mithen

The Switch is a tiny little 1-season, 6-episode comedy about a trans woman living in Vancouver. It’s part quirky workplace comedy, part quirky roommate comedy, and part “she moves in with her ex who’s secretly an assassin, who spends the whole season trying to dodge the investigation for an executive they recently killed, but, like, in a funny way.”

Half the cast is trans, a ton of the crew is trans, so it’s a big part of the show in a way that feels genuine and natural. Even though the show in general has a fun heightened-reality vibe. (The original Kickstarter campaign mentions a sorceress character. She’s not in the final cut at all, which I kinda suspect was a broader “oops, we’re trying to stuff too much in 6 episodes, we need to cut the magic subplot” decision. But, listen, if they had made a second season where Sabrina the Teenage Witch moved in down the hall, it wouldn’t feel out-of-place.)

I watched the whole thing for free on Tubi! There are some other streaming options on their official website. They also just straight-up tell you “want to be a pirate? here are the torrents” — but give them some ad revenue, if you can.

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So I guess I’m a Hazbin Hotel fan now, huh?

FFA did a rewatch of season 1 in the leadup to season 2, so I rewatched it along with that. Then ended up watching S2 as it came out (dropping two episodes a week), because now I’m invested enough that I didn’t want spoilers.

(Couldn’t totally avoid them, because…listen, there is a deep vault of Fandom Lore here, which I have never actually looked at. So there were regular comments like “sure, we already basically knows Plot Point X, because of the leaks/interviews/character designs posted on DA in 2012” where I had no idea about X at all. It worked out fine, though, because sometimes the fandom was wrong! And I had no way to predict when.)

All the music is good, and some of it is great. Their animation budget must be incredible, and you can see it paying off — Vox Populi showcases some amazing dynamic tracking shots, and the reprise Vox Dei has them just showing off. It has the same overstuffed pacing as S1, where they’re trying to pack about a thousand different character beats into eight episodes — there are setups that never get payoffs, and payoffs to things that weren’t actually set up — but the central arc of the season does hold together, and all the individual moments are fun to watch.

There’s a recurring theme of “look, this is shameless pandering to the iddiest of fandom desires” that goes so hard, you have to respect it. The saddest woobie with the softest vulnerable heart gets manhandled in all-new ways!

The most Tumblr Sexyman spends multiple episodes tied up and gagged, strapped to a chair, in his jealous rival’s bedroom!

There are moments that honestly feel like “the show won’t bother going too deep into this, because they know they can just toss the idea in front of their audience, and wait for a million fics to fill in the gaps.” And given the size of the fandom, I don’t think they’re wrong, either.

…The size of the fandom means there’s an overwhelming number of Youtube videos. But a lot of the ones I’ve watched are, well. Bad? Like “hidden details you missed” but it just lists basic plot points, or “fixing the character designs” but it’s fixating on things that aren’t problems.

Have a few recs, because these deserve to be watched without viewers having to dig them out of the heap first:

• An Exhausted Defense Of Angel Dust (posted before S2, has some heavy discussion about sexual assault)
• The Character Design of Hazbin Hotel (also posted before S2, the only video about the designs where I haven’t gotten exasperated and stopped watching)
• Collider Ladies Night interview with Vivziepop (released after S2, plenty of spoilers)

What Moves The Dead: Another T. Kingfisher novel, and, wow, it’s a good thing I didn’t start with this one. DNF halfway through. I figured out the twist pretty quickly, double-checked on Wikipedia that I was right, and wasn’t gripped enough by the characters to enjoy the process of “listening to them bumble around for a couple more hours failing to figure it out.”

Future game plan: stick with her fantasy works, skip the horror.

 

The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz: Bought this on Audible years ago, and didn’t remember not liking it. So I downloaded it when I tried out Libation, and gave it a re-listen.

Definitely worth it. Reminds me of 1984, in that it’s a near-future dystopia run by a government that is as totalitarian as it is surreal. At the same time, it’s set in Unnamed Middle Eastern/Muslim City (the author is from Cairo), so it all plays out in a way that’s culturally-specific to that part of the world.

Cool and enriching to see which parts are different. Depressing to see that certain things are the same. The POV residents have a range of perspectives and life experiences, but they’ve all been more-or-less frogboiled into accepting an untenable situation as Just How Things Work. One guy spends the whole book actively dying, but he was injured during the Disgraceful Events that nobody will talk about directly, and his friends/loved ones/doctors keep running into “of course the government will authorize him to get life-saving surgery…just as soon as you have all the proper paperwork.” The titular Queue is all the citizens lined up to get their paperwork. It hasn’t moved for a month now. But it’s going to start soon! Somewhere between the MOASS and the Rapture, probably!

Also, there’s a character named Yehia, which I assume is the same name as Yehya Badr with a slightly different Anglicization. So that was entertaining.

 

Mogworld, by Yahtzee Croshaw: Checked this out based on how much I liked Will Save The Galaxy For Food, and it did not disappoint.

Starts as a fantasy story about a necromancer overlord’s reign of terror through his undead hordes, but from the POV of Jim, a beleaguered zombie who just wants to die (again) (for good, this time). Then it develops into a parody of fantasy-adventure video-game mechanics. Then you start to see the chat logs between the game developers. Then Jim starts to see the chat logs between the game developers…

It’s like if Terry Pratchett wrote Guilded Age. It’s full of absolutely incredible turns of phrase. (One that I had to stop and write down: a group of supernatural beings is described as “heading off to deliver unwanted resurrections, like a flock of poorly-briefed storks.”)

There’s a character type you see sometimes, where the male protagonist has the support of a devoted female hanger-on, who he finds grating and annoying and never appreciates…but he keeps her around because she does useful things for him. She conveniently never notices his disdain, so she keeps giving him endless support for zero care/support/respect in return. (Misa from Death Note is…a deconstruction of this trope? A commentary, at least.)

Mogworld pulls a twist on this that I’ve never seen before. Undead bodies don’t heal, so Meryl is the local expert in sewing them back together. When the plot drags Jim off on a solo adventure, Meryl follows, conveniently dedicating herself to repairing all the dramatic injuries he gets along the way. But, the reason is: Jim is the only other zombie from Meryl’s home country…and Meryl is a huge [their country] supremacist! So there’s something Jim can legitimately resent about her, he’s not just being an entitled sexist. (They both do a bit of learning and growing as the story goes on, too.)

One warning: the R-slur gets thrown around a bunch. It’s a book that deals with video-gamer culture and was published in 2010, so this isn’t hugely unrealistic…but the writing mostly doesn’t have other slurs/profanity outside of that, so it was kind of a jumpscare.

As long as that’s not a dealbreaker, definitely give this one a read.