#this week's post

[theafictionado]

The Chill Guy and the Ice Queen: Knocking Down Expectations in The Ramparts of Ice

Light spoilers ahead for episodes 1 – 5 of The Ramparts of Ice.

Sometimes you’re engaging with a work of fiction—reading a book, watching a show, pick your treat—and you feel an involuntary emotional reaction crawl up your spine. Your body reacts: a curl of the mouth, a narrowing of the eyes, and before you know it you’re muttering ‘oh, this guy kinda sucks’ at some animated teenager. You’re then caught in an interesting limbo wondering if the suck-age is going to continue, simply treated as a neutral character trait (or, worse, treated as something cool and likeable, actually)… or if the narrative is going to frame this as a character flaw, a trait to be unpacked and worked through for satisfying storytelling purposes. It’s a gamble, and I’ve been disappointed before. But I was pleasantly surprised when watching the currently-airing school drama The Ramparts of Ice, which absolutely rewarded my patience and is (so far, anyway!) providing some very interesting character work and a refreshing flip of my expectations.

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[theafictionado]

Crying About Robots with Apocalypse Hotel

I almost didn’t watch Apocalypse Hotel. I tend to avoid post-apocalyptic sci-fi at the best of times, and I’ve really only had the stomach for slice-of-life comfort shows this year. But, well, in a sense Apocalypse Hotel is a slice-of-life show, it just follows the lives of robots and aliens in a distant post-human future instead of, say, teenage golf enthusiasts. And sometimes, honestly, a show that’s bittersweet and haunting and ultimately hopeful in the face of a vast, incomprehensible, unforgiving universe can be a comfort show. 

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[theafictionado]

Songs for Lost Girls: Messy Teens and Emotional Stakes in BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!

Spoilers ahead for the first season of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!

Would you believe me if I told you that one of the most impactful and dramatic opening scenes I’ve ever seen was, in its entirety, a group of middle school girls arguing in a music room? It might not sound like much on paper, but the intro to 2023’s BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! packs a punch, dropping the audience into a moment of confusion, heartbreak, and intrigue that fantastically sets the tone and the stakes for the show ahead.

One gloomy afternoon, Saki arrives for practice with her band CRYCHIC, only to bluntly announce that she’s quitting. The room goes cold despite the rainy-day humidity, and tension builds like the storm outside, all ramping up to a moment of chaos and a final knife-twist of interpersonal drama. I don’t know who these girls are yet, save for the glimpses of their personalities in this rocky and stressful character-establishing moment, which surely does not show them at their best. I don’t know why Saki is quitting or why it’s such a big deal. I don’t know what’s going to happen next… but I need to find out. I’m hooked, fascinated, and a little bit emotional already. And so the stage is set.

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[theafictionado]

Secrets of the Silent Witch: An “Overpowered” Fantasy Protagonist Done Right

In my years of reviewing anime, I find I come back to a few recurring trends: I often catch myself critiquing shows where “everything is easy for the protagonist”, whether that means they’re already better than all their peers at their own special skills, or they’re beloved by everyone despite putting in no visible effort to be good or even nice. The reason this bugs me is because these wish-fulfilment stories might be fun on a very shallow level, but they just don’t make for actual engaging storytelling. There’s nowhere for a character arc to arc if the hero is already good at everything and already (allegedly) a great, rounded person; and there’s no stakes nor tension if the plot arranges things so that they’re never challenged. Maybe this suits a chill-out slice-of-life series, but it makes a very weak and flavourless story for any other genre—especially fantasy!

I say “them” for inclusivity, but let’s be real—these characters are usually young men, and usually helming the kind of boilerplate power fantasy, reincarnation isekai or otherwise, that has glutted the seasonal anime schedule for years. Overpowered female protagonists are fewer and further between, which made this year’s Secrets of the Silent Witch stand out. Its main character, Monica Everett, is a teen prodigy who’s revolutionised the world’s magic system and is slaying un-slayable dragons before the prologue’s even begun. But don’t be fooled: I was pleasantly surprised to see how well Silent Witch constructed its so-called OP protagonist and crafted a story with genuine stakes, conflict, and character growth. It can be done!! And I think Silent Witch is, as well as being a fun show overall, a neat case study in how.

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[theafictionado]

Faeries and Footnotes: The Nerdy Fun of Scholarly Worldbuilding

I have an affection for stories that take a scholarly, dare I say nerdy, approach to their fantasy elements. I’ve recently devoured both books in Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series, which follows a prickly academic on a field trip into Faerie, filling her journal with footnotes and references to in-universe research on magic along the way. My favourite character in Freya Marske’s The Last Binding trilogy is Edwin Courcey, who helps deliver much of the setting’s lore and magic system via his ceaseless curiosity and very academic and technical approach to how magic works. The scholarly book-within-a-book about portal worlds in The Ten Thousand Doors of January made me whoop for joy.

I can probably trace this back to reading Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell at a formative stage of my undergrad studies, at which point I reckon it did something to my brain chemistry. But what, exactly, is the appeal of a series that looks at its magic through the lens of research, and with all the scientific technicalities and academic in-fighting that come with that? It does something unique and very fun to the way these fictional worlds are built, and I want to play with that here.

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[theafictionado]

The Chosen and the Beautiful: A Haunting and Magical Gatsby Remix

On and on we blog, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into nerdy obsessions of the past.

I have a continued fascination and lingering affection for The Great Gatsby, possibly because I came across it organically as a Jazz-Age-obsessed teenager and was never made to study it. It’s a story that still holds up, and still resonates even though it’s about such a specific place and time; the vibes are impeccable, the tragedy delicious, the themes and social critique ever-relevant. I’m also a sucker for Fitzgerald’s style of prose (there’s an ancient post somewhere on here about me reading and gushing over his short stories, which will probably auto-link at the bottom of this page and embarrass all of us).

Naturally, new writers keep approaching Gatsby from different angles—as of 2025, people have been crazy about Gatsby for 100 years! Nghi Vo’s fantasy-tinged retelling The Chosen and the Beautiful, published in 2021, has been shining its enticing green light at me ever since I first heard about it. As a novel that shifts the genre and focuses on (and somewhat reinvents) a main character, it’s a few steps sideways from the original, and I was curious as to how it could work. Buoyed by my love for Vo’s short stories (where she weaves together fantasy elements and the Jazz Age very well), I took the leap and checked this out, and wow am I glad that I did.

Read my full review here!

[theafictionado]

Novels to Read If You, Like Me, Have Fate Brainworms

As you’ll know if you’ve followed this blog for a while, the Fate franchise retains a special place in my heart. Having absorbed this story of mages and mythic heroes at a formative age, it’s lodged itself in my brainstem and influences my tastes to this day, both in terms of my own creative output (see my mythology-messing thesis, and the fact that all my original fantasy projects contain extended, emotionally important scenes of the characters stopping to cook and eat dinner) and my creative input. Certain thematic threads, character dynamics, and ways of handling magic echo across my favourite pieces of media, each executed in their own imaginative ways.

So with that in mind, here’s a very niche novel recommendation post: these three fun, creative, really cool fantasy works all have some element and/or theme that means you might enjoy them if you also like Fate! My reasons for making the connection are laid out at the top of each review, so scan through and see if that aspect is what you’re after in your next read.

As a bonus, all of these have queer characters in the central cast (though hey, that’s also in the spirit of Fate and has been since the very beginning!)

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