This essay was commissioned by Shawn. You can find out more about commissions here. Horror anime is rare and rarely affecting. Series often have difficulty conveying or maintaining unsettling atmospheres and slow burns, and turn instead to gore and body horror—subgenres that can be quite effective but can […]
The vampire craze of the late 2000s has come and gone, the Twilights and True Bloods and Vampire Diaireses leaving a bad case of publisher burnout in their wake. The only ones left behind are people like me, whose specific fondness for queer vampires wasn’t exactly served by […]
Previous We’ve arrived: the nadir of the book. I’ve convinced no small amount of trusting, unwary souls to try this rollercoaster of a series. Every one found different characters and themes that appealed to them, but without fail they reported having difficulty with this stretch of pages. Why? […]
This essay was commissioned by abby-something. Want me to write about something you find interesting? You can find out more about commissions here. A guy walks into a studio. “I have a great idea,” he says. “The Parisian catacombs are spooky, right? How come nobody’s ever shot a […]
DEVILMAN crybaby has been tearing up the internet since it dropped a few weeks ago, sparking conversation about its use of sex, violence, horror, and taboo to tell a story about love and the end of the world. Not an inconsiderable amount of that discussion was centered around the […]
Previous If you’re wondering why it’s been a little while since the last recap, it’s because this section requires a certain amount of mental steeling to face. Not because it is particularly more horrible than other parts of this book (though at points it is, because it revolves […]
I talked about Gankutsuou’s handling of teen crushes on adults last week, but here’s a more extensive discussion on age-gap relationships with Dee and Caitlin: the ethical, the bad, and the normalizing. Oh, and the “that doesn’t actually fall under this pernicious problem.” (I can’t believe I forgot […]
