It cannot ever be said enough times, Fuck J.K. Rowling, Fuck Harry Potter and every single thing to ever emanate from that poisonous cancer pit of a person. Go read @tyrantisterror 's Wizard School Mysteries, go read from an author who isn't actively working to destroy human lives every waking moment, go read books about trans protagonists, go read books about wizards and dragons and fairies and demons, go read books where sticking your neck out for people in need is just the right thing to do, go read books where it is not a crime to just exist
The Meddlesome Youths (Wizard School Mysteries) [Cope, William David, Cope, William David, Gayhart, Alex, Wood, K.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* sh
...your favorite book about mystery solving teens in a wizard school turns out to have been written by a bigot who actively funneled her ludicrous wealth into the political campaign of several like-minded bigots in order to make the United Kingdom even more hostile towards trans people than it already was. Worse, this is only the latest and most egregious bullet point in a long pattern of bigoted behavior, and one that only serves to underline what people have been telling you for years: you cannot support the Harry Potter franchise without also supporting repugnant bigotry.
And that sucks! I get it, dude, I really do, it sucks hardcore, because that series was part of your childhood, man! I, too, am a millennial, a child of the 90's. I understand what the heights of Harry Potter mania were like. I went to midnight book release parties at Barnes and Noble, I saw the movies on opening day. I had the incomparable experience of having that book series grow up with me - beginning as fairly childish stories fit for an eleven year old, and slowly getting more mature and complex with each entry. I understand how important the fantasy of a place like Hogwarts is - of going somewhere that values your weirdness, your oddity, your desire to see the world differently. A place where being an oddball and a weirdo with your head in the clouds is the norm, where you're surrounded by other people who want to see magic in the world. I understand why you don't want to give that up.
The bad news is that you have to. I'm sorry, there's no excuses anymore, and honestly, there haven't really been any for a long time. The best you can do is argue ignorance, and if your best defense is "Well I'm a dummy who never reads the news ever," well, that's not a great place to be in your life, is it?
The good news, my friends, is that giving up Harry Potter does not mean you have to give up having a multi-book series about mystery-solving teens attending a school for wizards in a world filled with magical beasts and dark secrets. Take my hand, friends. It's time we left the grade school bullshit of Hogwarts and went off to college together. Follow me to the Academy of Applied Arcana and Magic...
...and let me tell you about Wizard School Mysteries.
A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO WIZARD SCHOOL MYSTERIES: THE NICOTINE PATCH FOR YOUR HARRY POTTER ADDICTION
Wizard School Mysteries is a series of novels about eight students attending a prestigious wizard college called the Academy of Applied Arcana and Magic, or the AAAM for short. These eighteen year old sleuths end up encountering all sorts of mysterious and deadly plots while trying to complete their studies, from unexplained disappearances to lethally-sabotaged sporting events, and even to outright unkillable monsters stalking campus and preying upon its students. By pooling their unique talents and perspectives, our eight meddlesome youths uncover the perpetrators of these plots and save the day, all while slowly unraveling the threads of a far greater scheme lurking behind the scenes.
Our protagonist is James Chaucer, a bespectacled wizard boy with shaggy black hair who escapes from an abusive home to begin studying magic at the AAAM. A chance encounter with a fortune teller on the road sucks him into the center of a prophecy that James is slowly realizing may be a much bigger deal than he initially believed. While generally even-tempered and unflappable, James has a tendency to overwork himself severely when trying to right wrongs, and is unyielding in his pursuit of justice and the truth.
Or, as one fan of this series said, "He's like if Harry Potter actually believed in something!"
James Chaucer is also a trans man, and his identity as a trans person is important to the plot - in fact, the first book's resolution would not be possible if James Chaucer was cis. This isn't a "oh there's totally representation in my wizard book series, you just have to read a tweet to know it's there!" thing, it's a part of the explicit text.
James's first friend is a goofy and kind-hearted wizard named Ivan Muromets. Coming from a poor home, Ivan is ignorant of a lot of things and often quick to call himself stupid, but his innocence also allows him to think up solutions and ideas that wouldn't occur to other people. He's a steadfast friend of James, and willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt no matter how often he gets burned for it.
Ivan is gay, and again, this is explicit in the text. He develops a crush on another boy in the first book, and that crush turns into a relationship in the second - the first canon romantic relationship in the series, in fact. Again, not something that was hastily tweeted out, but explicit in the text itself.
He also doesn't constantly neg the source of his affection out of envy, like some characters who fill his role in other stories do constantly.
The second friend James makes on his way to the AAAM is Gretchen Pappenheimer, a well-read and highly intelligent wizard girl with curly brown hair whose vast supply of booksmarts is juxtaposed next to her relative lack of social skills. Though she can be acerbic and blunt, Gretchen proves to be every bit as loyal and caring a friend as Ivan, and her vast knowledge of obscure magic lore make her an invaluable ally to James on his journey.
Gretchen is a trans woman, which is also established early in the series itself - when James explains his situation, Gretchen comments that she has the same issue but in reverse, and her dysphoria plays a key role in the conflict of the third book. She is also black, and again, this is part of the text, not something that I arbitrarily decided to take credit for when a stage production of a semi-canonical sequel to this series cast a black woman as her in it, like certain other authors I could mention did.
Now, you may be looking at these three and thinking, "Hold on, is this JUST a Harry Potter rip off then?" If so, congrats, you fell for my bait! I purposely made the first three of our eight kids superficially resemble the famous wizard kid trio from Harry Potter to jab at the expectation that Wizard School Mysteries is just a knockoff/parody of it. But by the time you get to chapter three, you'll realize that the story goes wildly off those rails and into some very different territory indeed.
After all, I said there were eight of these meddlesome youths, not three...
The fourth member of this merry band is Margot d'Francane, a girl whose magic powers come on so strong that her body has grown far larger than is normal to accommodate it, and even then, the sheer amount of destructive magic power she constantly channels has made her left hand wither as a grisly side effect. The group's muscle, Margot is sweet, polite, and more than capable of putting even the gnarliest magic monster six feet under.
Our fifth youth is Rodrigo Cervantes, the seventh son of a nobleman and James's room-mate at the AAAM. Being the only member of the team who comes from money, Rodrigo understands fashion, wealth, and the customs of noblity that otherwise ellude his peers, which proves crucial when their rogues gallery includes at least one royal villain. Add to this his ability to scope out threats to the teams' morale and network with allies from all sorts of circles, and you have a valuable member of the Meddlesome Youths.
Rodrigo is of Arabic descent - this is, unfortunately, not stated explicitly in the text, mainly because Wizard School Mysteries takes place in a fantasy world that doesn't have our modern day countries but rather rough equivalents of them, so there's not really an elegant in-universe way to say it explicitly, but the intent is that Rodrigo is Arabic, and I have tried to establish that in ways that make sense for the setting.
The sixth student to join the team is Serena Takeuchi, a wizard whose boundless and bubbly enthusiasm is matched only by her sheer tenacity on the battlefield. With unsurpassed skill in utilizing crystals in her magic and a keen eye for figuring out the motives behind people's actions, Serena helps the team both in battles of spellcraft and of the mind.
While not explicitly stated in the text for the same reasons as Rodrigo, Serena is of Japanese descent.
Our seventh Meddlesome Youth, Charlotte Bolshe, isn't a human wizard at all, but rather an Ettercap, i.e. a kind of spider-fairy. Because if you have a fantasy series about a world of magic people that canonically has several species of non-human people who are magical, it'd be kind of weird if not a single one of them was a main character, wouldn't it? Charlotte is a sweet, compassionate soul whose effortless kindness disguises a truly cunning mind. She also has something of a Little Mermaid complex, being fascinated with humanity and envious of their ability to live in places and ways that she, as of now, cannot.
Hey. Hey, you. Yes, you, the goth girl who had a crush on Draco Malfoy when you were fifteen, and spent years arguing that he was actually misunderstood and deserved a redemption arc, only to ultimately be disappointed when J.K. Rowling gave him none of the dimensions you projected onto him and ended his character arc with the redemption equivalent of a wet fart. Do you still crave to see a blonde rival to a bespectacled wizard boy protagonist who has hidden depths and slowly but surely grows into a good person?
Well, meet Polybeus Antony. You will be annoyed by him when you first meet him. Hell, you might even hate him. But by the end of book 2, you will love him. He might even be your favorite.
And yes, he has ship tease with the other boys. THEY ALL HAVE SHIP TEASE! I TEASE ALL THE SHIPS, AND I DO IT FOR YOU, GOTH GIRLS WHO WERE INFATUATED WITH DRACO MALFOY!
...
ahem.
Of course, the core group of kids is not the sole appeal of Harry Potter, because it also has a large supporting cast of characters who are just as beloved, and Wizard School Mysteries is no different in that regard! We have wacky teachers...
...whimsical students...
...and diabolical villains...
Oh, and magical creatures, of course. Fantastic beasts, the lot of 'em.
While there are continuous plot threads and changes to the status quo that make reading the series in order necessary, each book has its own mystery that is more or less independent - i.e. you will not find, say, a redundant recurring plotline of "the Big Bad has a new evil scheme to get back his body and/or take over the world" each book, but rather new villains with their own schemes that are independent of those that came before, and new curveballs they throw at the protagonists AND the audience as a result.
For example...
Wizard School Mysteries Book 1: The Meddlesome Youths sees our heroes come together for the first time as they unwrap a scheme by wicked fairies to spirit young wizards away into Fairyland.
Wizard School Mysteries Book 2: Tournament of Death sees our heroes trying to identify the culprit behind a series of violent and, eventually, LETHAL sabotages of the participants in the school's annual spell-casting tournament.
Wizard School Mysteries Book 3: Wicked Witchcraft pits our heroes against a seemingly unkillable undead monster, while at the same time one of their own is trapped in a literal internship from Hell.
And that's just the three novels currently published! A grant total of eight Wizard School Mysteries books are planned, and as a treat, I'm going to post the in-progress covers of the remaining five entries at the end of this - though be warned, there might be slight spoilers in them.
Before that, though, there's one last question to answer: where can you buy this wonderful series?
Well, as of now, you have two options. You can find the entire series on Amazon.com, and likely will be able to do so for the forseeable future. As much as I hate to be tied to Jeff Bezos's business, at the moment it's the only site that allows me to get this book to all the members of my audience who want it for an affordable price. Until there is a better option, it's gotta stay on Amazon.
...but if you don't mind paying for shipping, I do have the ability to buy these books at production cost, i.e. without giving Amazon a cent of profit. Simply send me a DM and I'll work on getting you copies that don't put money in Bezos's coffers, then send you a bill for the price of the book + whatever shipping ends up being once I've sent them to you in the mail. I'll even autograph them for free!
Ok, time for those covers. You read? Start scrolling!
"Yeah, that's great and all," I hear you say, "But I'm a Potterhead! I don't care about the substance of a story, I care about the toyetic franchise shit - Hogwarts Houses, cosplay opportunities, shipping! Does WSM have that too?"
Haha, you silly fucker, of course it does!
You've got four dormitories with distinct color schemes, each based on the four humors: Sanguine, Melancholic, Choleric, and Phlegmatic. And because the four humors have been a time tested concept in fiction for centuries, each dormitory has a lot of distinct symbolism and meaning associated with it, which means you don't have the problem of the four houses being condensed to "Heroes, Villains, Nerds, and Miscellaneous!" No more feeling like shit because you got sorted into Jigglypuff, each house is actually fun this time!
"But are there fun school uniforms to cosplay?" Yes, of course! Sure, they're not as easy to do as "slap on a black robe and a tie," but on the plus side, they actually look interesting, and you've got two color schemes per dormitory to choose from!
"But what about shipping? All I care about is shipping!" Well, fucker, I've got great news for you! Not only are there EIGHT main kids with loads of ship tease between them for you to glom onto...
But there are DOZENS of minor and supporting characters in the student body for you to have fun with as well! And trust me, you can go wild with the fanfic shit, because we've got...
Goblin students!
Goth girl students!
Fairy students!
Gothic horror monster students!
AND SO MUCH MORE!
So c'mon, dump the chump and get with the wizard school book series that lets you Enoby Darkness Dementia Raven Way yourself into your wildest dreams, you fanfic loving scamps!
Ok I'm 90% sure I've shared all of these sketches before but for funsies, let's look at some of the minor characters from book 1 of Wizard School Mysteries.
We'll start with the four elemental experts of the AAAM's teaching staff. While I generally use the four humors theory as, like, a surface level detail for my students, I tried to make the four teachers who specialize in the elements really live up to it, witch each teacher sporting the personality traits associated with the humor that corresponds to their elements. Lymf Splenik is a sadsack melancholic, Sulfrous Bladgal is cantankerous as befitting a choleric, Arturiel Haemoglobe is free-spirited and sanguine, and Mewcosa Glycocet is sweet but extremely emotional, as a phlegmatic should be.
Their names, of course, play on this too. Mewcosa is a play on Mucus, Sulfrous's last name, Bladgal, is a corruption of "Gall bladder," which makes yellow bile, Artery = Arturiel and Hemoglobin = Haemoglobe, and Lymf = lymph nodes while spenik is a corruption of "spleen," which makes black bile.
Professor Alys Evelina, teacher of Sorcery Studies, ends up serving as a secondary antagonist for books 1 and 2. Given how wild I went with making a lot of these side wizards explicitly monstrous, I decided to make Alys look excessively normal, even attractive, to not play into the "ugly = evil" trope. Don't read too much into the Alice in Wonderland motiff - while Alys and Alice both share a general disdain for things that are don't make sense to them, Alice Liddel is a much more likable character.
We don't get to see much of Alys's rival, Broomhilda Siegfried, but I still wanted to put some effort into her design anyway. She's meant to visually contrast Alys in the ways that Conjuration contrasts to Sorcery - notably, she's a lot shorter and hides her face, to go with the fact that Conjurers are kind of looked down upon by sorcerers. She's not keen on how her magic is viewed as the "lesser" of the two main ways to be a wizard.
They might not all get named, but we do see a lot of the non-educator staff in the first two books as well. Astrae Bygonn, the bugbear who runs the AAAM's Lost and Found, plays a pretty important role for how little screen time he gets. Esmer the gargoyle is named, while Quasi and Modo go uncredited in their roles as the two gargoyles working the school dance that starts the climax of Book 1. I think Ralda might only have showed up in book 2, but what the hell let's include her here anyway. And of course the janitorial homunculi are always on the fringers, being gloppy, helpful little guys maintaining all the school's functions.
Though they don't feature heavily in the story, both Ambrosio Medina (the alchemy professor) and Curdletongue (the prophecy professor) have named cameos in book 1, and they'll have slightly more important roles later on. Ambrosio is specifically meant to resemble Vincent Price, as I wanted him to have that charming yet slimy quality to him that Price so often brought to his roles.
I wanted the school to feel full, so I had my friends in the writers workshop discord I'm in pitch loose concepts for wizard students so I could have, like, a few dozen to pick from whenever I needed a background extra. Eventually we sorted them all loosely into the minor arcana of Tarot, and then expanded it to include some of the arcana from Minchiate, a card game very similar to Tarot that might be a parody of it? We were having fun making wizard students, what can I say.
Mugre Repellus was pitched by @bugcthulhu while Bartholomew Crawson was pitched by @dragonzzilla, and both of them went the extra mile to do some concept art too, which I adapted into these designs. They were two of the earliest spare wizard students we made, and we grew a bit attached to them - and since they both had claws on their arms, they were unofficially named "the claw gang" despite only having two members. Then, because it was fun, I made Shere Statchell to be their third member, the Jessie to their Team Rocket, and the Claw Gang became a sort of quirky trio who we kept making fun side stories for while working on the rest of the Spare Wizard Kids.
The joke was fun enough to keep going, to the point where I've made them recurring background extras and cameo characters in the series. What can I say, I love the Claw Gang.
Of course, another reason I needed a big ol' bucket of Spare Wizard students is that this is a mystery series, and mysteries need victims. I warned all my friends sending me pitches not to get too attached, because some of these kids were gonna die.
I'm a firm believer that a character's death should serve a purpose, though. You can kill a random one-off character for a gag, but if a character actually has, like, stuff going on, their death should have some weight to it. And book 2 needed at least one death that we felt - a side character who we liked enough to be sad to see go.
I picked Gabriev because his concept pitch - a wizard who also wants to be a chivalric knight - felt easy to make likable very quickly. Possibly a bit of personal bias - I'm a suck for knights in shining armor - but all you really need to do is make him nice and profess his desire to be a hero who goes out and does good, and suddenly that untimely death he's facing seems tragic.
Buuuut, if you do that too hurriedly, it'll be obvious he's set up to die - akin to having an old character say "I'm two days away from retirement" in a monster movie. Gabriev had to be seeded subtly, so audiences think he might have a future ahead of him.
So I put him in book 1, as a nice but not terribly prominent background extra in one of the main classes the kids attend in it, so readers might remember him and assume he's just a recurring extra like the Claw Gang. Ain't I devious?
Gabriev Zelgad's design and name is another Slayers reference. His armor is based on Gourry Gabriev (who is also obviously the source of his first name), and his last name is just another Slayers character, Zelgadis, without the "is." Like Gourry, he's a beautiful blond young man who's a bit of a ditz, and like Zelgadis, he suffers horribly tragedy.
Before I started the Spare Wizard Student project, I made a handful of supporting cast wizard students based on alternative names for various Major Arcana cards. Liam O'Sullivan here is based on The Lust, which is what Aleister Crowley renamed The Strength to in his Tarot deck, because of course he would, the horny old bastard. I initially didn't want to use that as a prompt because, like, what the fuck would that character end up being, WSM's take on Mineta? But then one of my friends joked I could just make him another take of the running gag I have in my TTRPG campaigns of introducing side characters who are deeply unflattering caricatures of myself that inexplicably end up in relationships with hot, terrifying goth women, and I smiled wickedly and said, "Oh you dumb bastard, that's canon now."
...which ended up being a godsend, because it gave me a way to introduce The Queen of Night, a minor character who's nonetheless important to book 1's mystery, as romancing her is the goal of the true antagonist. Sometimes torturing a specific part of your audience accidentally leads to a useful story beat.
Mr. Mackers is another minor fairy character who I wanted to use to show that Midgaheim does not work on the "Seelies = good fairies and Unseelies = bad fairies" trope, and also that it doesn't follow the "all fairies are explicitly evil eldritch horrors" trope that's becoming increasingly common as a "more true to the myths" approach. The mythic Nuckelavee is explicitly evil, to be fair, but not all fairies are, and I figured taking a fairy that's popular in internet culture for being so damn creepy and monstrous and having it be a relatively nice guy was a good way to subvert the modern expectations of what fairies should be - and try and stay true to the general mythological approach to fairies, which is that fairies are complex, not just good or evil.
Finally, we have good ol' Lornwig Kayjay, no relation to any children's book authors who decided to be figureheads for hategroups that specifically bully trans people. My rough concept for Lornwig was "that kid you get in at least one college class a semester who deliberately antagonizes the professor and every other student in class," because dear god you always get at least one class with a That Kid in it. The worst I ever endured was my class on Environmental Studies, because we had THREE That Kids in there. My second worst was the graduate class I took on Medieval Literature About Hell, because despite my best efforts, I was the That Kid of that class. It's a weird phenomenon.
As pre-writing chugged along and a certain children's book author became more prominently deranged, I decided Lornwig could get some theming outside of her role as a That Kid. And, you know, she's not the only That Kid I have planned. There's different flavors of That Kid, you know.
While Lornwig's role as a minor antagonist doesn't leave a lot of room for depth, I tried to give her a consistent philosophy behind her douchebaggery. She likes order and categorization, and things fitting into neat and tidy groups that you can sort into "Good" and "Bad" categories. That's a very human mindset - not a good one, but a very human one nonetheless. And she lives in a world of dangerous magical monsters, she does have some reasons to be scared and paranoid.
Several more of our friends threw in student pitches of their own, but by the time TT deemed the roster was big enough I think DZ and me had provided like half of the prompts
What can I say, the fun of brainstorming and hyperfixation are a dangerous combo (and it provided a wonderful distraction from Pandemic Hell)
Because I've been hyperfixating on Digimon, I've been figuring out friends' ideal Digimon partners and their lines, mostly just from Rookie to Mega. Might post them on here, along with the logic behind them, because why not?
Alright! Let's start with the initial line that got this going, my sister @lydiathespiderqueen ! It started with my discovery of Hydramon, a relatively new Mega level Digimon. As soon as I saw it I felt that it fit Lydia's aesthetic really nicely, she loves herself a plant monster! From there, I got to thinking about making a nice thematic line with this, starting at the end funnily enough. It was pretty easy to find other Digimon that linked into Hydramon aesthetically, and I went out of my way to avoid the humanoid Digimon that make up a good chunk of the franchise. Blossomon was a Digimon I remembered Lydia also expressing affection for, and it was a perfect choice for the ultimate level, and while I considered other Champion and Rookie levels, Palmon is another mon Lydia loves, and I've always found Sunflowmon to be underrated, and those two aesthetically fit the Ultimate and Mega way better than any other choices. There's this nice throughline of reptilian plants with teeth and vines throughout, getting more and more pronounced with each stage until you get what's basically a Digimon version of Biollante! I DID pitch Alraumon, a different colored variant of Palmon for those who don't know, but Lydia liked Palmon's colors more, and I agree it fits the overall warmer color scheme of the line.
And there it is! The one that started this whole rabbit hole I've been down. I'm debating if I'll just keep adding to this post, or start making individual posts for all the follow ups. It'd be kinda nice to see people adding their own Digimon lines, or one of their friends' lines that they made, to this. Digimon as a franchise isn't perfect, I've got my quibbles, but overall I love it a lot, even choosing it over Pokemon at one point in my life(long story). I might talk about my nitpicks another time, but this isn't the post for that, and I wanna leave off on a positive note: Digimon has such fun freedom and variety to what you can do with it, story wise and thematically, which we've seen be delved into in the various mediums the franchise has touched, and it has so many great monster designs. Here's to maybe turning this into a whole thing!
Tournament of Death [Cope, William, Cope, William, Gayhart, Alex, Wood, K.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Tournament of Death
If you’re like me, you’ve probably been thinking, “Man, I sure wish there was some good wizard media for me to enjoy in this, February of 2023. It sure is a shame there’s nothing wizard-related coming out right now for me to enjoy and indulge this urge to consume a fun story with wizards! I’d especially like it if said media took place in some sort of school for wizards, so there could be a convenient reason for a bunch of wizards to hang out, and maybe they could have a sort of coming of age journey set alongside the act of solving a magical mystery! If only such a piece of media existed!”
Well, fret no more! There is a brand-spanking-new piece of wizard content, set in a wizard school, with mysteries galore and coming of age drama for your perusal, all available to you now in early February of 2023! I present to you:
That’s right, the second book in my wildly popular Wizard School Mysteries series, Wizard School Mysteries 2: Tournament of Death, is now available for purchase! Continue the adventures of my bespectacled wizard boy, James Chaucer, and his ragtag group of misfit friends as they uncover a sinister plot at the Academy of Applied Arcana and Magic! Wizards! Magic! Young Love! Drama! Death! It’s got it all! Here, read the synopsis:
After foiling a kidnapping plot in their first semester, the Meddlesome Youths thought they had surely faced the worst peril the Academy of Applied Arcana and Magic could throw at them. After all, it can’t get much more perilous than fighting off a fairy prince and his army of elves, goblins, and orks, right?
Plus it seems the school itself is set for reverie, as the second semester brings with it the Ultimate Wizard Battle Tournament, a vast test of skill where wizards are invited to test their mettle and spell-casting prowess in a series of one-on-one duels. It’s the wizard equivalent of a joust, with a fabulous prize and all the glory one could hope for.
Yet what should be a friendly competition takes a deadly turn as it becomes clear that one of the competitors has decided fair play isn’t enough, rigging the matches without a care for the safety of the other students. Can our heroes find out who the saboteur is - and, more importantly, will they make it out of the tournament unscathed?
Doesn’t that sound like a hoot? You can purchase it here! And hey, if you haven’t read it already, pick up its predecessor, Wizard School Mysteries Book 1: The Meddlesome Youths, because this is the kind of series that really should be read in order, and also because it’s good and hey, that’s TWICE the wizard school content for your wizard loving heart!
And if you don’t want to support the evil empire of the Dark Lord Jeff Bezos, shoot me a DM and we can work out getting you a signed copy - i.e. a copy of the book that I order from Amazon at the cost of production (as in “amazon doesn’t make a profit”), autograph, and then send to you for the price of the book ($15) plus whatever shipping ends up being.
There you go, fam! Now you don’t have to worry about dying of wizard famine. I have fed you the good wizard content you crave, and indeed, the only wizard content you’ll need this month.
Finally watched Godzilla v Kong (the new one). I felt overall it was weaker than the previous one. The monster fights were good but Kong felt like he was basically just the main character for most of it with the madison russel sideplot feeling kind of slapped on. The hollow earth was very interesting as a location, especially the implied Kong civ, and makes me wish that the monsterverse continues.
WARNING: I AM GOING TO SAY SOME MEAN THINGS ABOUT A GODZILLA MOVIE THAT SOME OF YOU DEAR READERS MAY LIKE. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO READ THOSE THINGS, THEN SKIP THIS POST.
So, like, being one of the pretentious members of the Godzilla fandom who takes these movies very seriously, I felt out of place when most of my fellow pretentious Godzilla fans railed against Godzilla King of the Monsters for supposedly being mindless, poorly written, poorly acted action schlock, because that’s just not my reading of that movie at all. Like, yes, it has flaws, but overall I think it’s a pretty solid movie with strong themes and some really interesting takes on the mythology of Godzilla that still manages to tie the monsters stuff to grounded human drama in meaningful ways. Again, not perfect, but far from disposable action trash.
I bring this up because Godzilla vs. Kong is, to me, what all my fellow pretentious Godzilla fans who take the movies very seriously said Godzilla King of the Monsters was. It’s just a bunch of action set pieces poorly strung together with badly written human scenes, it reduces Godzilla to a one-dimensional antagonist for 90% of its runtime, it’s got moments that are just, like, so utterly stupid that they break even my capacity for suspension of disbelief-
It’s just not very good. It’s fun action schlock, but, like, NOTHING else.
I really liked Kong: Skull Island because it felt like a Godzilla movie that was masquerading as a Kong movie. Godzilla vs. Kong, by contrast, is a King Kong movie, with human characters who are either bland, grating, or both, and monsters who exist purely to menace said humans and get their asses kicked by Kong, who’s kind of interesting but nowhere near as compelling a monstrous protagonist as Godzilla is. And like pretty much all Kong movies, its only saving grace is its spectacle, because everything else is as barebones as the writers could get away with.
But they did let Godzilla win the titular fight, so I can’t hate it.
Also this is a minor point but I REALLY don’t like that MechaGodzilla, an arch-enemy of Godzilla, was ultimately done in by Kong with only a minor assist from Godzilla. It’s like if Superman was the one who finally stopped the Joker for good, you know? It just doesn’t feel right.
It totally fucking baffles me that there’s so much love for Godzilla vs. Kong. EVerything in it is done in a previous monsterverse film and done better. I guess the only improvement it makes is that there is less human drama to the story, it’s very sparse so it keeps the monster scenes flowing. If you call that a plus, I guess, but then there’s no reason to remember or revisit all of it. Why watch the film when I can watch a ten minute compilation of the monster scenes on youtube? Why spend the money to cast and film it at all, if youre not going to do anything with it? There’s just nothing to sink into at all.
Godzilla vs. Kong feels like the point where the Monsterverse stopped trying.
Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla is this very precisely paced, methodical movie whose goal is to rehabilitate Godzilla’s image in the public eye after years of ridicule and the 1998 remake had tarnished it, and it succeeded in that despite critics calling it boring. Kong: Skull Island decided to jettison the tried and true story-telling formula of King Kong while keeping the title monster and setting in a far more complex story about war, and I feel it mostly succeeded even if some characters were a bit flat/underdeveloped. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a fan’s love letter to the entire mythos of Godzilla, with some great attempts to explore the mythic aspect of kaiju that a lot of American media underplays or outright cuts, and while it has some shaky bits and suffers from trying to put too much into one movie, that love is so, so palpable.
Godzilla vs. Kong is a movie that looked at how the previous three were all written off as stupid action schlock whose biggest flaw was not realizing they were stupid action schlock, and said, “Welp, guess I’ll just be stupid action schlock then.” There’s no attempt at theme or character arcs, no greater connection between the human and monster plots beyond a need for someone to dump exposition as quickly, lazily, and incoherently as possible, no effort put into anything that isn’t mindless spectacle.
And that’s not the worst thing in the world. I love plenty of schlock monster movies. I mean I stand by Rampage as a perfectly adequate movie for fuck’s sake. But I don’t know, it kind of stings when we got three movies in this series that were trying to be something more than that, to have the most successful one be the one that gave up and said, “fuck it, just slam the action figures against each other and call it a day.”
I left KOTM hoping that there would be more Monsterverse movies to build off of what it set up. I left GvK… well, not unhappy, but at peace with the concept of the Monsterverse ending there if it had to, because I just don’t like the direction it was going. I’d like the Monsterverse to keep trying to be good.
Talking as someone that enjoyed GvK all the same, I stand convinced that the whole thing reeks of Legendary not having nearly as much faith in this movie or the Monsterverse's future as they said.
The higher-ups swore that KOTM not being the smash hit tons of people were hoping it'd be wouldn't deter them, but then GvK had absolutely *zero* marketing up until the trailer was released and reception turned out really positive. And later we'd learn that lots of presumably lore-heavy scenes including returning cast from KOTM were cut out entirely, like they were desperate to remove anything that might remind moviegoers of the previous movie in fear of a repeat.
It's also really telling that they immediately brought Adam Wingard back to direct the sequel, while we'll probably be lucky if we ever see Dougherty breathe anywhere near Godzilla's direction again
The Meddlesome Youths [Cope, William David, Cope, William David, Gayhart, Alex, Wood, K.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Meddlesome Youths
Wizard School Mysteries Book 1: The Meddlesome Youths is officially available for purchase in paperback and kindle!
In the fantastical land of Midgaheim, James Chaucer sets out at the tender age of eighteen to attend the Academy of Applied Arcana and Magic, the first ever school for wizards in the history of the continent. Yet he soon discovers the school is not as it seems when his fellow students begin disappearing. Together with his newfound friends, James uncovers unravels a dark mystery and uncovers a sinister plot that only eight meddling kids can hope to solve.
Can James and his friends stop this vile conspiracy? And can they do it while also passing their classes and learning to harness the strange and terrible powers of magic itself? Dragons, goblins, lake monsters, unhinged professors, and other dangers await in this first book of Wizard School Mysteries!
One more thing! As before, I will be getting author copies, which will be autographed and shipped to you for the purchase price ($15) plus whatever shipping ends up being. If you’d like to reserve one, shoot me a DM with your name and address and I’ll add you to my list.
Y'all better get your copy if you enjoy medieval fantasy settings, absurdly intrincate and passion-drenched worldbuilding, a cast filled to bursting with loveable dorks, and endless spite towards everything J.K.Rowling has wrought!
Entry for good ol’ @tyrantisterror ‘s third ATOM kaiju contest!
One of the last “children” of Area 51, the 112 feet tall OBSIDEBAN appears to be an early foray into the realm of man-made kaiju, preceding the birth of Rohobaron, and contained within the deepest bowels of the infamous Spooks facility. While it is believed she took part in the so-called “kaiju breakout” as the site went down in flames, something must have gone wrong during her escape, for the first time the world knew of her was when she suddenly emerged from the Glaciar Oasis, far from her original location, trampling her way into the ocean towards Typhon Island.
Obsideban’s DNA is largely built from extinct rauisuchid stock such as Postosuchus, as well as traces of short-tailed sea tyrant and spike-tailed goliath retrosaurs. Slow and cumbersome, she compensates her limited physical prowess with the curious ability to repel all heat from her surroundings, freezing and weakening even the most cold-hardy adversaries, and in addition her heavy jaws pack an extremely powerful, crushing bite.
Despite her pugnacious appearance, Obsideban is a calm, easygoing and calculating creature that enjoys company as long as she doesn’t have to exert herself too much, and may spend long hours simply lying in place and taking in whatever scenery catches her eye that day (eg: the morning fog above the mountains, the stars in a clear night sky). Researchers have noted her behavior around other kaiju can be best described as “sisterly”, going out of her way to break up fights while being non-confrontational herself and preferring to intimidate would-be-challengers with her sheer size and rythmic teeth snapping
All of this abruptly ends the second actual harm comes to any of Obsideban’s allies, in which case she transforms into a raging, merciless berserker, with a total disregard for pain or her very own life until she has throughoutly mangled those that would strike her friends, whether they can actually defend themselves or not.
Out of any other kaiju since her arrival to Typhon Island Obsideban appears to have the closest bond to her fellow hybrid Rohobaron, and their familiarity with each other has led many to theorize the two must’ve been raised together as “siblings” , or at least trained to work in tandem at some point. The excitable, hotheaded Rohobaron often wears down the relaxed, coolheaded Obsideban, and she is typically the one to literally drag him out of trouble, but the sight of him getting injured provoques the most violent reactions out of her, and he remains the only one able to truly snap her out of her berserker rages
Ok, one LAST 4 Horror War thing - I drew my team! Well, the first sixteen monsters anyway. Ideally, there’d be a lot of customization options in the game - different skins for each Arky and whatnot - so some of my arkies are a little different than their “standard” designs. My Fear Crafter is a Serling, but he’s also pretty good with Gothic Horror monsters, so I gave his outfit a little Radcliffian fashion as well.
Have YOU picked out your team? Feel free to share if so!
me: i don’t mind being alone
also me: *feels abandoned for no reason at all, needs constant reassurance that my presence is wanted, cannot see how anyone would want to be friends with me, is not able to focus on anything because of the intense feeling of imaginary rejection*
