Phew, okay, is that it? Was that January? Bye, I guess! It felt like you didn’t stick around for long!
2023 has hit the ground running. Here’s what I got up to this month:
On AniFem
It is once again premiere season! I took a lighter workload this time round, and just covered…
Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill – not necessarily much nutritional value, but a fun light snack.
Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement – tonally inconsistent to the point of being baffling rather than entertaining.
Sugar Apple Fairy Tale – to be fair, this one’s not an isekai in the portal fantasy sense. But it is a fantasy shoujo romance dealing in some power dynamics that are fraught to say the least.
Anime Feminist’s Recommendations of Fall 2022 – while we’re getting swept up in the new wave of content, let’s not forget to look back at the staff favourites from the previous season.
And don’t forget Patreon!
Everyone gets early access to my first blog post of the year, and from tier two upwards you get a short piece of fiction writing every month!
Content to Enjoy
Settle in for a journey through history… or, at least, the way various film and TV makers represented history in the media of 2022.
I always enjoy Mike’s “appropriately unhinged recap” videos, and I do love how they get more elaborate and less hinged each time. Tune in this month for a rundown of Gossip Girl seasons one and two, icons and time capsules of late ’00s teen drama.
This month I learned about “Scamilton”, an illegal performance of the hit musical Hamilton by a Texas Christian group who er… made some adaptational changes.
Your Body is a Haunted House: Hiron Ennes on the Discomfiting Tradition of Medical Horror – the first book I read in 2023 was Hiron Ennes’ Leech, a gothic sci-fi body horror extravaganza whose inspirations are so nicely explored in this article here. Doctors are scary, sure, but simply having a body is a terror of its own!
Orientalism and Occidentalism in Anime – stereotyped treatments of “the East” in the scholarship and pop culture of Europe are worth unpacking, but so too is the treatment of “the West” in Japanese media, all of which carries its own historical, social, and artistic baggage.
Book Releases: LGBT YA Books of January – June 2023 – I’m still doing my best to keep up with upcoming releases, and resources like this are always helpful! Give them a look.
#LoveOzYA Reads We Can’t Wait For in 2023 – and closer to home, here is a list of some of the Australian books in the pipeline this year! What’s that An Unexpected Party anthology they mention at the end, hmm? That sounds interesting…
For the song stuck in my head this month, I’m revisiting a classic.
February’s just around the corner, and 2023 is keeping on keeping on. I’ll see you over there!
The Afictionado 