originality is dead. long live Disney. š
i have thoughts about that Cruella trailer; plus new podcast episodes, live shows on Stereo, and a free convention for emerging SFF creatives
welcome back toĀ honest to blogĀ (working title), a newsletter with thoughts about writing, movies, music, science fiction and fantasy, and general creative processĀ blah.Ā you can read the last issueĀ here.
but we already have 2 cruella movies
happy new year everyone! i tried to start this newsletter about 30 times since january, but the ānew year, new lockdownā narrative exhausted me even more than the actual lockdown has (iām so very tired of this schtick, but so is everyone else, ya know) - so i sat on it for so long, weāre halfway through february now. close to this substackās first anniversary (the 22nd). oops!
iāve been keeping very busy while on perma-furlough from my theatre day job; more on that later, with tasty tasty links to content and conventions and all that good stuff.
right now, i want to talk about the highly-anticipated (by whom? idk tbh) trailer for cruella, the latest in live-action prequels we didnāt need from Disney:
good lord this looks like a boring movie.
technically itās spectacular; look at that production design! the costumes!! 80sābut really looking like the 60sālondon! the story of a misunderstood villainess who doesnāt deserve the hatred sheās been getting for almost 30 years, because sheās just a girl boss with mental health issues!
weāve been making movies about cool, pSyChOtiC villains since the late 90s. this stuff peaked in the mid-00s, along with emo fringes and my chemical romance, and iām not gonna lie to ya: teen me would have been all. over. it. i can see teenage me rocking black-and-white granny blazers and red lipstick unironically, and maybe that wouldāve been a better look than the half-assed butch/punk hybrid i had going on back then, but i digress. itās 2021, and seeing this trailer made me groan in [exhausted], [bored] and [disinterested], which is about the polar opposite of what a trailerās supposed to do for a film.
thatās because cruella looks like birds of prey, or joker, but sanitised for a Disney audience. (i donāt expect her to shoot anyone on live tv, at the very least.) the reason itās boring is weāve literally just seen this movie, and we didnāt need that one either.
iāve been thinking a lot about Disneyās nostalgia train recently. andrew liptak shared the following video about Disney Princess costumes from gavia baker-whitelaw, and she puts it in words beautifully: everything about Disney that we now consider āiconicā has been about monetising nostalgia and conservative beauty standards, and their more recent attempts to diversify their cast of characters and portfolio of stories directly clashes with everything theyāve built since the 1930s:
inspired by the above video, i was discussing the issue with my partner last week and they said something even more succinct: Disney films outside the Mickey-verse have always been about nostalgia. fairy tales from centuries ago, retold and repackaged, suffused with the agenda of conservative beauty and family values, and marketed to children.
fuckinā yikes, basically, but iāll confess i too am a sucker for a cute princess dress. blame that on the 90s renaissance and that sweet sweet yellow belle gown.
anyway. i know itās incredibly reductive of me to say āoriginality is deadā, but thatās clickbait for ya. of course itās dead, itās been buried for decades, and thatās absolutely fine and not directly disneyās fault. thereās a difference though, between common story arcs, character archetypes, and tropes (as in, no matter what story you want to tell, chances are the surface elements have been done before), and just straight up remaking the same 10 things over, and over, and over again. itās why Disneyās last announcement of a bajillion Marvel and Star Wars things, on top of their pre-planned live-action remakes of their animated classics, had me rolling my eyes into the back of my skull. iām justā¦ā¦ tired of this samey stuff. i see and read all the incredible, and original, new science-fiction and fantasy coming out every year and i know, for a fact, there are so many cool stories being told, that would look amazing on the big screen (or the little one, for however long we need, because plague.)
to tell the truth, iām extra bitter in the wake of Disney firing everyone at the Fox-owned Blue Sky studio, and by consequence axing the upcoming nimona, based on noelle stevensonās long-running webcomic (yes, noelle stevenson of she-ra fame). iāve been reading nimona on and off since 2012, when stevenson went viral with their thor tumblr comics. based on stevensonās own tweets, it was shaping up to be incredible. and now weāll never get to see itābut donāt worry! theyāre making a new cruella movie! even though we already have two of them!! and glenn close was pretty darn good!!
i donāt have a closing paragraph except a tired sigh. disneyās gonna disney, as they have for decades, and now that they own such a big piece of the entertainment pie, everything under their umbrella will be subsumed by the nostalgia monster. everything is the past. the future is dead. the present, even more so. i hate it, but thatās the way it is. i donāt expect theyāll change that tune any time soon.
the only way out is to write and make new stuff (the indie way, by the looks of things), and try not to be too cynical as the wheel of disney keeps on turning, paving through the media landscapeāwhile not paying its authorsāand making every story weāve ever loved into a big flat nothing.
there, thatās a good closing paragraph. better get back to writing, eh?
how iāve spent lockdown #3
basically, iāve picked up what normal people would call āan absolute truckload of projectsā, but thatās my (undiagnosed) ADHD braināi canāt not fidget and skitter from one thing to another, everything is shiny and cool and i want to do it!! so hereās what iāve been doing, in bullet form:
i attended capricon, which is a science fiction convention normally hosted in chicago every year, but this year was of course virtual. it was a fun weekend full of interesting panels and chats on discord, and i got to have kaffeeklatches (round-table discussions) with some awesome people, like friend of the newsletter brandon oābrien, vida cruz and ada palmer, which was an absolute highlight.
speaking of conventions, iām helping to organise one! iām on the concom (thatās short for āconvention committeeā) for flights of foundry, a free (!!!) virtual convention aimed at emerging creatives in the speculative arts. thatās everyone from writers, editors, and visual artists, to podcasters, reviewers/critics, and games designersāeverything that could be or is science fiction, fantasy, and everything inbetween. (the parent organisation, dream foundry, does this all-year-round, but this is their special event.) iām marketing chair so this is absolutely a plug, but did i mention itās free??! with an optional donation?? if you are in the speculative arts in any capacity, please check it outāand if youāre interested in workshops and kaffeeklatches, hurry up and register before 1st march!! we expect lots of interest so weāre running a lottery for those items that are limited capacity; more info on the website.
since new yearās, iāve also made a few new podcast episodes for strange horizons. in reverse chronological order, we have a sleep-paralysis-inspired story about a bad date (cw: cockroaches for teethāyes itās gross but the story is GREAT and i had a lot of fun with it so give it a chance pls), which is on the longer side, and two shorter pieces about working out grief through magical realism. iām very happy with how these turned out, and theyāre all lovely stories! spotify embeds to follow, but you can also find them on my author page here, or on our podbean page.
iāve joined a new novel workshop cohort through my writers group (which i am now organiser of!), Spectrum. iām getting back in the fiction saddle, folks! shelving the long-suffering paradise lost quadrilogy because it starts off with four characters in a lockdown and iām, uhh, not about it right now, so iām working on my secret society of swedish superheroes book, which features a draco malfoy-esque lesbian antihero in search of identity and redemption. i love that story a lot, so iām really excited to finally put those words on the page (most likely on my new freewrite traveler.)
some audio stuff coming up:
a live show on the Stereo app (which is like a live podcasting situation with voice messages from listeners) coming up TODAY, thursday 18th, at 7pm GMT. iāll be chatting to friend and queer media critic/agony aunt rowan ellis about lgbt movies, and attempt to answer the question, āwhat is the best gay movie of all time?ā (spoiler: itās not carol, we both hate it.) you can leave us your Hot Takes as voice messages during the show to spark conversation and influence the outcome. come hang out, itāll be funāhopefully iāll do more of these in the future too, so give me a follow on there, @darthjuno.
a podcast episode with my buddies at kneel before pod on the fifth season of the expanse. itās pretty spoiler heavy, but itās all good stuff, guaranteed to keep you company with some pretty juicy opinions about space things. itās my favourite show right now so i had a LOT of feelings about it. you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
thatās it from me this week. as always, feel free to share your responses to anything above byĀ twitter,Ā comment, or dalmatian puppy messenger. you can also forward this email to a friend, if you think theyāll like whatās in it.
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above all, stay safe, wherever you are!
speak soon,
xK