(no subject)

 A brief round-up to capture some of what I've been squeezing in lately.

•  I gave The Dragon Prince a try shortly after it came out and found it underwhelming, but a friend recently convinced me to give it another go with the promise it improved - and, sure enough, mid season 2 I found it started to develop a sense of pacing, stakes, and character development that was really catching my interest. It's still not the best children's show I've ever watched, but I like many of the elements it prioritises - strong sibling relationships, breaking cycles, grey moralities and the justifications we use - and every now and then the humour is genuinely very clever. The absolutely blase, zero-fucks-given attitude towards displaying non-hetero relationships is also both unexpected and delightful. It's the very opposite of queer-baiting; as a (different) friend said to me, you feel free to read whatever you like into anything because attractions of all kinds are so casually embedded in the narrative. Hats off to the creators.

• The Outer Worlds was very good :) I found it a smidge heavy-handed at first and I wouldn't call the combat anything special, but it was reliably Obsidian fare with emphasis on the areas they do well: character development, freedom of choice, ruthless social commentary. The overall story was strong, and the maps were pretty good. It absolutely felt like a mash-up between Fallout: New Vegas and Mass Effects, but since those are both games I enjoy and the mash-up was actually done well, it worked. There was also an explicitly asexual character! I had some feelings about it. (Good ones.)

• On the other hand... the His Dark Materials TV show has been a huge let-down. Northern Lights is a book I hold very dear to my heart so I don't pretend I was ever going to be anything but fussy, but given they went out of their way to show us trailer scenes that emphasised the canon accuracy I've been left increasingly bewildered by the many choices to stray from the events in the book in favour of different scenes that don't even capture the spirit of what was originally being expressed. I've ended up uneasily wondering if the writers/producers just don't care so much about this story as everything that will come after it - the big, dramatic war story that may appeal more than that of a reckless ragamuffin growing wise. Plus, alright, the animation for the daemons has indeed improved, but it's hard to appreciate that when it's apparently at the cost of rarely having them onscreen. From what I've heard, those new to the series end up with wildly inaccurate ideas of what daemons are and how they're meant to operate, at which point it's just like, come on, You Had One Job.