Reviews November 2018

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Books:

An Unseen Attraction by K J Charles: 19th century m/m romance. An autistic lodging-house keeper bonds with one of his lodgers, an introverted taxidermist, and then the two get caught up in a murder mystery. As in a lot of K J Charles books the two become friends with benefits fairly early on. I was really enjoying it (the autism was handled a little clunkily, as was him being South Asian, but she obviously means well) but then when the murder mystery was about to kick in my brain shouted "STOP READING! You will just get anxious and they're already a cute couple" so I did. I assume the rest is fine? I might finish it one day?? Brains are weird.

Animated:

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: I quite liked this, I watched all of season one in a day. It's ALLLLL about female characters, they're varied and kickass and have interesting relationships with each other, including stuff like messy mother/daughter relationships you don't see often. Very much a kid's show, the plots are a bit silly and I am trying not to think too hard about the Princess-centred worldbuilding. Fun, morally grey female villains. Super femslashy. The art is kind of meh but I got used to it.

Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san: Cute short satirical anime episodes about working in a bookshop. I have only watched a few episodes because it has no plot and I ran out of enthusiasm. The protagonist has a "skull face" because it's based on an autobiographical manga and he's hiding his identity.

Live action TV:

Crossing the Line: A very cute Chinese m/m web series about a highschool volleyball team. The main pairing is a very slightly bad boy and the sensible team captain. The secondary pairing is two stepbrothers who met in middle school, it only hit my incest squick a little but YMMV.

(They're definitely speaking Mandarin but it's unambiguously queer, idk how that works with Chinese censorship, maybe it's from Taiwan? EDIT: Yep, it's from Taiwan)

Games:

Hidden Folks: Find specific people and objects within huge, animated, detailed, adorable black and white images. Like an interactive Where's Wally book. I got stuck like 10 puzzles in but was having fun before that, even when I'm stuck it's fun poking things to see what happens. Some of the early ones had some unfortunate racial stereotypes.

Vicarwissen: A cute short horror visual novel about two Youtube paranormal investigators who are also girlfriends investigating strange events in a museum. Does have a happy ending but I died a LOT of grisly deaths getting there. Not super scary but definitely in the horror genre.

The Cinderella Phenomenon: A free fantasy m/f dating sim. Beautifully made, moderately well written, VERY unfortunate plot. The main character is a Cruel Princess who gets cursed to become poor and have her princess-ness forgotten until she can do 3 good deeds. Which could be really interesting but
(a) She's not...actually...a super bad person? Unfriendly and callous, yes, and she should be less of a jerk, especially given her position of power. But she's not actively malicious, and we learn early on that she's been traumatised and abused.
(b) The "good" people "helping" her become a better person (who the narrative is clearly on the side of) do so by a combination of mockery and weary obligated politeness. Many of them are in a position to see why she is the way she is, but instead of trying to relate to her and help her find a way to be good without letting go of her coping mechanisms/basic personality etc it's just this repeated dynamic where she is given the opportunity to be Nice, is rude, and they either mock her or sigh sadly. A friend played to the end and said the moral never got less unfortunate.

Other:

Press Buttons and Talk Let's Play of Phoenix Wright: This is a very amusing youtube series by the voice actors Manky and ProZD, they act out the actual dialogue but also make jokes riffing on what's happening. Even though I've played the game and watched the anime I'm still enjoying it (I'm currently mostly through game 1). The humour can be a little bro-ish but they're basically good-natured and sincere fans and quite happy to ship the male characters.