do you know how bad you have to fuck up "omnipotent hateful brainwashing moth demon" for me to not find it even slightly hot
set's a mess! it turns out that "all of 80s horror" is not going to produce a coherent tone or aesthetic. hellraiser doesn't play nice with chucky doesn't play nice with the thing doesn't play nice with ghostbusters. the setting doesn't cohere, the art direction is woefully uninspired whether we're talking about the survivors' chunky rectangular goggles and video game peripherals, or about so so many of the monsters where they've slapped a bunch of teeth and claws onto something and called it a day. there's very little mystery here! just ghoulies jumping out at you and yelling blaaargh over and over.
so while you do have standout artwork in the set (three abstract pieces from Dominik Mayer, A. M. Sartor's cold and moody work on Rite of the Moth,) all of that gets drowned in a tide of needle teeth ringed around maws, elongated limbs, #teen moments, evil piggy banks, wesley snipes as blade, and so forth.
Overlord of the Balemurk (art by Babs Webb)
This one is my favorite. It's eerie. Six limbs arranged in contemplation. The eye. The way the dark room warps and flows around it. I have no idea what it's going to do to me. And then you look at the next card in the pack and it's an Evil Bigshark With Teeth. The eerie, the subtle, the haunting things get shouted down by how loud and discordant everything else is.
Anyway this is a boring set for the specific purposes of this blog also but this insect token is cute.
looking at their draft of exordia like "yeah i could make this good but i think i'll save it for if i ever write tie-in fiction for a hasbro incorporated product"
It's my debut book of very gay poems which I previously wrote about here - and since I've no wish to repeat myself I will simply say that it's good poetry, that I'm proud of it, and that you can purchase the physical edition here for $12 and the digital edition here for free (though if the spirit so moves you, I do have a ko-fi.) Thank you for reading and happy pride month!
multiple cloud strife cards all working with equipment. zero pretty dress equipment cards. 0/10 irredeemable garbage set.
anyway if you wanna read something by someone who understands what FFVII is about & what it says about how gender and sexuality and identity, i can't recommend Jaden Kristofferson's Dollhouse Arsonist enough. gorgeous art, fucked-up comphet, sad gay sex.
also if you're a terminally-online transsexual like me (and if you're reading this, odds are good) you should be reading tpwrtrmnky & Talia Bhatt's Ranked Competitive Breast Growth if you aren't already, because it's hot and insane and screamingly funny and also because everyone keeps calling one of the characters "boymoder sephiroth," so technically, it's relevant.
hey guess what! my book WOLFCANNON is out on June 17th, and you can pre-order the print edition from kith books right now (link). these are poems about the transformative power of insects, queer toothed loves, regret, and of course: what if the Roman Republic had a giant wolf mecha that you could fuck?
also let's all pause and appreciate the extraordinary cover art my friend & partner @onetomb-art did for this book. it rules. i'm gonna get that wolf head silhouette on a pin and wear it everywhere.
it's $12 for the print edition and will be pay-what-you-want for the digital edition. thank you for your time, and i hope you read it!
Advance Praise for WOLFCANNON:
"CJ Selwyn's WOLFCANNON is primordial. Reading this book feels like reading uncensored scripture. It is violent and marbled in its beauty, like a cracked open clam, wet with muscle and tasting of bloody saltwater. Is this mythical parable, or is it stark reality—all pretense dropped, showing us insectile corporeality? Both, woven together in a tale that leaves you with weeping wounds and the squeeze of a hand that says me too." — dre levant, author of sun eater and icarus rising
"Calypso Jane Selwyn’s WOLFCANNON reimagines myth and memory through a lens that's both devastatingly intimate and ecologically attuned. Selwyn's poems pulse with queer desire and ecological grief, howling at the intersections of personal and planetary violence while still finding moments of tender connection in unexpected places. This collection cracked me open—I found myself recognizing my own wildness and wounds in her startling imagery that refuses domestication." — Megan Kaminski, author of Gentlewomen, Deep City, and Desiring Map
Hiiiiiiii so Tarkir: Dragonstorm comes out real soon and there is... nothing major wrong with it! No racecars, no evil clowns, no suppurating mass of yet another shoehorned IP crossover event, just... Magic. Remember Magic? One of the best games ever made on this wretched earth in spite of everything? This is that!
And sure, I could complain about some things, like how the Abzan and the Sultai have the exact same color scheme for some reason, or all the inconsistencies in the overall time travel plot, like how Zurgo is suddenly a big badass like in the old timeline instead of the whinging bellbonger he was in this one or how the mammoths are suddenly unextinct, or how the application of the "Druid" subtype represents a desire on the part of WotC to appear less racist without wanting to understand anything about how racism operates at a structural level so they're just changing surface-level aesthetic elements at random while periodically looking back at the audience for approval like in that one dril tweet, but frankly I'm past wanting Magic: the Gathering setting and story to be good, you know? I just want it to be good enough.
AND SISTER, IT IS
Riverwheel Sweep (art by Wayne Wu)
At this point I believe my record on women with blindfolds and intense upper-arm muscle definition speaks for itself, but just in case: this is real hot. As for my stance on being wrapped up in a length of red silk, reeled in, and forced to my knees: surely you can guess.
Flamehold Grappler (art by Wayne Wu again, good job Wayne)
I firmly believe that everyone should shave their head at least once in their life, and only partially because I think it's hot when women do this. It also really helps to break the back of the beauty standards cop in your head. "But I have a weird-shaped head! I could never pull that off!" Bitch everyone has a weird-shaped head, or a weird hairline, or one little patch of hair that grows in the wrong way, or something. Get comfortable with your own weird body—you'll be happier.
Anyway while I like the idea of a woman with four additional flaming arms, in practice I think burns are Not Worth It. Probably she doesn't have those all the time, so I suppose she could just be a good-looking girl who can beat me up, which I'm not complaining about, but also consider: if you took a bath with her the water would never get cold.
Meticulous Artisan (art by Anna Pavleeva)
Really really long nails, on the other hand, are worth it. I want to stumble out of the bedroom the following morning covered in cartoon kiss marks and an alarming number of lacerations.
Also—we're all on the spectrum here, yeah?—"meticulous" is one of the hottest things a dom can be. Slow, patient, curious about stimulus and response. "What happens if I touch you here? Interesting. What happens if I hurt you there? Very interesting."
Constrictor Sage (art by Nereida)
One of the other hottest things a dom can be is a giant snake lady. Have you ever held a snake, realized it's just smooth and pleasantly-textured skin over nothing but muscle? Holding a snake is a kind of tactile and sensory bliss—we are all on the spectrum here?—which exceeds any number of smooth rocks or plunging your hand into a bowl full of flat glass beads. I've never met a rope that could compare to the coiling allure of snondage.
And while we're on the subject: look how her victim is arching her back. Look at the spectral snake beside her head flicking its tongue out across her jaw. There is something very lesbian going on here, and I hope they both enjoy themselves.
Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan (art by Victor Adame Minguez)
I'm really enjoying her th—hang on, what the fuck is she wearing? The weird burning face breastplate? Wait all the Abzan are wearing this, this Arnim Zola bullshit? Can she team up with four more for the full Voltron? Is this intended to tease an upcoming Power Rangers secret lair?
WAND! MAKE MY MONSTER [Become Immense]
Okay shut up about that it's Eshki time.
Eshki Dragonclaw (art by Tran Nguyen)
I am immediately in love with this character and this piece. I love the bright colors and the patterns on her coat, the beads in her hair. I adore how stylized, how just one step shy of cartoony it is. I really enjoy her dog, who is evoking for me the demons and monsters of traditional east Asian art. And the girl... I want to see her on runways. I want to see her in magazine shoots talking about her nascent music career. God help me, I want to be her songwriter in that music career, and you know, I would try to keep her grounded and safe against the pressure and the predation of that but she's getting actually famous now—look at her, of course she is—and working harder and harder and the fans and the producers keep wanting more more MORE and she can't stop, she can't even slow down and when I tell her I can't keep watching her do this to herself she says who cares, there's a hundred better songwriters drooling for the chance to work with me but I see her face in the instant before she composes herself to say that and it breaks my heart but I leave anyway. And when they start putting her in movies I watch them, I watch when they cast her opposite whatever fifty-year-old man they have doing Bond this decade, watch her go to bed with him, watch her face-up floating dead in the pool when the bad guy takes his revenge, and I follow along when the press inevitably turns on her like botflies. The court case against the powerful industry figure she loses, the tabloids talking about her drug use, the easy punchlines she makes for nepo comedians. And then one day she's gone—dead or vanished, no one can say for sure—and that is all.
Until one day, many years later, there's a woman in the park sitting with her back to a tree, not singing but playing guitar, dark-haired, face different from how everyone remembers it, and she's playing the last song I ever wrote for her, the one she never recorded, never performed. And I stand there across the way, unable to move, and she plays until another woman comes to get her and she slings the guitar on her back and they go off hand in hand. And wouldn't that be enough? In all this wide world, wouldn't that be enough?
NO. IT'S A PEDESTRIAN, TOOTHLESS LITTLE FANTASY. YOU HAVE PEOPLE THESE DAYS WHO LOVE YOU BACK IN UNCOMPLICATED WAYS. HAVEN'T YOU OUTGROWN THIS
Mostly, I think. Every once in a while it's fun to indulge, tho—and for a pedestrian, toothless fantasy, isn't it awfully pretty?
CAN YOU PLEASE JUST EAT PEOPLE OUT IN YOUR FANTASIES LIKE A NORMAL PERSON
Well, maybe next time. Whenever Wizards deigns to bestow upon us another actual Magic set. Or whenever I nail down what the next seminal, life-changing essay is supposed to be about. See y'all then.
This was intended to be an essay about chivalry—its history, its uses, its various incarnations—medieval violence, the Romantic reinterpretation, the ideal of chivalry in the American South and its attendant lynch mobs. I would have talked about the chivalric triad: Knight, Innocent, Enemy—the way the Innocent serves as a fulcrum for the Knight to enact violence against the Enemy—the iterations of this triad in any number of places in our society, from the so-called sheepdog mentality trained into our police to the legion of revenge-fantasy Taken clones. I would have talked about the way Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling incorporates chivalry with the sacrifice of Isaac, the theology of self-justified suffering that comes from that. I would have talked at some length about various portrayals of lesbian chivalry in media—Revolutionary Girl Utena, the Locked Tomb books, Signalis—how they use it, what they say about it, and whether at the end there is anything worth salvaging from this intrinsically violent way of relating to the world, to others, to oneself, to God.
I think a version of that essay might still be worth writing someday, but right now, there's something I need to talk about much more urgently. Right now, there's something I suspect you might desperately need to hear. Today I'm going to talk about Godzilla.
GODZILLA SAVED MY LIFE: A Polemic
Godzilla Minus One (2024) takes place in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Its protagonist, Koichi, is a failed kamikaze pilot who in the opening scenes is repeatedly excoriated for his cowardice and dereliction of duty. When he returns home to a bombed and desolate Tokyo, his bereaved neighbor tells him, if people like you had done their duty, this would not have happened. The film spends the rest of its runtime doggedly refuting this idea. It says, out loud, that the relentless calculus of sacrifice that turns men into things to be spent has no place in this world, that it is needless and cruel. It is not subtle about this point. It is not trying to be.
I saw this movie in its black and white version in theaters in February, on the last day of its run. Its version of Godzilla inspires in me both terror and near-religious awe. It looms over the film, an echo both of the devastation of the war and of Koichi's guilt and shame, its presence inviting—demanding—the final consummation of the mission he abandoned.
I wept in that theater. I gripped my friend's hand and I sobbed. This is unlike me (unless I'm watching Gunbuster), and it took four days for me to work out why this Godzilla movie had affected me so profoundly.
arkansas kamikaze
and she looked, and behold! a beast rose from the sea,
and against the beast he breathed glory in a Zero dive.
his beatified smile shone from the wreck
of the Little Rock Planned Parenthood clinic.
and a great wind blew out of heaven, and she woke
and made breakfast, and watched her son
wholly absorbed in Bonhoeffer, found her lipstick
worn down to the nub for practice stigmata,
and saw for a moment the dove descending,
the tongue of fire over his head.
The thing about being raised in a right-wing fundamentalist family is that you are from birth being prepared to be a weapon, or a martyr, and there is really no difference between those two things. If my mother had had her way, I would have gone to a tiny far-right college and studied law for the sole and explicit purpose of getting Roe v. Wade overturned. She would, I believe, have settled for me bombing an abortion clinic. Certainly it would have been easier for her to reconcile with that than with what I became instead.
The other thing about being raised in a right-wing fundamentalist family is, some things stick. And it's very hard to notice, as your beliefs and values and identity undergo radical changes, that there is still a whisper in you that believes in the power of the glorious death, of the ultimate virtue of strapping explosives to your chest and walking into the halls of the Enemy. And when you feel helpless, when you watch systems and institutions that ought to prevent atrocities instead encourage them, that whisper grows louder and louder and louder.
Watching Koichi fly his last mission, watching him an instant before impact eject, and live—watching everyone live through the final confrontation because they had all rejected the calculus of sacrifice—allowed me to see also for the very first time this parasitic idea that had grown coiled inside me since infancy, allowed me to see where it had come from, its whole monstrous lineage, and then it allowed me to take hold of it and pull it out.
Twenty days later, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, in protest of the still-ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. He was, like me, raised in a right-wing fundamentalist environment. He was, like one of my siblings, a member of the US Armed Forces radicalized by his experiences and his own conscience. People called him a hero and martyr—on this very site, in responses to the excellent Crimethinc piece circulating at the time, I saw people saying they felt like they should follow suit (even though the article in question explicitly and repeatedly warned against it!) As if the loss of a person of conscience and conviction could be anything other than a tragedy, as if anyone in power choosing to support the genocide could regard the death of one of their own soldiers as anything other than what soldiers are for, as if the moral response to a genocide could ever be to add another corpse to the mountain—and still I saw people lionizing him, praising his courage and his sacrifice, all but telling people to follow in his footsteps.
No. Aaron Bushnell was a suicide. He lived his whole life within organizations that taught him that he could purchase more with his death than he could ever accomplish with his life, and while we may praise his conscience, we can only mourn his loss and the grievous error that led him to it.
This is the thing about learning to see this parasite: you begin to see it everywhere. Our history for millennia is awash with human sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac, Jephthah and his nameless daughter, Agamemnon and Iphigenia, the crucifixion of Jesus—and later, litanies, row upon row of dead saints, stories of glorious last stands. The courageous martyred dead: blood and corpses, only and always, to Moloch.
In light of the recent US election, perhaps many of my American readers are feeling shock or horror or despair. I understand, and without blame, with love and gentleness, I tell you that this is because you have not correctly understood the scope of the problem. You imagine a discontinuity between the liberal version of American capitalism and imperialism and the fascist version of the same. No such discontinuity exists. Things will no doubt be different for us here in the US than they would otherwise be, and probably worse, but there is no distinction to be made between the genocide of yesterday and the genocide of tomorrow. The enemy is the same. The work is the same.
Above all else, this is to warn you: when you do this work, when you look for a place you can put your shoulder to the wheel, there will be people who want to spend their lives—or yours—like coin to purchase some great change immediately. Perhaps they mean well, and helplessness and desperation drives them to act without regard for the consequences. Perhaps they do not mean well. Do not follow these people. Perhaps they merely expect you to go to prison, and have no plan for how to support you after that. This is barely different. It is far better for you to languish in useless liberal nonprofits which will accomplish nothing of value than to attempt radical direct action with people with correct politics and no forethought, and end up dead or imprisoned—but these are not the only two options. Aaron Bushnell cannot ever again do anything for anyone. You can.
This is as much as I know for certain. I love you. Don't die.
-------
End Notes
It would not be unreasonable to ask me, in light of what I've said here about martyrdom, what I think of it in other cultural contexts, especially since a similar word is often used to refer to e.g. Palestinian people murdered by Israeli soldiers. The answer is nothing at all. Such people get to use whatever words they want to salvage whatever meaning and comfort they can.
Godzilla Minus One, as effective a movie as it is, was not solely responsible for the scales falling from my eyes. It was an important part of the process, but I doubt it would have sufficed on its own were I not in community with people I trust and talk to about such things. "Godzilla and also my trusted friends saved my life" is, alas, a worse title.
There will be a part two to this. Part one seemed more urgent.
list of worm characters and how good they would be at force fem
beware spoilers
UNDERSIDERS
Taylor (Skitter): unless there's an estrogen spider somewhere in the world, no shot
Taylor (Khepri): unfortunately, unlimited power comes at the cost of a rapidly-dwindling understanding of gender
Grue: lacks both the ability and the inclination. his fragile masculinity makes him a fine target, however.
Tattletale: you'd think she'd be good at it, or at the very least sufficiently-advanced egg detection, but she also believes everyone on the team is straight, so this is gonna be a blind spot for her.
Bitch: shockingly good at it if the end goal is puppygirl, stone useless otherwise.
Regent: i mean. he could, but what's in it for him? easily bored, no patience for process. at best he could manage getting someone into a tutu for a lark before losing interest.
Imp: gaslight girlboss of course she's gonna be great at this. what's this? all the contents of your underwear drawer replaced? you didn't do that... did you? who else could have? so you must have wanted this...right?
Parian: if you will not wear the dress, the dress will have to come to you.
Foil: nah
EVERYONE ELSE
Accord: ugh who wants a tidy feminization?
Bakuda: hey maybe you'll get hit with the fem grenade! probably you'll just die, or worse.
Bonesaw: oh now we're talkin. unparalleled biomech horror force fem game. the mechanical spider tapped into your spinal column decides when it's time to get you prettied up for a tea party.
Canary: shania twain karaoke incident feminizes twelve, birdcage for sure.
Cherish: trivially easy to set up an emotional conditioning system. wearing skirt? dopamine hit! wearing pants? kill yourself - whoops. well, she'll have a lot of time at the bottom of the ocean to figure out correct feedback intensities.
Clockblocker: in theory one should be able to get up to some mischief while someone is frozen in time, but i'm not sure dennis has the ability to freeze someone without also freezing their clothes, which means this has limited utility. could play a support role for someone else.
Contessa: effortlessly trips you into a chain reaction that completely reshapes your life as part of a twelve-thousand step plan to improve humanity's long-term odds of survival by a fraction of a percent. thank you for your service.
Echidna: all your evil monster clones are girls for some reason. whether this works depends entirely on how you respond to awkward post-incident questions your friends have about it.
Eidolon: yeah i mean he could. but it doesn't make him feel globally, historically important so he's not gonna.
Gallant: is "feminine" an emotion he can inflict? girl feelings beam attack? shame we'll never know, RIP.
Gregor the Snail: nothing in canon says he can't secrete a mildly acidic ooze that turns you into a slime girl.
Jack Slash: broadcast shard should in theory mean he can easily manipulate other capes into getting feminized, but that's less time spent on self-aggrandizing mass murder, so.
Marquis: bone structure matters less than you'd think in the grand scheme of things, but yes he can reshape your jawline and cheek bones, give you those child-bearing hips. pros: he doesn't kill women, so you're that much safer. cons: it is going to hurt like a motherfucker.
Number Man: oh no your company has fallen on hard times and you've been laid off! and how peculiar that the only business hiring anywhere near you is the maid cafe. it says they're very strict about their dress code but that's probably fine. and food's gotten so expensive but wait these odd imported protein shakes are absurdly cheap...
Panacea: you know what the joke is already, come on.
Scion: has Path to Victory and would never in a billion years think of using it for anything fun.
and finally,
the Simurgh: best in show. sure, it'll take four years for the triggers and conditioning to work their way through your subconscious but when they do...
BONUS
Simurgh/Dragon double-team: Defiant probably never spent enough time close to the Simurgh to get affected, plus he had those high-tech earplugs he designed himself, so surely he's fine. nevertheless, his focus wanders during a critical moment while editing Dragon's source code, and now she's bossier, maybe even a little meaner, and the prosthetic parts she's making for colin's cyborg body are... different. curvier, softer. and every time he tries to find the problem in her code he gets distracted, and she gets more and more imperious. can he find a way out of the Simurgh's conditioning and his AI lover's domination? will he have to seek help from Saint - or worse, Teacher? surely they wouldn't take advantage of him in his vulnerable cyberdoll state?
hello! i've set up a ko-fi. you can give me money if you want. there's no emergency but i am one of those disabled broke transsexuals only just escaping a terrible and dare i say kafkaesque living situation, so it'd help.
WHAT YOU GET FOR THE MONEY
you know i'm gonna keep writing dumb horny reviews of magic card art as long as i stay interested, and when i stop being interested i'll start writing dumb horny reviews of something else.
i got a chapbook called WOLFCANNON coming out this year! it's about what if the roman republic'd had a multi-story wolf mecha that you could fuck. there will be an electronic version available for free, which will always be true of my poetry, but there will also be a physical version available! meanwhile here's the one poem i've bothered to get published in a journal that hasn't since gone defunct, RIP Entropy.
one life-changing* essay every year or so. here's a moodboard for the next one:
...and much more! probably. we'll see! i have so many projects back-burnered at any given time.
YOU WILL STILL BE ABLE TO GET ALL OF THESE THINGS FOR FREE JUST SO WE'RE CLEAR. BUT YOU CAN ALSO ELECT TO GIVE ME MONEY ABOUT IT
if you do, thank you! regardless, thank you all for reading my writing. i have accidentally built a small audience in maybe the dumbest way possible, and i am never going to be good about responding to replies or messages, but i do appreciate all of you, so, yeah, thanks. see y'all next time.
man i'm not gonna figure out which of these beatrix potter animals fuck
I'm predicting I will get less and less interested in reviewing new magic releases as time goes on, but 1) there's still a lot of older stuff I haven't even touched, and 2) you never know, maybe they'll do something to recapture my interest down the road, like bringing Kaja Foglio back, or taking any creative risks whatsoever. Or, you know, there's other games!
BY 2029 THIS BLOG WILL EXCLUSIVELY REVIEW THE MOST FUCKABLE ANDROID: NETRUNNER ICE
Meanwhile, original Theros block!
Kiora, the Crashing Wave (Scott M. Fischer)
I don't have that much interest in Kiora as a character but I cannot deny that this is a fine piece of pin-up art. Big Hokusai wave, pearlescent light off her thighs, the cheesecake pose, feet - and the gentle way her hand rests on that tentacle. The connection to the other Hokusai piece everyone knows is surely not accidentacle.
JACKIN OFF? BUDDY LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT KRAKEN OFF
Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver (Karla Ortiz)
There's so many good feet in Magic that you never get to see because Wizards crops them out of the final card, because they're cowards. I, however, am not. You're welcome.
Anyway yeah Ashiok's hot, we all know this already.
Forgeborn Oreads (Ryan Yee)
The starry infusion of Nyx here mixes with the fires of Purphoros to create a look I'm calling Julie Mao if the protomolecule had been red. It's a good look.
Spirit of the Labyrinth (Jason Chan)
Stupid little airhead can't even solve Mommy's brutalist maze, can she?
IS THIS NOT THE PLOT OF REMEDY ENTERTAINMENT'S HIT 2019 ACTION-ADVENTURE GAME CONTROL
Dunno, never played it! If anyone has, let me know if that joke was funny or not!
Reaper of the Wilds (Karl Kopinski)
I guess I do kind of want a woman who can turn me to stone and also crush my petrified ass into powder with her powerful feral serpent body.
Hythonia the Cruel (Chris Rahn)
Goddamn, did Elesh Norn really not have an original thought in her life? "Throne of petrified victims" makes so much more sense for a gorgon tyrant than a cyborg cult priestess, too. Anyway this ain't about her, this is about Hythonia turning me to stone and then sitting on me. Look how her snake-hair entwines her victims bodies. It would be like sleep paralysis, but sexy and forever!
Pharika, God of Affliction (Peter Mohrbacher)
O, for the limb-loosening fever, the delirium of the god-touched! O, for the venom-rite and the sharp ecstasy of the serpent-kiss! O, to be obliterated by a rolling wall of scale and snakeflesh! O O O for Pharika, She of bitter remedy and sweetest poison!
MAN JUST READ SWINBURNE ABOUT IT ALREADY
Ooh, yeah, good idea.
O lips full of lust and of laughter,
Curled snakes that are fed from my breast,
Bite hard, lest remembrance come after,
And—
I WAS OBVIOUSLY KIDDING, DON'T DO THAT SHIT
Aspect of Gorgon (Willian Murai)
The flavor text for this one reads, "My adopted children are loved no less." —Pharika, God of Affliction, so in addition to being an extremely pretty woman with curly black hair-which-is-also-snakes (already a great start), there's a trans metaphor going on here. Which is to say, one can by the grace of Pharika transition to gorgon, and then presumably have a whole lot of T4T gorgon sex. And if I can do all that and also call Pharika "Mommy" then I do think I'm living my best life at that point.
There's "spaghetti western" and then there's whatever the hell this Chef Boyardee shit is
Hello! and welcome back to Wifelink. We're talking about Outlaws of Thunder Junction today, Magic's second product in a row set in a version of Nevada, and let me tell you something: I am not impressed. The mechanics are uninspired, the setting is undercooked, the story is overstuffed, and to top it all off the whole thing smacks of settler-colonialism. AND they yassified Vraska, the monsters!
WE WILL GET TO THE HOT WOMEN, BELIEVE YOU ME, BUT FIRST I AM GOING TO COMPLAIN SOMEWHAT, AS IS MY RIGHT AS AN AMERICAN, AS A HUMAN BEING, AND AS A GAMER
The mechanics we've discussed elsewhere, and I will skim over the main storyline except to say that very few of this Big Villain Heist Team-Up gets enough spotlight to justify their inclusion here beyond getting recognizable names on cards, and that Rakdos' presence on the plane alone ought to be an apocalyptic calamity. I appreciate Jace & Vraska going full blackpilled accelerationist, stealing a baby, and aiming to destroy the multiverse & start over (a novel hybrid of Raising Arizona and Doctor Strangelove,) but I also know, sure as the sun rises, that whatever happens with their villain arc will be a underwhelming let-down.
What I actually want to complain about, though, is the setting. Thunder Junction ain't real, and I don't mean it's fictional, I mean it's plywood facades on a backlot. It's the set for a cowboy film. You feel me? This ain't a plane, it's a god damned sound stage.
Lemme go over the facts: we know Thunder Junction has been settled for a bit over a year. A year! - and yet there's multiple towns, multiple railways, and an honest-to-god metropolis. Less than two years and we already have ghost towns! This is not the product of a bunch of people on various planes all individually deciding to seek a new life in the off-world colonies. All of this represents a staggering quantity of people, material, wealth, and labor, being moved between planes, directed and organized - but by whom? For what reason? How, even? The story is totally uninterested in these questions.
One of the few silver linings to the way the Phyrexian invasion storyline ended was that the Omenpaths had a lot of interesting potential! Different planes would come into direct contact with each other for the first time ever! Different technologies, different philosophies and religions, different kinds of magic colliding, coming into conflict, adapting and adjusting to each other. And after a couple of sets where the interplanar contact was limited to one or two particularly adventurous individuals, we finally get to see what interplanar contact at scale looks like here in Thunder Junction... and it just looks like a John Wayne flick. Did people not bring their culture with them? Is there a big rack of hats and boots and dusters right where people step off the Omenpath? Shuck off those old Ravnican rags, kid, get changed. You'll spoil the aesthetic. I mean, it's baffling.
Luxurious Locomotive (art by Leon Tukker). This is one of the few man-made parts of this plane that I can look at and know where it came from: this is a Kaladeshi design. More of this sort of thing would have made Thunder Junction feel more like a real place and less like a Sergio Leone joint.
There's a side story, No Tells, by Isaac Fellman, which I quite like actually: it's about guilt and betrayal and the inevitable regrets of having moved into a queer housing co-op, and one of the things that makes it great is that we know where Yuma came from (New Capenna), we know why he left (the limitations of "be gay do crimes" as praxis under capitalism), and we know what he brought to Thunder Junction with him (cocktails, pool tables, and his co-op's emergency funds). Fellman has written nothing else for Wizards and doesn't play Magic, and even so he's done more to make Thunder Junction feel like a real place situated in a real history than the rest of the story team combined - which goes to show, one, that we should only let trans people write magic story for the next decade or so, and two, that what I'm asking for in terms of worldbuilding is not unattainable, or even that difficult.
And all of this ties into the colonialism, right? Thunder Junction is being colonized, and asking questions about who benefits, who's sponsoring this breakneck settlement of the plane, what they're after and so forth would require the story to take a good hard look at the process of colonization itself, and Wizards is flatly unwilling to engage with anything that thorny in their products. So, just as Ixalan involved a limp-wristed slant reenactment of the Spanish conquest of the Americas - but it's fine because they're the bad guys and they're technically not even trying to colonize Ixalan and they don't win anyway so no one gets hurt! - Thunder Junction is attempting to present a Disneyland version of Western colonialism. Untamed wilderness! Bringing civilization to uninhabited deserts! How cool and heroic these hard frontiersmen and -women are! I'm told they brought in Navajo cultural consultants for the Atiin, a fantasy equivalent, and I hope those folks were well compensated! The Atiin seem cool, and the one Atiin character we spend any time with is well-written, but the Atiin are not indigenous to Thunder Junction. They're not being colonized. And if there weren't anybody being colonized, I'd probably still dislike the colonial vision of a wild land inhabited only by animals, just waiting for us to shape it to our will with railways and violence, but there is in fact a native race of sapients on Thunder Junction, and these cactus folk get no voice in the story, so if they have some kind of opinion on the rapid colonization of their home and the clear-cutting of their cactus forests, we don't get to hear about it.
Prickly Pair (art by Brian Valeza) Too much of the extremely-limited presence Thunder Junction's only indigenous sapients have on the cards is devoted to cactus-based puns like this one, which is pretty distasteful given, you know, the colonialism.
I'm talking about colonialism not because I think that replicating colonial myths in fantasy fiction is an unethical thing to do - although it is - but because you can see, right, that Thunder Junction's lack of verisimilitude is intertwined with the colonial vision of the world at play here, yeah? The story wants to have cool cowboy shootouts and train robberies and it does not want its cowboy fantasy to be complicated by uncomfortable realities, so it has to avoid all of the basic worldbuilding questions that would tell us who the colonization benefits and how they're profiting off the plane, and in the end we're left with nothing but an empty aesthetic, like a duster hanging off a scarecrow, blowing in the wind.
ANYWAY SO WOMEN
To be honest, under the circumstances I'm not really feeling like giving the fine women of Thunder Junction my usual more elaborate treatment, so we're going to lightning-round this shit, which is at least thematic.
Welcome back to the best dumb idea I've ever had! Murder has come to the City of Guilds. Well, murder lives here, but it's crept out of the shadows, crawled up from the undercity, slunk through steam and oozed its way out of the breeding pools, and guild leaders are dropping like coins from a debtor's mouth. Who could be responsible? Who could be next? Who was that woman slipping furtively into an alley, and what's her deal? Is she single? Some of these questions and more will be answered on today's episode. Live from Ravnica, this... is Wifelink.
But first, a word from today's sponsor: picture this - it's your turn to host the monthly meeting of your true crime book club, and you maybe haven't finished Massacre: the true story of Ravnica's bloodiest killings and the woman behind them, and now you're trying to decide whether to finish it so you don't look like an idiot in the discussion group, or to spend time whipping up hors d'oeuvres so you don't have to serve everyone the same stupid veggies-and-ranch plate you did last time and suffer once more through Joanna's veiled disapproval. But what if I told you there was a way to get professionally-made charcuterie shipped directly to your home, leaving you the time you need to finish your last few chapters and craft a trenchant discussion question just in time for the doorbell? With Hello Flesh, it's just that easy: the incredible chefs at Hellbender will provide you with a mouthwatering selection of their finest meats: prosciutto, summer sausage, capicola, pastrami, and much, much more! Go to helloflesh dot com now, and sign up using offer code KNIFELINK to get your first month absolutely free! That's helloflesh dot com, offer code K-N-I-F-E-L-I-N-K. Hello Flesh: Don't ask where the meat comes from.
WAIT, WE'RE DOING RAVNICA? DIDN'T YOU SKIP A COUPLE SETS
What are you, Azorius? I've never felt any fondness for Eldraine, and I really didn't vibe with the new Ixalan set, so we're doing the Ravnica Murder Mystery set. I'm not going to do every single set that comes out or this will be my full-time job by 2026.
Cold Case Cracker (art by Wayne Wu)
Some things are very simple. Good cheekbones and the classic trench coat with the wide belt. I particularly enjoy the way her hair looks more like strips of fabric or parchment.
Merchant of Truth (art by Carissa Susilo)
"Goth angel" works on me every time, and this piece is particularly gorgeous - the composition and that dress, my goodness. You don't see a lot of angels from behind in Magic, on account of you would have to figure out what the anatomy and clothing situation is where the wings connect to the back, and Carissa has solved the clothing problem rather elegantly, and refused to engage with the anatomy problem at all. I can respect that.
I've never quite understood what's going on with Orzhov angels - I think they're mostly supposed to be disillusioned ex-Boros, but they don't really get much of a voice in story. You've got the flavor text on Angel of Despair, "it is as if their duty is to an empty void," but that's a quote from the most Boros of all the angels. Perhaps it's simply that the Orzhov don't labor under the same illusions as the other white-aligned guilds - the Boros and the Azorius and as we see in this story, even the Selesnya are all firmly entrenched in the idea that they stand for what's Right and Good on Ravnica, but ultimately they stand only for themselves and their own power and pre-eminence. The Orzhov, at least, make no secret of this. Maybe that's a comfort, to an angel.
Experiment Twelve (art by Michele Giorgi)
Oh baby girl the Simic fucked you right up, didn't they. Claws and scales and some sort of muzzle - do you feel like an animal, now? Do you hate what they did to you, or do you glory in your new sharpness? Did you escape, or are you on their leash? Are you hunted, or am I?
Bubble Smuggler (art by Leesha Hannigan)
This is Glovax. I've only had them for a day but if anything happened to them I would kill everyone in the room and then myself.
Honestly I'm disconsolate that this isn't a real animal that exists in the world and that I'll never get to rescue one from an aquarium and have an octopus fish best friend for life. You know that soul-sick feeling you get when you remember that Anomalocaris has been extinct for 500 million years ago and that you will never be able to pet one? Yeah. Goddammit they're going to make this a pet on Arena and I will spend real earth dollars on it.
ALL THESE TENTACLES AND STILL THE BIGGEST SUCKER IS YOU. NOW MAKE WITH THE LEGENDARIES
Etrata, Deadly Fugitive (art by Livia Prima)
I have looked at a whole lot of Etrata art, and do you want to know my considered opinion? This outfit fucking rules. It's got one and a quarter sleeves, thirteen visible buckles, a circular collar that connects only at the sternum, and a clingy ankle-length skirt with a slit damn near up to the thigh to reveal more buckles. It is the least practical outfit I can imagine an assassin wearing short of an inflatable dinosaur costume but god, it looks like it's meant for deadly stealth, and I am in love. Etrata is broody and gorgeous and has a big knife and extraordinarily naked shoulders, and what else could you want?
Judith, Carnage Connoisseur (art by Jodie Muir)
A look specifically crafted to elicit "step on me mommy"s from the general public. I'm on record as saying that there's no way Judith does any sort of aftercare, so maybe have a Selesnya cleric on speed-dial if you're gonna run that risk.
Judith, Carnage Connoisseur (alternate art by Alex Dos Diaz)
I think Loxodon Hierarch is screening my calls.
Honestly, I would do stupid, stupid things for a pretty girl with red eyes, sharp nails and facial scarring. I'm not sure what kinds of things I would do for a pretty girl with gold flame decals on her arms, but based on prior evidence, they would probably also be extremely stupid.
Izoni, Center of the Web (art by Justine Cruz)
It's weird how people get locked in your memory at the point in time you knew them. You know you've changed a lot since then, and if you thought about it you'd agree other people might well also have changed, but you don't think about it, and then you run into an old friend or an ex and the things you knew them for, the things you've tied their memory to in your mind, aren't even still part of their life.
So Izoni, my beloved Izoni, Ravnica's foremost bug girl and finder of beetles, has moved on with her life in the past six years. She's into spiders now, that's her thing. She's a spider girl. And that's cool, spiders are cool, too, but the way this went in my head I was going to tell her about the mantis-riders of Tarkir and the dune-beetles of Amonkhet and the behavioral quirks of giant ants on Innistrad and now, instead, I'm not sure what to say. "You're looking well," I suppose, or something about, "so, leading the Swarm now? How's that going for you?"
Analyze the Pollen (art by Anna Christenson)
It's not even that big a change, really. Hardly noticeable. She still has that same intensity, that same curiosity. Her brows still furrow in concentration. She's still covered in crawling things, and she is still the most beautiful woman on Ravnica. Spiders or insects, what's the difference? All it means is that six years have passed. All it means is that the places and people you love continue to move in your absence. All it means is that you're both talking past each other to your echoes, to the people you used to know, who no longer exist. Time has eaten them both.
And if you, like time, get hungry, don't forget to use our affiliate code KNIFELINK at -
HEY. HELLO FLESH IS A RAKDOS JOINT, RIGHT
- in the middle of the ad read, dude?
YOU SAID HELLBENDER CHEFS DO THE CHARCUTERIE. THAT'S JUDITH'S PLACE
Yeah, what about it?
DO YOU THINK SHE'S GONNA BE GOOD WITH CONTENT SHE SPONSORED CALLING SOMEONE ELSE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN RAVNICA
Ah.
OR LIKE DO YOU THINK SHE'S GENERALLY COMFORTABLE SHARING THE SPOTLIGHT
...so thank you all so much for listening to this episode of Wifelink! I'm going to lay low for a bit, and if my body turns up face-down in an undercity canal, y'all know who did it.
I still enjoyed the ditch essay and found it pretty useful, FWIW, so I hope you don't think that writing it was a complete waste of your time.
Thank you for that. There's probably a more rigorous version of the idea of the ditch that could be built out, but personally I mostly just use it to be like "oh that seems like a boring analytical lens, so I'm going to ignore it," which I can do because I'm under no obligation to win or even participate in any given argument, which is a liberating realization. Plenty of people, well-intentioned or otherwise, will read something you wrote and respond with something that reveals they've completely missed the on-ramp. I value clear communication in writing, but I also value knowing who the target audience is, and I do think it's fine to be like, oh, you didn't get the first thing about this? Cool, either figure it out or go away, I'm busy.
Canopy Spider (art by Mike Raabe)
Anyway, I got you this picture of a spider from Seventh Edition because I thought it was cute, and so can you.
So, funny story, I was watching a guy stream a Warhammer 40K game, and by "stream a Warhammer 40K game" I mean he had the game open to the character-select screen while talking about fascist aesthetics and Warhammer for an hour and a half, and all the while this growing certainty gnawed at my hindbrain like, oh man I'm going to have to issue a substantial correction, and I really didn't want to have to talk about fascist aesthetics yet again, but here we are. Okay.
The problem is that I've argued in the past for a mostly transsexual reading of Phyrexia by arguing against the more common reading of them as a fascist faction, saying the Phyrexian aesthetic is incompatible with the idealized heroic figures of fascist iconography, and that's basically true if we're talking about German Nazism specifically. Unfortunately, there's a bunch of other fascisms out there, and the guy whose stream I was watching (Cameron Lauder of LRR, if you wanna know) was quoting from Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and I was like oh, no this is eminently compatible with Phyrexia. He wants to fuck a train for being a fast, powerful, violent machine; this man might as well summer in the Hunter Maze.
And in retrospect, since different valid readings of a text can simultaneously exist, the only reason I felt I had to argue against the fascist reading is that I didn't want to be tarred and feathered for a philia for fictional Phyrexian fascists, you know? Not that it worked - I still got angry notes. So, okay, the fascist reading is also correct. This leaves Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia mostly intact - good! - but the ditch essay pretty thoroughly eviscerated, since the whole point of it was trying to shore up precisely that part of the first essay's argument, and I'm not sure what's left is worth much. "The Ditch" is like a power drill: a useful shortcut if you know what you're doing, and capable of doing a fair bit of damage if you don't. Ah, well.
I SEEM TO RECALL THIS PLACE USED TO BE FOR REVIEWING PICTURES OF HOT WOMEN ON CARDSTOCK?
Yes, well. We'll get back there, but I got covid, so: happy new year, and good luck.
The time has come once more. In my beneficence and might I have chosen to bestow upon the peoples of the earth my great work. Look on the perfection of my Halloween playlist, you unworthy, and shiver.
You have questions, of course, but I have anticipated your insect whine and so plucked answers out of stone and thunder. Be grateful.
You will ask—can such a gift truly be meant for us, lowly and unworthy as we are?
I have already said—it is meant for you and for all the peoples of the earth and for no one else.
You will ask—does this come to us free of price or condition?
I have already said—fools (though I do not say it unkindly)—there is a condition and a price.
You will ask—we are certain that the condition is just and the price is generous, but may we know them?
I have already said—my condition is this: as you would not rearrange the words in a book or the atoms in a hydrocarbon, so too will you not rearrange the songs in my playlist. The shuffle button does not exist for you.
And so, too, have I already said—my price is this: when you gather together to celebrate the night, you will pour unto me a libation of red wine (zinfandel, ideally), or else scotch, or whatever you have on hand. This shall be pleasing in my sight.
And you will ask—Great One, if we may be so bold, we have our own songs befitting the holiday; may we send them to you for your judgment and perhaps even incorporation into next year's playlist?
And I have already said—it is meet for you to participate in the work of creation. I permit this, so long as you do not send me the Monster Mash.
TUMBLR POST EDITOR WON'T LET ME TITLE THIS POST ANYMORE SO I GUESS THIS IS THE TITLE NOW. WEBBED SITE INNIT
So let's say you grew up in the nineties and that The Lion King was an important movie to you. Let's say that the character of Scar - snarling, ambitious, condescending, effeminate Scar - stirred feelings in you which you had no words for as a child. And then let's say, many years later, you're talking about it with a college friend, and you say something like, "oh man, I think Scar was some sort of gay awakening for me," and she fixes you with this level stare and says, "Scar was a fascist. What's the matter with you?"
The immediate feeling is not unlike missing a step: hang on, what's happening, what did I miss? You knew there were goose-stepping hyenas in "Be Prepared," but you didn't think it mattered that much. He's the bad guy, after all, and the movie's just pointing it out. Your friend says it's more than that: the visuals of the song are directly referencing the Nuremberg rallies. They're practically an homage to Riefenstahl. This was your sexual awakening? Is this why you're so into peaked caps and leather, then? Subliminal nazi kink, perhaps?
And then one of your other friends cuts in. "Hold up," he says, "let's think about what Scar actually did in the movie. He organized a group of racialized outcasts and led them against a predatory monarchy. Why are you so keen to defend their hereditary rule? Scar's the good guy here." The conversation immediately descends into a verbal slap fight about who the real bad guy is, whether Scar's regime was actually responsible for the ecological devastation of the Pride Lands, whether the hyenas actually count as "racialized" because James Earl Jones voiced Mufasa after all. Your Catholic friend starts saying some strange and frankly concerning shit about Natural Law. Someone brings The Lion King 2 into it. You leave the conversation feeling a little bit lost and a little bit anxious. What were we even talking about?
INTRODUCING: THE DITCH
There is a way of reading texts which I'm afraid is pervasive, which has as its most classical expression the smug obsession with trivia and minutiae you find in a certain vein of comic book fan. "Who was the first Green Lantern? What was his weakness? Do you even know the Green Lantern Oath?" It eschews the subjective in favor of definitively knowable fact. You can't argue with this guy that, say, Alan Scott shouldn't really count as the first Green Lantern because his whole deal is so radically different from the Hal Jordan/John Stewart/Guy Gardner Corps-era Lanterns, because this guy will simply say "but he's called Green Lantern. Says so right on the cover. Checkmate." This approach to reading a text is fundamentally 1) emotionally detached (there's a reason the joke goes, oh you like X band? name three of their songs - and not, which of their songs means the most to you? which of them came into your life at exactly the right moment to tell you exactly what you needed to hear just then?) and 2) defensive. It's a stance that is designed not to lose arguments. It says so right on the cover. Checkmate.
And then you get the guys who are like "well obviously Bruce Wayne could do far more as a billionaire to solve societal problems by using his tremendous wealth to address systemic issues instead of dressing up as a bat and punching mental patients in the head," and these guys have half a point but they're basically in the same ditch butting heads with the "well, actually" guys, and can we not simply extricate ourselves from the ditch entirely?
So, okay, let's return to our initial example. Scar is portrayed using Nazi iconography - the goose-stepping, the monumentality, the Nuremberg Lichtdom. He is also flamboyant and effete. He unifies and leads a group of downtrodden exiles to overthrow an absolute monarch. He's also a self-serving despot on whose rule Heaven Itself turns its back. You can't reconcile these things from within the ditch - or if you can, the attempt is likely to be ad-hoc supposition and duct tape.
Instead, let's ask ourselves what perspective The Lion King is coming from. What does it say is true about the world? What are its precepts, its axioms?
There is a natural hierarchical order to the world. This is just and righteous and the way of things, and attempts to overthrow this order will be punished severely by the world itself.
Fascism is what happens when evil men attempt to usurp this natural order with the aid of a group or groups of people who refuse to accept their place in the order.
There exists an alternative to defending and adhering to one's place in the natural order - it consists only of selfish spineless apathy.
Manliness is an essential quality of a just ruler. Unmanliness renders a person unfit for rule, and often resentful and dangerous as well.
And isn't that interesting, laid out like that? It renders the entire argument about the movie irrelevant (except for whatever your Catholic friend was on about, since his understanding of the world seems to line up with the above precepts weirdly well.) It's meaningless to argue about whether Scar was a secret hero or a fascist, when the movie doesn't understand fascism and has a damn-near alien view of what good and evil are.
There's always gonna be someone who, having read this far, wants to reply, "so, what? The Lion King is a bad movie and the people who made it were homophobes and also American monarchists, somehow? And anyone who likes it is also some sort of gay-bashing crypto-authoritarian?" To which I have to reply, man, c'mon, get out of the ditch. You're no good to anyone in there. Take my hand. I'm going to pull on three. One... two...
SO PHYREXIA [PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE, GROANS]
We're talking about everyone's favorite ichor-drooling surgery monsters again because there was a bit in my ~*~seminal~*~ essay Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia which seemed to give a number of readers quite a bit of trouble: namely, the idea that while Phyrexia is textually fascist, their aesthetic is incompatible with real-world fascism, and further, that this aesthetic incompatibility in some way outweighs the ways in which they act like a fascist nation in terms of how we think of them. I'll take responsibility here: I don't think that point is at all clear or well-argued in that essay. What I was trying to articulate was that the text of Magic: the Gathering very much wants Phyrexia to be supremely evil and dangerous fascists, because that makes for effective antagonists, but in the process of constructing that, it's accidentally encoded a whole bunch of fascinating presuppositions that end up working at cross-purposes with its apparent aim. That's... not that much clearer, is it? Hmm. Why don't I just show you what I mean?
Atraxa, Grand Unifier (art by Marta Nael)
In "Beneath Eyes Unblinking," one of the March of the Machine stories by K. Arsenault Rivera, there's a fascinating and I think revealing passage in which Atraxa (big-deal Phyrexianized angel and Elesh Norn's lieutenant) has a run-in with an art museum in New Capenna. The first thing I want to talk about is that, in this passage, Atraxa has no understanding of the concept of "beauty". A great deal of space in such a rushed storyline is devoted to her trying to puzzle out what beauty means and interrogating the minds of her recently-compleated Capennan aesthetes to try and understand it. In the end, she is unable to conceive of beauty except as "wrongness," as anathema.
So my first question is, why doesn't Atraxa have any idea of beauty? This is nonsense, right? We could point to a previous story, "A Garden of Flesh," by Lora Gray, in which Elesh Norn explicitly thinks in terms of beauty, but that's a little bit ditchbound, isn't it? The better argument is to simply look at Phyrexian bodies, at the Phyrexian landscape, all of which looks the way it does on purpose, all of which has been shaped in accordance with the very real aesthetic preferences of Phyrexians. How you could look at the Fair Basilica and not understand that Phyrexians most definitely have an idea of beauty, even if you personally disagree with it, is baffling. This is a lot like the canonical assertion that Phyrexians lack souls, which is both contradicted elsewhere in canon and essentially meaningless, given Magic's unwillingness or inability to articulate what a soul is in its setting, and as with this, it seems the goal is simply to dehumanize Phyrexians, to render them alien, even at the cost of incoherence or internal contradiction.
Atraxa's progress through the museum is fascinating. It evokes the 1937 Nazi exhibit on "degenerate art" in Munich, but not at all cleanly. The first exhibit, which is of representational art, she angrily destroys for being too individualistic (a point of dissonance with the European fascist movements of the 20th century, which formed in direct antagonism to communism.) The second exhibit, filled with abstract paintings and sculptures, she destroys even more angrily for having no conceivable use (this is much more in line with the Nazi idea of "degenerate art", so well done there.) The third exhibit is filled with war trophies and reconstructions from a failed Phyrexian invasion of Capenna many years prior, which she is angriest of all with (and fair enough, I suppose.) But then, after she's done completely trashing the place, she spots a number of angel statues on the cathedral across the plaza, and she goes apeshit. In a fugue of white-hot rage, she pulverizes the angel heads, and here is where I have to ask my second question:
Why angels? If you are trying to invoke fascist attitudes toward art, big statues of angels are precisely the wrong thing for your fascist analogues to hate. Fascists love monumental, heroic representations of superhuman perfection. It's practically their whole aesthetic deal. I understand that we're foreshadowing the imminent defeat of Phyrexia at the hands of legions of angels and a multiversal proliferation of angel juice, but that just leads to the exact same question: why angels? To the best of my knowledge, the Phyrexian weakness to New Capennan angel juice is something invented for this storyline. They have, after all, been happily compleating angels since 1997. We could talk about the in-universe justification for why Halo specifically is so potent, but I don't remember what that justification is, and also don't care. Let's not jump back in the ditch, please. The point is, someone decided that this time, Phyrexia would be defeated by an angelic host, and what does that mean? What is the text trying to say? What are its precepts and axioms?
Let me ask you a question: how many physically disabled angels are there in Magic: the Gathering? How about transsexual angels? How many angels are there, on all of the cards that have ever been printed for Magic: the Gathering, that are even just a bit ugly? Do you get it yet? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?
SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU
There is a kind of body which is bad. It is bad because it has been significantly altered from its natural state, and it is bad because it is repellent to our aesthetic sensibilities.
The bad kind of body is contagious. It spreads through contact. Sometimes people we love are infected, and then they become the bad kind of body too.
There is a kind of body which is good. It is good because it is pleasing to our aesthetic sensibilities, and it is good because it is unaltered from its (super)natural state.
A happy ending is when all the good bodies destroy or drive into hiding all of the bad bodies. A happy ending is when the bad bodies of the people we love are forcibly returned to being the good kind of body.
Do you get it now?
ENDNOTES
It's worth noting that the ditch is very similar to the white American Evangelical hermeneutics of "the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it," the defensive chapter-and-verse-or-it-didn't-happen approach to reading a text, what Fred Clark of slacktivist calls "concordance-ism". I don't think that's accidental. We stand underneath centuries of people reading the Bible very poorly - how could that not affect how we read things today? We are participants in history whether we like it or not.
I sincerely hope I haven't come across as condescending in this essay. Close reading is legitimately difficult! They teach college courses on this stuff! And while it is frustrating to have my close readings interrogated by people who... aren't doing that, like. I do get it. I find myself back in the ditch all the time. This stuff is hard. It is also, sorry, crucial if you intend to say something about a text that's worth saying.
I also hope I've communicated clearly here. Magic story is sufficiently incoherent that trying to develop a thesis about it often feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. If anyone has questions, please ask them! And thank you for reading. Next time, we'll probably do the new Eldraine set.
Getting this out of the way: I do not care about Alesha, so if you were coming here ready to hear anything about the first-ever transgender girl out of Magic*, sorry to disappoint.
Actually, yeah, I’m gonna talk about this for a little bit. I understand Alesha means a lot to some people, and I’m not saying they’re wrong to feel that way. I’m sure there are people who had to fight to make Alesha openly & canonically trans, and I’m not saying that this was meaningless, wasted effort. It’s nice to be able to point to someone and say, see, there’s a place for people like me here. I was excited about it at the time and I wasn’t even into Magic back then.
But like c’mon, y’all, she’s not really a character, right? She gets one story, the thrust of which is, “this character is trans, and that’s basically fine.” Alesha exists to be part of the banner image of the internal WotC LGBT employees’ monthly newsletter. She exists to be the discord avatar for every third trans girl into Magic. She exists so a massive corporation can point to her as evidence that they care in some nebulous way about trans people, and she costs slightly less than paying someone to, say, actually moderate the hate speech comments on their vids of Autumn Burchett’s pro tour games.
All of which is to say, they don’t actually care. You know this. Individual staff, writers, artists - sure, but they’re not the ones who make the final decisions. And you and I deserve better from our stories, and we’re never going to get that from fucking Hasbro, right?
So here’s my pitch: seek out actual queer stories, and I’m not talking about contemporary YA shit with a marketing budget. For readers of this specific blog I’d recommend looking up “Attack Helicopter” by Isabel Fall (you should still be able to find it online). Stories where the texture and structure of thought are queer and trans are revelatory. You don’t need to beg for crumbs from a megacorp’s table.
ANYWAY, COMMA,
welcome to Tarkir! There used to not be dragons here, but now there are. In either timeline, everyone is locked in a brutal, unending struggle of clan-against-clan, so thanks, Sarkhan? Yeah, no, I hear you, it’s definitely different now. Yeah, and better. Yeah, because of the...yeah, because there’s dragons now, right. No, you did great, buddy. You really, uh, made a difference.
JESUS, IS HE CRYING? GET ME OUT OF HERE PLEASE
Monastery Swiftspear (art by Steve Argyle)
I’ve come to think of the current era of MtG art (let’s arbitrarily say from Kaladesh block to the present) as the “Magali Villeneuve era”, and if I’m being totally honest, I kind of hate it. Everything is technically competent, clearly lit, and immaculately detailed. Everyone has amazing cheekbones. It is so, so boring. I’m not at all saying she’s a bad artist! Sometimes, as with Kaldheim, she is very nearly the only person in a set making good art. I’ve featured her work on here many, many times.
What I am saying is that her work always has this, like, objectivity to it that feels detached and even alienating, like we’re looking at these characters through a powerful telescope. There’s no stylization, and dare I say no style.
The reason I bring her up in a set in which I will not be reviewing her work (sorry, Narset fans), is that Steve Argyle makes for an interesting comparison. They are to my untrained eye very similar artists: the sharp linework, the combination of dynamics and detachment. The major difference is that Steve’s art is substantially hornier and substantially male-gazier.
And goddammit, at least that’s something.
I HAVE THIS OPINION BECAUSE I’M A BAD FEMINIST. AND I DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED ABOUT IT
Unyielding Krumar (art by Viktor Titov)
I’m not sure why Viktor made this orc look like a ripped lizard man. None of the other orcs in this block look like this. Maybe he thought “krumar” was a species of lizard folk, when in point of fact a krumar is, checks notes, an orphan of the Mardu raised by the Abzan who killed their parents in a twist of worldbuilding regrettably reminiscent of a strategy used in real-world genocides. Whoops!
Anyway, big arms. Lizard person. Sorry about your family.
WIZARDS STAY CLASSY I GUESS
Ire Shaman (art by Jack Wang)
Yeah, see, extremely not a lizard.
We’re not going to talk about armor practicality because that is very much beside the point, but we were all thinking it, and I want to acknowledge that before moving onto saying nice things about what all the leather bands are doing for her arms, and what this lamellar bustier is doing for her tits.
YEAH I KNOW WHAT LAMELLAR IS. PRETTY HOT, RIGHT
Den Protector (art by Viktor Titov)
I am not immune to mothers, nor women in furs, and I’m especially not immune to women with big two-handed weapons (in either sense, I suppose.) I really like the sense of motion in this picture, and the dynamic thrust of the landscape behind her, and... hm. Is her right-hand grip reversed from what it should be? Dammit, that’s going to bother me.
I LIKE MY WOMEN TO HAVE BETTER GRIP TECHNIQUE IS ALL I’M SAYING
Wandering Champion (art by Willian Murai)
I am trying really, really hard not to date myself by a reference to a shitty 20-year-old flash animation. Anyway! she has flexibility, power, and isn’t afraid of a little viscera now and again. All excellent qualities.
I AM HONESTLY EXERCISING IMMENSE SELF-RESTRAINT HERE
Sultai Flayer (art by Izzy)
Sorry, do you not want a forty-foot androgyne snake person to remove your skin with tender, agonizing slowness? Are you lost?
WHY DON’T YOU MARRY YOUR SKIN IF YOU’RE SO GODDAMN ATTACHED TO IT. PUSSY.
Highspire Mantis (art by Igor Kieryluk)
I did the mantis bit in my Battle for Zendikar post, but I thought I’d actually dig into what the appeal is here: raptorial forelimbs. The inescapable, serrated hold of something that could slice you open as easy as thinking, but hasn’t yet. The smoothness of chitin, hard without being inflexible. The many strange articulations. And then either you make out or it eats your head, and it is not up to you which.
WHEN WILL WIZARDS GIVE US THE MANTIS-FUCKER REPRESENTATION WE DESERVE. ROSEWATER’S SILENCE ON THIS ISSUE IS DEAFENING.
Alright, that’s Tarkir down! Who knows what’s next? Probably a very cranky explanation of what fiction is and why it’s okay to like fictional bad guys (it’s because they’re not real.) At first I thought that was going to be a more interesting topic, but the more I think about it the more it seems like it’s...really not. I can have fun with it, though! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see y’all next time.
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*the first-ever transgender girl out of Magic/had to settle on a name/and the top three contenders after weeks of debate/were Alesha/and Shensu/and the Kolaghan Bomber
