Rant

Middle Grade Media to Enjoy Instead

~ Eric ~ Leave a comment

With a reboot series coming and no sign of the author shutting up about her trans-hating (and often racist and even misogynist) views, the most commonly known wizard-school story is still being pushed hard by news orgs and of course by Warner Bros. Surrounding all that talk, I hear a lot of base assumptions that HP is somehow uniquely good or influential, when in fact much of its popularity was originally (if I may) astro-TERFed. (For more on the myth of the books’ original impact, check out Caelan Conrad’s excellent deconstruction here.) It really wasn’t until the movies that the series became a pop culture phenomenon, and even those were unable to conceal many of the horribly flawed storytelling and world-building decisions of the books.

I try to stay on top of children’s media, especially for the middle grades, and it always makes me sad how much the specter of the TERF-slop wizard books overshadows much better books, movies, and television. For that reason, I wanted to compile a list of lesser-known works that I consider vastly superior in writing, production, and creator non-bigotry. I’m sure many people would have other favorites to add, but each of these are things that I would personally recommend to anyone willing to try them.

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On the 250th, a Petition for Redress of Grievances

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July 4th, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. As a country, we don’t mark our birth from the adoption of a constitution (not even the first, kind of bad one), but from a document that declared our intent to separate from a tyrant. In that document, the Continental Congress listed a set of grievances justifying this action. On this 250th birthday, it seems appropriate to revisit those grievances to see how we’re doing.

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The Uses and Misuses of Nonviolence

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Over the past week, I have watched people who are understandably scared and angry reacting not only to the news, but also to each other. This never goes well. It’s the sort of situation where people who are otherwise inclined to agree on fundamental values start arguing about how to express and defend those values, and because we are facing a wave of state terror, we’re not generally disposed to listening to nuance. And so we have people justifiably defending nonviolence arguing with people justifiably pointing out its weaknesses, and neither can see that they’re both right…sort of. More importantly, they’re not actually arguing around the same definitions.

Today, as we remember whatever selected portions of Dr. King’s legacy seem to support our views, I wanted to take a moment to collect some of the misunderstandings on both sides and clear things up a bit. (For more, see my previous article on this topic.)

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Video Game Reflections of 2025

~ Eric ~ 1 Comment

This is an unusual topic for me – I’m not usually one for the “end of year retrospective” type of post. But 2025 has been astonishingly rich in great video games. In particular, this year even the “mainstream” has been flooded with games that I’ve liked. You can see this just by contrasting how my playlist overlapped with The Game Awards nominees last year (2 total, and they’re both way down there) to this year (10 total, including 4 of the 6 Game of the Year nominees). And there are several other nominees for this year that I still plan to get around to.

Part of this has to do with the release of the Switch 2, since that’s where I played 3 of the GotY nominees, but it’s also a tribute to the massive strength of indie releases this year. Seriously, the second half of 2025 was just one indie smash after another, and I am still trying to catch up.

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A May Revolution in Song

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It’s been a while since I’ve done a song-a-day project, and the last few started to lean more into musical conversation than topical discussion. But with everything happening, I decided it’s high time to get topical again.

For the month of May, 2025, I am diving deep into some of the strongest musical statements I can find. I expect these songs to be in various degrees challenging, inspiring, surprising, and appalling. I want to warn you right now that I am not pulling any punches on this one – there will be explicit language, explicit content, and abrasive opinions. I will post relevant content warnings on every selection, but it’s also completely understandable if you choose to nope out of the whole playlist. I’m also going to be less picky about making sure every song has a video or a live performance. Most of them do, but not all. So sometimes you’ll be staring at album covers or reading lyric videos, but that’s because the songs are important enough that they need to be there anyway.

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Luigi Wins by Doing Nothing

~ Eric ~ 1 Comment

In the discourse following the violent actions that ended the life of a health insurance CEO, one trend I found particularly alarming was the assertion that this event somehow proved that violence was the only effective means of systemic change. Amidst the absolutely justified anger surrounding the US healthcare system and the profit focus of its C-suite executive class, there was also an underlying frustration that nonviolent action had failed to bring about any change.

The comments I saw displaying this frustration typically showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the uses of both nonviolent and violent actions. More importantly, they too often veered into post hoc defenses of inaction, which has led us to a new type of online poster: the pro-violence slacktivist.

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Resistance Triage

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Well, here we are again. Yes, the irony is not lost on me that I wrote a literal Cassandra post before the election, yet afterwards everyone keeps finger-pointing and talking about the 2024 election as if it is an isolated incident and not the result of 40 years or more of long-term degradation of the US electoral process.

Anyway, we can’t think long-term right now. We are stuck in the moment, and we’re about to have another wave of intentional crises – a veritable Gish Gallop of oppression – that is designed to overwhelm our ability to fight against any of the individual pieces. It happened during Trump’s first administration, and it’s only going to get worse this time. While we don’t know exactly what will happen and when, there’s a lot of panic and anticipation about all the things that could happen.

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“Superhero Fatigue” Isn’t Actually That

~ Eric ~ 1 Comment

Is superhero fatigue killing movies? Don’t the terrible numbers of 2023 show that there’s superhero fatigue? And if so, why does it exist? Is it because there’s too much to watch? Because it’s bad? Because it’s too “woke?” (Not even those scare quotes can convey the sarcasm I type that with.) Because Millennials are too old? Because Gen Z won’t go out to the movies? Most importantly, how can we make money again? WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE MONEY?

Everyone from Screen Rant to Forbes talks about this trend as if it’s a given, but no one can seem to agree on what it is and why it’s so pervasive. If you read the industry-focused analyses, the clear indicator is the rapidly declining success of the superhero movie as the box office juggernaut it was throughout the 2010s. If you read the fansite analyses, the clear indicator is the rapidly declining reviews both from critics and audiences (and from non-audience review bombers). But both of these are symptoms with no single clear cause, so anyone can project their own assumptions onto them. And that’s what’s happening, because these analyses are part of the actual real problem. They are themselves a symptom that is indicative of a totally different problem: the addiction to canon.

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Done With the 101

~ Eric ~ 2 Comments

or Why some media other people find deep feels so shallow

You ever watch a movie or a series that everyone else is gushing about, and you just can’t help but wonder…why? So then you try to find review sites you respect to explain what everyone’s getting out of it, and you find these effusive reviews about how complex and insightful the show is? And you read all those reviews and the examples that keep coming up are ridiculously simple things like, “Did you notice that Verna is an anagram of RAVEN?”

Well, it happens to me a lot. In particular, it has happened with every single thing I have watched from “horror auteur” Mike Flanagan. (Yes, people call him that. No, I do not agree.) And while it is tempting for me to just have a rant about how I think Flanagan is overrated, I wanted to glean something more broadly applicable from this experience. So I am using this opportunity to talk about why reasonable people can have different views about the depth of the same work.

I call it “the 101 effect.”

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Yes, This Is Art

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Every once in a while when I’m hanging around my social media feeds, I see someone who I normally think of as educated, open to new ideas, etc., posting another meme or complaint about “modern art.” Sometimes it’s abstract, sometimes an installation piece, sometimes pop art, but inevitably the question becomes “how is this art?” (Sometimes the conversation focuses on “why is this worth so much?” which is a different but related question.)

Because I always try to hit the same points when I’m replying to these discussions, it was kind of inevitable that this would end up a blog post that I can just link to in the future. So here we are – a discussion of modern and contemporary art and why it is indeed art. Yes, even that banana.

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