interest in getting to know the characters. It’s not exactly a mercenary mindset, more of a self-defeating whiny one, with excuses about having too much to do.
Pointlessly, he has an off-screen romance with one of the character anyway. At that point I had to drop the fic. Usually when I read a self-insert I’m entertained by the character interactions and interesting ways to solve established situations, but in this fic I got none of that, just angst.
My Cousin Vinny
Right off the bat you’ll be able to tell the humor is surprisingly dated and a bit too over the top to be able to preserve immersion. Some people may consider the southern stereotypes to be downright offensive. In the end, though, it doesn’t detract from the core of the movie: guy has to learn to be a proper lawyer to save his cousin from a borderline evil judge.
If lawyer stuff doesn’t sound interesting to you, don’t bother, you’re not going to get anything out of this. I found this movie enjoyable but extremely overrated. You’re going to get more legal highs from playing the tutorial case in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I recommend that more.
(Also it’s a crime Marisa Tomei got an Oscar as a supporting actress for this and not as lead as she deserved, but whatever, this happened 30 years ago.)
Compass of Thy Soul
Historical fiction masquerading as Naruto.
Having less to do –and with a reduced risk of running into Senju outside the compound– Kita wanders further afield than usual, gathering wild greens and digging up roots to take home and eat or plant in the garden, and manages to get her hands on a truly unexpectedly large quantity of wild silk by way of bringing home oak branches covered in caterpillars and keeping them in trays alongside Mama's silkworms. She has to make the extra trays herself –she cobbles them together out of hemp paper and broken floorboards– and regularly bring in fresh branches, but the result is well worth it: four times as many cocoons as she has ever found herself before.
Mama tells her that she is old enough to decide for herself if she wants to rear her own silk moths, so Kita only dries three quarters of the cocoons and lets the rest hatch, setting up a tent of old sheets for the moths to fly about in at night and branches for them to lay their eggs on. She takes care that all the hatching cocoons are on the smaller side –a larger cocoon can be a sign of a caterpillar having been parasitized– so that her moths will all hatch, and that the cocoon itself is well-made. The silk will all be greenish-gold, but Kita likes the colour. It's pretty.
This autumn Grandma has promised to teach her to spin her own silk –since it is hers and she won't be wasting Mama's cocoons trying to learn– and has unbent enough to inform her that the silk from the split cocoons the egg-laying moths came out of is also valuable despite it not being possible to spin it as finely. Monks will buy it, because the caterpillars did not die to produce it, so that will be a new market the clan can take advantage of.
It’s just a lot of this. Our main character barely does anything that might remind you of the Naruto setting. While I’ll begrudgingly admit it’s very well written and researched, it’s as far from personally enjoyable to me as it can possibly get.
Murder by Numbers
People told me this was an interesting murder investigation PC game where your main minigame consisted of Picross-style puzzles.
They lied. There’s plenty of Picross, but you can get that anywhere, and the rest of this video game had the worst writing I’ve seen in a long, long time. Feels like it was written by the unfunniest college student ever, and they think their low hanging fruit humor is enough to carry a story, with extremely, extremely stock characters.
I heavily suggest you don’t buy this game.
Sublight Drive
A Star Wars prequels self-insert fic that starts right in the middle of the action, with our surprisingly bad-guys-siding captain main character trying to survive Anakin fucking up their ships with chosen one powers.
I found this pretty alright, maybe even great. Usually fics like these just end up bogged with the logistics and minutia of war, but this writer is pretty good at pacing the parts SpaceBattles enjoys and the parts I enjoy. It even gets me to care about big ships shooting at each other, maybe because we get some scenes right out of Ender’s Game—existing characters do space wars like they do in movies, without taking into account the third dimension, but our protagonist is allowed to be clever.
It’s ongoing, and still kind of short, so maybe it’ll turn awful later. For now, it’s pretty enjoyable.
Oppenheimer*
You know, it occurs to me that the trailer for this movie promised to show us a bit of how Oppenheimer dealt with his fame as the “father of the atomic bomb”, but in the end there are barely any scenes with more than two non-scientists or non-communists in the entire film. Weird that the view of the “common man” is so absent. I thought it detracted a lot from the otherwise stellar quality of acting, dialogue, etc.
We had a lot of scenes about communism. I understand that it was the key reason why they were able to dethrone him, but I think at some point it started hitting diminishing returns.
I also noticed that Oppie didn’t seem to give a shit about his kids, who stay unnamed, and constantly cry in every scene where they’re in the background. I get the feeling that Nolan also doesn’t care, and just wanted the minimum level of screentime so people didn’t complain that we skipped over that part of Oppenheimer’s life.
I watched this with subtitles, so I didn’t have the “music drowns out dialogue” problem that everyone else seems to have had. Additionally, I think the IMAX stuff is a gimmick for the bomb scene, which isn’t even that great, and the rest of scenes aren’t shot in any special way that would warrant a big screen. I’m going to commit a Lynch crime and say you can watch this on your phone just fine without missing anything.
Overall good movie, barring everything I’ve said. I’d only recommend it if you’re interested in the subject matter, though?
Holy shit, I made it an entire article without using footnotes.