There were about five times in this extended premiere that I said, out loud, “I can’t believe it’s still going!” It doesn’t help that the characters move and act like cardboard cutouts. What went wrong?
Hotaru’s story represents the tension between our desire for comforting narratives of disabled people healing and the reality of disabled life as shaped by capitalism and the limits of our bodies.
My feelings veered wildly between “Love this!” and “oh NO!”, settling on loving it. Oshi no Ko powerfully explores women’s emotional labour in the idol industry and more broadly.
World Dai Star is interested in the actual process of acting, of how actors inhabit the minds of their characters and use all the tools of physicality and stagecraft to create the artifice of inner life. And it is a joy to watch in this way.
This show is bad in an interesting way, in that it reveals the interfaces between sexism and capitalism. Just go with it.
Whoever is responsible for this, I salute you. I deplore you.
It’s hard to write about Heavenly Delusion right now, because what we got doesn’t feel like a full episode. It ends on an enormous cliffhanger, where we are just starting to peek into the menace of the world. It’s even more challenging because what we did get was largely a beautifully atmospheric mood piece, punctuated by only minor intrusions of gender nonsense.
Yuri’s assault on Ringo is emblematic of how the tensions and arguable flaws in Penguindrum point to larger tensions and unresolved questions in our movements for transformative justice, abolition, and queer liberation.
As somebody who has witnessed repeatedly the failure of would-be individual saviors to undo entire oppressive systems, I want to try to come to a deeper understanding than what is afforded on the surface by Rebellion’s final twist. What happens when hope is institutionalized? How do oppressive ideologies shape the worlds we can imagine? And the question that has haunted me most: if in the moment we destroyed an oppressive world we were given the full power to create a new one before we had any time to heal, would we like what we make?
Both Kazuki and Toi emerge from similar circumstances of capitalism, oppression, and the hypermasculine coping mechanisms they’ve been given to deal with the pain of that oppression. It is only through learning to care for one another—and learning that they can care for one another—that they can both be free.
