#reviews

[pricelessreviews]

[mysharona1987]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Vicky Osterweil’s “The Extended Universe”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/28/mouseketeers/#uncle-walt

Vicky Osterweil's The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World makes the kind of long, polemical, startling and illuminating argument that defines great cultural criticism; it's the sort of book that encapsulates the reasons I read criticism in the first place:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

My first brush with this kind of criticism came more than two decades ago, when I read John Kessel's now-classic "Creating the Innocent Killer," a critique of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a book I had read and enjoyed enough to re-read several times:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer

Kessel's argument is that Card used Ender's Game to smuggle in some very ugly ideas, wrapped in a story that was compelling, even exhilarating. In Ender's Game, we meet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a small, physically weak boy possessed of a prodigious intellect and a great deal of sensitivity and empathy. Ender is tormented by an escalating series of aggressors, whom he retaliates against with overwhelming force, first to the point of lethality and then all the way to literal genocide. And here's where Card makes his move: Ender's sensitivity and empathy and intellect tell him that he must respond this way, because he can tell that his aggressors will not back off from their intention to harm him; and because Ender is so small and weak, he has to use whatever tactic his brilliant mind can devise, and if that tactic results in the death penalty for mere bullying, well, that's the bully's fault, not Ender's. Indeed, in dying at Ender's hands, these bullies re-victimize Ender, because Ender is a gentle, smart, wise, weak person, and these inescapable murders that he is goaded into committing are a stain on his soul that he can never wash away.

Before reading "Creating the Innocent Killer," I confess I didn't really understand what criticism was for. Like many people, I conflated "criticism" with "reviews," thinking of critical works as a species of inconveniently difficult-to-digest essays that might help me figure out which books to read and which movies to see.

Kessel's magnificent essay changed all that, and not in spite of the fact that Kessel had pointed out some very important problems with a book that I loved, but because of that fact. In helping me understand the ugliness hidden within something whose beauty and virtues I saw very clearly, Kessel taught me more about myself – about where my aesthetics and my values overlapped, and where they diverged. It was literally life-changing.

Like Kessel, Osterweil's 'Extended Universe' deals with media that I have a great deal of affection for – the products of the Walt Disney Company. Though I'm primarily interested in theme parks – I love a big, ambitious built environment of any description and Disney pursues these with a seriousness that few others can touch – the Disney films (and the films of the studios Disney purchased, like Marvel and Lucasfilm) are obviously intimately bound up in those theme park designs.

Osterweil has her own ambivalent affection for these movies. Like so many of us, she's been raised on them, and they've shaped how she sees the world and its stories. But – like me – Osterweil is deeply suspicious of capitalism, American imperialism, and the notion of "intellectual property," and she uses reviews of a dozen Disney films to make the case that Walt Disney and the studio he founded with his brother are standards-bearers for these odious forces, and not just in the overt ways that might immediately spring to mind, but also in subtle ways that can be teased out of a close reading of the films.

In so doing, Osterweil also makes a sharp and well-argued case that intellectual property, colonialism and racial oppression are all facets of the same drive, the drive of people who fancy themselves born to rule to dominate others, which requires that those others also be dehumanized and their work denigrated. When Walt Disney insisted that his be the only name associated with "his" movies, he was playing out the same logic that underpinned his virulent opposition to labor unions and his participation in American imperialism in Latin America.

As with Kessel, Osterweil's argument is full of surprises and illuminations that are especially vivid for those of us who have great affection for these works. As her chapter on Black Panther shows, this contradiction need not go unresolved. There is plenty of scope for fans to seize the reins of the narrative (and as her chapter on the reactionary backlash to the later Star Wars movies shows, it's not just the forces of progress and anti-racism who can pull off this move).

Like the very best criticism, Osterweil's book is more than a way to deepen your understanding of the material she dissects – it's a way to deepen your understanding of the world that produced it, and to deepen your understanding of yourself.

[weaselandfriends]

Lucky☆Star (Anime)

How does art age?

There's a joke in Lucky☆Star where the four main characters fill out a questionnaire that asks them what they want to be when they grow up. Konata, the otaku, puts down "Brigade Leader," which draws as punchline an eyeroll from her sarcastic friend, Kagami.

The core of this joke is that Konata has taken a serious question and answered it with a fictional "occupation" from an anime she likes -- specifically, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which was monstrously popular at the time. Almost everyone watching Lucky☆Star in 2007, when it first aired, would understand this reference. That understanding would then foster a sense of kinship with the work, the feeling of "being seen," the long yearned-for ideal of niche nerd subcultures laughed at by society at large.

Despite its incredible influence on moe aesthetics and anime culture in 2006, Haruhi Suzumiya is virtually forgotten now, unwatched even by diehards and unrecommended by the old weebs who were around in its heyday. I've never seen it myself. It's my next watch, with another friend who is even more of an anime neophyte than I am; our third friend, who did watch it in 2006, refuses to rewatch with us. It's too cringe, she says. The suggestion I get is that, if we were to modernize the what-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up joke, Konata might instead put that she wants to become a Skibidi Toilet.

Haruhi Suzumiya haunts Lucky☆Star like a ghost. She is in almost every episode, as either a poster or figurine or manga cover or cosplay or karaoke rendition or even, once, a voiced commercial. She has more presence than most of the supporting cast, the majority of whom do not appear until the 14th episode (but who also haunt the show via their unexplained presence in the OP). Konata is voiced by the same actress who voiced Haruhi, a fact that launches an armada of arcane metafictional injokes, including a scene where Konata sees said voice actress in concert. The sheer magnitude of these references wash over the 2025 viewer. They are meaningless. Haruhi Suzumiya is dead and buried. She is seen more by the shadow she casts in this show than anywhere else.

The inscrutability of this massive swath of the show suggests that Lucky☆Star itself has not aged particularly well. Indeed, compared to its zenith in 2007, it's not faring much better than Haruhi today. The sole advantage Lucky☆Star has, in fact, might stem from the "Out Of Touch Thursday" meme, which keeps some small shard of it alive in the anime community's consciousness. Even if you take the time to research the references, needing to research them at all gives the ultimate impression is that Konata is no longer the trendy otaku she once was, but passe, lame, dated, cringe, Out Of Touch. It's only the thin line of competent verbal skills that keeps her from becoming her dark mirror, Tomoko Kuroki.

But Haruhi Suzumiya is by no means the only obscure reference the show flings out, and some of these references I can only imagine were unknown even to the teenage-skewing anglosphere anime culture of 2007. At one point, Konata makes a reference (Timotei, Timotei) to a Japanese commercial for a Finnish shampoo brand from the 1980s. Karaoke segments feature Japanese pop songs from the 70s (with Kagami sarcastically asking Konata "How old are you?" whenever she puts them on). The entire Lucky Channel bit that appears at the end of each episode is an extended reference to a Japanese-only radio show that ran concurrent to the original airing. Even within that context, the fact that Lucky Channel co-host Minoru Shiraishi is a real person playing himself (and the other co-host, Akira Kogami, is not) is lost on anyone without highly specialized knowledge. That the credits sequences of the show's second half feature the real Minoru Shiraishi in live action is equally easy to miss. The bleeding edge transience of the references culminates with the show recursively referring to its own fame. In one scene, Konata reads a fortune at a Kyoto temple that says "Konata is my wife"; this is a reference to real-life otaku going to a temple in Saitama, where Lucky☆Star is set, and leaving the same prayer.

The show requires footnotes. It had them, on the 2007 anime forums where the show accrued so much buzz, entire Bibles breaking down every reference; it truly wasn't understood even when it aired. It makes perfect sense why Lucky☆Star wouldn't age well.

Yet, watching the show for the first time in 2014, long after its cultural moment, and again in 2025, I have found it extraordinarily timeless. In fact, I liked it better in 2025 than 2014, despite an additional 11 years of watching anime that enabled me to understand exactly 0 things I didn't get the first time around. And there are a lot of things I didn't get. The references I detailed earlier are only the ones, in complete befuddlement, I bothered to look up; so many more continue to elude me.

In many ways, Lucky☆Star is aware of how inscrutable it is and compensates for itself. Wikipedia describes Konata as the "main character" of the show, and to the otaku audiences of 2007 she was the most relatable of the cast and by extension the most popular character by far (something outright stated in one of the Lucky Channel segments, which reveals the results of an actual character popularity poll), but in terms of screen time, she is not appreciably more present than either of the Hiiragi twins, Kagami and Tsukasa. It's not as though Lucky☆Star has anything resembling a plot, either, that would frame a particular character as the "protagonist"; at best the cast can be described as ensemble. This decentralization of perspective enables a wide variety of ways for the viewer to connect with the show. Konata's authentic (in 2007) otakuism made her the darling of that audience, but the show itself does not innately weigh her so highly. In fact, even when her references are inscrutable, it's the confused response of Tsukasa, or the sarcastic response of Kagami (who tends to call Konata the 2007 equivalent of "cringe"), that provide a contextual framework for what the joke is supposed to be. I don't need to know what the SOS Brigade is when Konata expresses her desire to grow up and become a Brigade Leader, because I can understand through Kagami's biting remark that it is some frivolous anime horseshit.

More importantly, the show's equivocation in terms of perspective makes it possible to empathize with Kagami's position over Konata's. The simplest comedy dynamic is the comedian/straight man, but the reliance of most narrative comedy on some form of social stakes -- either in the form of argument, humiliation, physical or psychological pain, or so on -- generally leads to empathy with one of the duo over the other. The straight man might be a put-upon everyman who is unfairly forced to deal with an obnoxious oaf, or a too-serious curmudgeon who is getting what they deserve from a guy who's just having a little fun. In the first case, the straight man is the point of audience empathy; in the second, the comedian is.

Konata and Kagami follow this comedy dynamic to a T, with Konata an aimless slacker and Kagami the uptight perfectionist. But in Lucky☆Star, divorced entirely from anything resembling a narrative -- episodic, situational, or otherwise -- there are zero social stakes to their conversations. Nobody ever "loses." Nobody is ever hurt. Nobody is wrong or right. Nothing happens at the expense of one character or another. As such, it is possible to watch the show and see the joke from the perspective of any given character at any time. If Konata says some arcane reference you don't get, Kagami's clapback becomes the joke. If Konata says something and you do understand it, the reference itself is the joke.

This comedic ambivalence is structurally remarkable (jokes typically have rigidly defined punchlines, moments you are "supposed" to laugh at), but comes with the price of the jokes not really being very funny. What it does do is create comprehensible and even "relatable" situations out of incomprehensible bits of referential information. Not understanding the reference is not an impediment to understanding Lucky☆Star. As such, Lucky☆Star functions as both a hyper-specific time capsule of 2007 anime subculture and a work that can be engaged with on its own terms even when completely divorced from that context.

The advent of the internet has led to an explosion in the spread of information and the ascendancy of the niche. It has also led to shorter shelf lives for information and an increased focus on the immediate. Memes burst into prominence, linger a month or two, vanish. Media is buzzed about in some section of society, is unknown everywhere else. A social media influencer has millions of followers and yet is a complete blank in the wider cultural eye. How can a work of art reflect this reality without rendering itself incomprehensible in a year, ten years, twenty? Is it possible to make timeless art in such a milieu, without stripping away as many signifiers of the world we live in to rely solely on "universal" and thus generic themes such as love, death, etc.?

I've seen many ways of attacking this problem. Infinite Jest's famous footnotes are one, as is the genre of "hysterical realism" itself, which attempts to create the suggestion of information density via massive novels with tons of characters spanning many countries and even time periods. Homestuck builds its own internal language of memes (I warned you about stairs bro!) that the reader will always understand no matter how many arcane applications those memes receive throughout the work. (Hence why an audience of teens in the 2010s were able to laugh uproariously at jokes about the 90s action flick Con Air that none of them had ever seen.) Multiverse movies, from Everything Everywhere All at Once to Into the Spider-Verse, depict the density of information horizontally rather than vertically, with unlimited variations on the same core theme. Even if you have never read whatever obscure comic run Noir Spider-Man comes from, you can understand him immediately based on his relationship to a sort of Platonic ideal of "Spider-Man".

These are all highly controlled forms of conveying the idea of "current day information density" without actually wallowing in actual current day information density. What's remarkable about Lucky☆Star is both that it actually does engage with the incredibly niche memes of its exact moment in time, but that it does so through the complete ceding of narrative control. Lucky☆Star functions because, not in spite of, the fact that it has no protagonist, no plot. It doesn't even have situations, like an episodic sitcom. It is not especially concerned with being funny, or dramatic, or heartwarming, or any particular emotion.

As a sort of thesis statement for the show, its first episode opens with a six-minute scene in which Konata, Tsukasa, and Miyuki discuss various ways of eating different types of food. There is no buildup, no joke, no emotional payoff, not even any of the references I've spent this entire essay talking about. There is no progression. The girls discuss how to eat one type of food, then move onto the next. In a way, this scene is a more aggressive challenge to the viewer than the niche references it employs later on. It is a complete surrender to banality.

Even within the context of the slice of life genre, which is full of comfy shows about Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, Lucky☆Star achieves phenomenal laxity. Other popular examples revolve around a specific theme that creates a sense of progression toward an ultimate goal; in K-On!, for instance, the girls are members of a band and work toward a successful performance, even if they spend a lot of their practices slacking off. Alternatively, without a clear theme, these shows might use surreal characters and situations to elevate the show above the mundane, such as in Azumanga Daioh, where a main character is a 10-year-old genius in high school. Or, in the case of Clannad, there might be a romantic angle to the laid-back character interactions.

This is all gone in Lucky☆Star. It has been stripped down past the basics of storytelling, akin to an abstract work of art that is three colors on a canvas. (Or four, in this case.) In this context, even Konata's deep cut animanga references sink to the level of banality, their impenetrability both an abstract confusion and a level of verisimilitude that other works can usually only suggest or evoke when they attempt to grapple with the reality of subculture. (To this end, Lucky☆Star is massively advantaged by its adaptation, as studio Kyoto Animation also made Haruhi Suzumiya and was able to mine its cultural relevance without the usual fear of copyright reprisals, in a prognostication of Ready Player One/Space Jam 2-style pan-brand media crossovers.) Similar to the best abstract art, there is an odd, ungraspable power to the starkness of Lucky☆Star's composition; also similar, much of this power emerges out of the work's context. Not simply its hyper-specific 2007 cultural context, which I've already discussed, but also the way it contextualizes itself internally.

Because I lied when I said the first episode of Lucky☆Star opens with a scene of three girls talking about how they eat different types of food. I'm not even talking about the actual first scene, which is a 10-second quick gag where Konata tells Tsukasa she doesn't join a sports team because it would cut into her free time to watch anime. No, Lucky☆Star opens in episode 1 the same way it opens every episode, with this:

The ambiguous 3 cm? Does that mean it's plushy? Wait! The wrapping is a uniform, argh, it's not an act, pooh Gotta do your best, gotta just do it That's time to catch n' release, eek Between sweat (whoop) sweat (whoop) Darlin', darlin' FREEZE! Kinda lethargic, something's kinda comin' out I love you... oh wait, one of those was different Worrywarts, high metal bars Tasty thoughts... and that's enough! The heated body of that flying you-know-who It's what you'd call a normal girlie Am I the only one surprised? Seconds on pork-bone broth ramen with wire-hard noodles Da da da da da! [Several seconds of indistinguishable chatter] Pom-poms cheer squad Let's get cherry pie [this line is in English] Happy fun welcoming party Look up! Sensation [also English] Yeah! Feeling of existence, dot dot small planet Collided and it melted away, in total awe Go all out to sing, shi-ranger! Take it away! I should be the one who'll be laughing in the end Because I have the sailor suit ← This is my conclusion It's only Monday! Already in a bad mood? What to do? I really prefer the summer outfits ← kya! Wah! Good! (cute!) <3 Until we approach 3 pixels, no hesitations please ☆ Do your best, be energetic My darlin' darlin' please!

The lyrics of Lucky☆Star's OP are nonsense, both in translation and in the original Japanese (and if you don't believe that, the English line "Let's get cherry pie" should be evidence enough). At best, they are a mishmash of schoolgirl concepts and oblique anime references, which at the very least is an accurate reflection of the content of the show. But the presentation is frenetic, erratic, aggressively at odds with the show's lassitude, without any contextualizing remark from Kagami to make it make, even in the abstract, any sort of sense.

Likewise, on the opposite end of the show is its concluding bookend, the Lucky Channel segment. This segment also sharply juxtaposes the show's core content, first in tone -- being far more cynical and meanspirited -- but also in structure. Lucky Channel engages in the exact stakes-driven comedian/straight man dynamic that the show eschews. When the Lucky Channel co-hosts Akira Kogami and Minoru Shiraishi banter, the results are either Minoru's physical or emotional abuse at the hands of Akira, or Akira's humiliation as a failed but narcissistic idol constantly upstaged by the unassuming Minoru. Lucky Channel also has another concept anathema to Lucky☆Star: narrative progression. Minoru grows bolder as the episodes draw on, Akira more violent; in a late episode, a mental breakdown leads to the destruction of the set, which remains destroyed in the final few episodes as Minoru and Akira finally and without reconciliation descend into blistering hatred of one another. At the same time, these segments are the location of some of the show's most indecipherable and multilayered injokes, injokes almost defined by their transience as most stem from a real-life radio show lost to time if you weren't right there listening to them as they went live. This segment is probably the most consistently funny part of Lucky☆Star; that's not because its jokes make sense, but rather the blunt slapstick and Akira's dramatic shifts from ultra-cutesy child idol to chain-smoking world-weary industry cynic.

The effect of the OP and the Lucky Channel segment is to sandwich the sedate, relaxed, mundane central content of Lucky☆Star between chaos, nonsense, and irony. Thus, the inner show contextualizes itself as a retreat from the storm of information and self-reflexivity, despite the fact that it deals directly with these topics. The show's indolence renders them harmless, comprehensible, and nonthreatening. Lucky☆Star is a world where the unknown can be easily and pleasantly demystified; the show's fourth character, Miyuki -- sometimes nicknamed Miwiki -- is an encyclopedic fountain of knowledge whose primary role is to exhaustively explain oddities on the fringes of Japanese culture with a polite and friendly smile. Miyuki is clearly secondary to Konata and the Hiiragi twins in terms of screen time, which gives her the feel of a supporting character despite her main cast billing, with an emphasis on the word "supporting"; like a servant, the other three will, after a conversation among themselves, call her to define some term or idiom. (That this obliging sense of service comes from the richest and most aristocratic character of the cast is another matter.) In Lucky☆Star, information is not chaotic and confusing, the way it is at the show's fringes, or in the "real world", but something that stimulates curiosity and kinship. So many scenes begin with a character saying, "I wonder why...?" followed by speculation and finally an answer. In the absence of plot, progression, or even humor, it's this sense of curiosity that renders Lucky☆Star's mundane scenes compelling. And it is their tonal juxtaposition against chaos that renders them so comfortable, so soothing.

As the internet grows older and more central to everyone's lives, as the headlines everyone talked about last week are forgotten today, Lucky☆Star's expression of retreat and reorder will only continue to become more emotionally satisfying, even as its 2007 references become more dated. What I find most potent in Lucky☆Star, though, is the steadily growing sense of wistfulness it fosters, not through any one scene or tone shift, but through a collection of tiny ones. New cast members are introduced in the second half, which dilutes the presence of the main characters and thins the tight-knit sense of friendship that unified the work. The characters increasingly ruminate on their futures (despite the lack of progression, time does pass linearly, and the show ends with the end of high school on the horizon), always suggesting a "real world" of adulthood lurking behind the corner. The show's artifice is explicitly exposed by the Lucky Channel segments, which metafictionally describe the show as "the show" and the characters as "actors." ("They must all hate each other once the camera stops rolling," Akira cynically suggests.) The ED of the show's first half features the four main girls in a karaoke bar; in the second half, though, this is replaced with live-action footage of the real-life actor Minoru Shiraishi from the Lucky Channel segments. Reality infringes on Lucky☆Star at its corners, slowly creeping inward. Its calm fantasy, a fantasy founded on verisimilitude rather than imagination, is gradually exposed as fake, a production. (Which it always was, no matter how real, how relatable it felt. For all the verisimilitude in its tone, these are characters who are more moe than moe, blobs of cuteness and distorted proportions beyond even the average CGDCT anime.) It ends, in the final episode, as the characters diegetically recreate the frenetic nonsense OP, with them all arrayed on a stage, the curtain rising to white light. And even more ominously, its final ED ends with Minoru Shiraishi intoning a few plaintive notes as he faces a lone and level plain.

This is Lucky☆Star's final shot. This what awaits outside of the show's dewy comfort. Bye-ni.

[khaleesiofalicante]

We need to talk about Adolescence on Netflix

This is easily one of the best shows I’ve watched in a long time. Netflix consistently delivers when it comes to miniseries, and this was no exception. But what makes Adolescence truly remarkable is that it tells a story that needed to be told.

We see the online radicalization of young men and boys every day. And because of the work I do on this topic, I can tell you that what’s visible - the parts we see on Instagram or Twitter - is just the tip of the iceberg. The real, insidious radicalization happens in the shadows: in private group chats on WhatsApp, Discord servers, and locked Reddit threads. It’s a thousand times worse than most people realize. So when the show actually name-dropped the word "manosphere," I was stunned. No one ever talks about it, despite how much it impacts young people - especially boys.

Beyond the subject matter, Adolescence was incredibly well-written. The way it handled the school environment, the interactions between parents, and the way adults often fail to grasp the coded language and social hierarchies of online spaces, it was all so nuanced, so painfully real.

This is the kind of content we need more of. I am begging Netflix to stop churning out serial killer shows that glorify their subjects. Instead, we need more stories like this.

And beyond the writing, the acting and directing were on another level. Stephen Graham was phenomenal. Every time he was on screen, I was in tears. And when I found out this was Owen Cooper’s first acting role? No experience at all? Just some random kid? He blew me away, especially in Episode 3. The entire cast delivered such raw, powerful performances.

Also, the fact that every episode was filmed in a single continuous shot...wow. I didn’t even notice at first, but once I realized it, it became clear how much it added to the story. It intensifies the realism, the claustrophobia, and the sense of inescapable momentum.

I’ve seen people say that parents of young boys should watch this. I disagree. The manosphere and the rise of online misogyny isn’t just about young boys. It’s about all of us. We contribute to it when we ignore it, when we allow it to continue unchecked, when we don’t talk about it. This isn’t just a show for parents. Everyone needs to watch this and understand the devastating real-world consequences of the misogyny that festers online.

10/10.

[sleepy-bebby]

Review of a butterfly farm… 🦋

[fragranticareviewers]