Into The Woods Vol. 1

(via morbidlybeautiful)

I need very little motivation to give a recommended new book a try. Sometimes it’s the plot concept that grabs me; more often than not, someone just says “it has queer people in it” and that’s enough for me. (I’ve ended up trying some terrible books this way; LGBTQ+ representation and quality are not mutually guaranteed.) Combining an author I already know I love with the promise of queer representation, though, is a no-brainer for my ever-growing to-read list. So when I saw that James Tynion IV had written a comic series I’d somehow never heard of, and that it came highly recommended by Bisexual Books, I obviously had to check it out.

Vague spoilers for Vol. 1 of The Woods below the jump.

Trailer Tuesdays: The Space Between Us

The first time I saw this trailer, I was sitting in the theater waiting for Rogue One to start. As soon as the ad for The Space Between Us started to play, I found myself significantly more impatient. The Space Between Us feels like a horrible waste of time, and watching the trailer was more than enough to make me never want to spend money to go see it. Maybe it’s the part of me that hates romance, but when a sci-fi movie stars a young boy born on Mars, who becomes involved in a generic romance that takes place on Earth, I feel like a lot of missed opportunities had to have happened in the story writing process.

Heteronormativity trumps all, you guys.

Trailer Tuesdays: Hirune Hime

I first heard about animation director Kenji Kamiyama when I heard about 009 Re:Cyborg. Growing up, one of my favorite anime series was the 2001 adaptation of the original Cyborg 009 manga (penned by Shotaro Ishinomori), so seeing that the series would have new life blown into it made me incredibly excited. Unfortunately, in the swirling torrents of being an adult and having a million things to do, I still haven’t gotten around to watching Kamiyama’s film vision of the series I enjoyed so much. Despite this, though, news of Kamiyama’s upcoming film still has me anticipating some slice-of-life goodness mixed in with some sci-fi on the side, right alongside some beautiful animation from studio Signal.MD.

Trailer Tuesdays: Arrival

As a bit of a language nerd, I was beyond thrilled when I first stumbled across this trailer. A sci-fi movie where the real enemy is ignorance, and the protagonist is a linguist and translator who’s just been tapped for the most important ethnography of her life? Sign me up.

Stranger Things: A Better Story than I Had Expected

Sometime last week, I sat down to binge watch the first season of Stranger Things. I’d kept hearing conflicting reports about the show—some people thought it was very well done and feminist, and others, not so much—so I decided to give it a try myself.

Stranger Things is a science-fiction horror show that takes place in the 80s and features a monster that looks like it came out of a movie from the 80s. Like all stories, Stranger Things is by no means perfect, and some of the problems I had with it are hard to ignore, but on the whole, I loved this show.

Spoilers up ahead.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Starling

I love a good philosophical sci-fi story. I also really, really love interspecies human/alien romance stories. However, even though I’d heard of Starling every once in a while for years now—one of the people I follow on Tumblr is a passionate proselytizer—I never really knew what it was about, and I never had the time or the inclination to change that. When a rec post came across my dash, however, giving me a spiel and a link to a starting point, I figured it was time to check it out.

Some spoilers for the story below.

Love in the Time of Global Warming Is the Queer Sci-Fi I’ve Been Waiting For

… Or it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten.

Let’s start at the beginning. Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block is a dystopian sci-fi story—which is actually quite light on the sci-fi and heavier on literary magical realism, in my opinion, but I’ll get to that in a minute. We follow a teenage girl, Pen, on her quest to find her family through the American Southwest, which has been devastated by a giant earthquake and tsunami. During the course of her journey, Pen picks up a rag-tag group of friends and they have to battle monsters and mesmerizers, which mimic the obstacles the hero had to face in Homer’s Odyssey. And the best part—all the kids are queer and have superpowers!

Spoilers after the jump!

Magical Mondays: Fantasy Worlds Are Dystopias, but the Real World Is Boring

A while back, Lady Geek Girl and I got to talking about how most worlds we read about in sci-fi and fantasy are dystopias. Other than maybe Narnia, I can’t think of a single fictional world that’s utopian. And even then, when Lucy first travels through the wardrobe, Narnia is blanketed in an eternal winter and ruled by a malicious ice queen. It doesn’t surprise me that fantasy worlds are often dystopias. After all, our characters need some powerful evil force to fight against, and many of the issues our heroes come across in dystopian worlds are things we can relate to—sickness, prejudice, racism, sexism, extreme poverty, so on and so forth. Yet, despite how horrible a fictional world may seem, we as consumers still use these worlds as a form of escapism.

Trailer Tuesdays: Tomorrowland

When I went to see Age of Ultron ten-ish days ago, I found myself underwhelmed by the majority of the trailers. We’ve covered our disinterest in Batman v Superman already, and I would preferably look at dog shit for three hours over spending money to see Ant-Man. But nestled among the uninteresting trailers for an nth Mission Impossible movie and a third Insidious installment was an unlikely gem: the preview for Tomorrowland. For a film that wasn’t even on my radar before I walked into that auditorium, I’m pretty psyched to see it now.

Trailer Tuesdays: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

There are plenty of Star Wars fans on this here internet blog, so imagine my surprise when I realized that no one had yet reviewed the trailer for Episode VII, which premieres at the end of this year.

Upon rewatching the trailer, I realized that this was probably because there’s not a whole hell of a lot to speculate about as of yet, since there’s not a whole hell of a lot of content. But I’d already committed myself to talking about it, so let’s split some hairs!