Anime Review: My Hero Academia — The Final Season

It’s the end of an era and My Hero Academia sticks the landing in the final season

It’s hard to believe the iconic anime My Hero Academia has come to an end. After multiple feature films and eight seasons of escalating battles, emotional struggles, physical loss, and societal betrayals, the series has wrapped up with a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t hesitate to lean into the imperfections of the characters and the reality of loss, while still leaving viewers with a profound sense of hopefulness. The long-running series follows the adventures of Izuku (Deku) Midoriya, a determined boy whose dream of being a hero inspires a diverse range of heroes, antagonists, and ordinary people, while he battles his own inner demons. MHA started out as a traditional underdog shonen anime with bright animation, fantastical character designs, and a feel-good plot. It seemed to be the kind of comfort adventure anime to enjoy without a lot of emotional exhaustion or complexity. Soon retail stores and cosplayers were diving into the show’s colorful palette and fun costumes. But early on, MHA began to dig deeper into its characters’ psyches and into the problems of families and of society as a whole. In between the energetic fight scenes and inspiring training montages, the show dealt with child abuse, domestic violence, racism, and mistrust of the government. After eight seasons and a significant last episode time skip, the characters grow from optimistic children into mature, flawed, emotionally complex adults. The last episode delivered an unexpectedly thoughtful and quietly powerful ending, one which embraced both imperfection and hope in its final message that everyone can (and needs to be) a hero on some level. This full-circle moment from the first episode of the first season was a powerful way to end the saga and answer the question of what it really means to be a hero.

[Spoilers for earlier seasons] My Hero Academia is the story of a near-future version of Earth, where a genetic mutation eventually causes most humans to be born with some variation of special powers (“quirks”). Those with particularly strong powers are sent to academies to be trained as licensed superheroes (simply called “heroes”). The protagonist, Izuku Midoriya (a.k.a. Deku), is one of the few children born with no special power (quirk) at all. Not even a minor one. But he idolizes the ridiculously brash and popular number one ranked hero, Toshinori (a.k.a. All-Might), and dreams of somehow becoming a hero to fight the violent superpowered villains who plague the country. After a dangerous act of bravery, Izuku is secretly gifted a transferable superpower from All-Might, who can no longer fully maintain it due to a critical injury. Izuku now has the potential for super strength, super speed, and super agility. He enrolls in UA, the top hero academy, where he trains his body to accommodate and control the enormous and dangerous power he’s been gifted. While at UA, he builds bonds with his teachers and friendships with his fellow students, who have a range of powers, personalities, and complicated backstories. But the idealistic setup is upended when a group of superpowered villains directly attack the children at the school, leading to a long term-battle over the next seven seasons that exposes upsetting truths and pits the young heroes not just against the villains but also against society itself and their own personal traumas.

MHA starts out as a kid-friendly, colorful, inspiring hero adventure with a simplistic plot: heroes versus villains and natural disasters. In fact, the main antagonists are a criminal group simply known unironically as “The League of Villains.” But, like all good shonen, the story quickly takes an intense turn. Deku’s powerful but stoic classmate Shoto is a victim of child abuse with a disturbing backstory which involves domestic violence by his father, the number two rank hero, against his mother, who is also a hero. Deku also encounters a child, Eri, who appears to be kidnapped and abused, and he struggles to help her in the face of societal denials that anything is wrong. When the heroes lose a major battle, much of society turns against them and against Deku in particular. The country begins to question the usefulness and trustworthiness of heroes and the government. Viewers see how easily people can be manipulated when fear and distrust take over. The fantastical character design of some of the heroes turns into an exploration of racism, as Deku learns about the bigotry faced by his classmates who are heteromorphs, those whose quirks create unusual physical features. We also see Deku’s journey to physical and emotional resilience while holding on to his core values. And we see Deku’s childhood friend and antagonist Bakugo progress from a loudmouth bully to becoming a true hero who is willing to sacrifice everything.

Building on all this, the final season dives into lots of climactic emotional intensity and plenty of powerful moments, including the final critical battles against the two main villains, with Deku versus the tragic and tortured Tomura, and Bakugo versus the sociopathic All For One. The final storytelling is elevated, showing the full heroic redemption arc of former antagonist Bakugo. We also see Deku’s maturity as he faces devastating physical damage and a high cost for his choices. The animation and music are powerful, and the character design of the two final heroes is symbolic, making them look more serious, mature, and less cartoonish in a way that reflects their inner development and the intensity of this final fight for their lives. The entire UA class gets in on the action, and the final battles also provide an opportunity for cameos from prior side characters from the MHA feature films or from earlier seasons. So many familiar faces cheering on the heroes is a nice way to signal the end of the larger story.

Unfortunately, a drawback of the series has been the two-dimensional treatment of the main villain All For One. However, in the final season, through a flashback, we finally learn the full backstory of All For One (a.k.a. Zen) and his peaceful younger brother Yoichi, the original owner of Deku's transferrable power. We see how their desperate childhood led to abuse, violence, and to Zen’s obsession with power and control over Yoichi. That twisted love and obsession ultimately fueled a decades-long battle between the brothers that reshaped the fate of the heroes and the country. There is a nice symmetry in the brutal Zen having the power to take while the kindhearted Yoichi has the power to give, with those opposite concepts defining “evil” versus “good” in the series.

For a show that started out playfully, the ultimate story arc and messaging became surprisingly insightful, particularly in this final season. The perpetually optimistic Deku had dark moments in prior seasons and eventually became an outcast vigilante. In season 8, Deku again experiences significant loss, and he is forced to make peace with an imperfect reality. In an intriguing scene, Deku talks with Spinner, an incarcerated villain, who calls Deku a murderer. Instead of arguing or crying about it, Deku calmly admits that he is indeed a killer when needed. The two have an odd conversation that acknowledges their significantly different worldviews but sparks inspiration in both of them.

The final season emphasizes the need for a cross-section of people to create the world we want to live in. Not just physically powerful fighters, but also engineers, teachers, people of different abilities, and ordinary members of society, because, as the final season shows us, physical power may be flashy and fun, but it is fleeting. Eight seasons ago, MHA began with a tearful Deku asking the cliched question, Can I be a hero? In a key moment in the final episode, two random characters, an aged grandmother and an abused boy, have an interaction that answers that question: Not only can ordinary people be heroes, but they need to be. Not in flashy ways, but in small, ordinary acts of compassion and courage. In the final season, many of the former heroes have suffered irreparable injuries and are gone from the traditional arena. But in that full-circle moment with two random people, we see the way small acts of kindness or courage can literally change the world. A major theme of the show is to go beyond our comfort level to do the right thing. Hopefully, it will help all of us to better understand what it truly means to be a hero.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Ultimately satisfying despite some sad moments
• Solid ending with profound messaging
• Big fights, big emotions, and quiet introspection lead to a powerful final season

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: Rumor Has It by Cat Rambo

The Disco Space Opera (a.k.a. You Sexy Thing) universe continues with more relationship-based SF, this time at an amazing space station

The crew of the You Sexy Thing has been through a lot in the previous two books, often self-inflicted. Like when Talon decided to make a clone of Thorn, the twin brother he misses so dearly. Or the often untrustworthy plans of archaeologist (and thief) Jezli. Or the drama-inducing hijinks orchestrated by the You Sexy Thing herself.

But now money is tight (again), and the best chance for the ship and crew to get money for needed repairs and just remain flightworthy is to visit the very expensive Coralind Station. The group mind find some peace in the gardens there, a chance to make some money with a restaurant, and get themselves back on their feet. Tubal Last, their enemy, is still out there, and is up to something—after all, The Devil’s Gun didn’t work when fired last time against him. But this time, the plan is for a peaceful rest at the station.

Things, once again, will not quite go to plan.

This is the story of Rumor Has It, the third book in Cat Rambo’s space opera universe.

The magic and secret sauce of Rambo’s work is her work on characters, first and foremost. Given that this is a crew that has been fused together by a variety of circumstances and adventures, it’s not a unified whole, but rather much more like a trail mix of a variety of ingredients, some of whom do not always get along with each other; and there are also centrifugal forces threatening to rearrange or break up our set of characters. In the main, all the action and drama is driven by the constraints and circumstances forced upon the crew and by letting them bounce off of it and each other. While seeing Niko have to navigate the bureaucracy of the bank is fun, it in is moments like the conflict between Thorn and the clone of his brother, who calls himself Rebbe, where the real strength of the series lies. Given that the ship is parked at the station and various groups go out into it, we get a variety of these types of character moments and dramas and scenes between members of this found family as they try to make their way.

And this is where I want to bring up the whole idea of Found Family. This is where Rambo excels, this group of misfits that the “Ten Minute Admiral” has indeed cobbled together (with some losses as well as additions) over the course of three books. They squabble, fight, protect and love each other with all the drama and verve of the archetypal found family in space that we need and deserve.¹

And one further joy, speaking of love and relationships, is the gleeful and unapologetic queernormness of the characters, both aboard the You Sexy Thing and in the characters they meet. This is the space opera found family where you can much more easily find someone to identify with, given the panoply and diversity of relationships, genders, and identities we get on the ship (and the ship itself as a sentient character to boot). And with Rebbe, as mentioned above, we get the whole interrogation of finding and forging an identity, especially when others already have strong opinions on what that identity should be, whether Rebbe likes it or not (he does, in fact, not).

Hand in hand with these strong characters is the rich worldbuilding of Coralind Station, a lush place with a large number of gardens of various kinds where, again, much of the plot and character drama takes place. Why have a character blow up in a sterile white 2001: A Space Odyssey space when you can instead have it happen in a lovely, flowering garden? Or a garden devoted to water features? Or any number of a hundred types of garden. We get descriptions and scenes set in a few of these, and mentions of a bunch of more, and a strong implication that the rest of the ones unmentioned are as scenic and amazing as the places we do see. Rambo expertly has a playground of the imagination and describes what we see and what we might see in a way that the reader can imagine more beyond the boundaries of the actual novel.

So, food. Readers of Rambo’s previous two novels will not be surprised that her focus on food has returned. The plot revolves around yet another pop-up restaurant and trying to adapt to their most challenging and biggest stage yet. And even amid restaurant shenanigans, sharing food is a bonding event throughout the book that helps develop the characters and the world in an engaging and immersive way. The preparing and sharing of food is shown as an act of intimacy, of love, and it is something more science fiction could stand to do, even today, decades removed from food pills.

One last thing I want to mention, something I wish more writers and publishers would embrace for series like this, is keeping the reader up to date. It had been a while between my reading of Devil’s Gunand this volume, Rumor Has It, and while some things were crystal clear in my mind, other details were somewhat less so. Fortunately, the author provides a recap of the plot in the first two books, as well as “Where are they now?” descriptions of the characters. I found this enormously helpful in getting myself settled into the Disco Space Opera verse and rolling right into their latest adventure.

So the obvious question is: Could you in fact start here if you didn’t want to start with the series? I suppose in theory you could; besides that opening forematter, the author does a lot of good in folding in previous plot and character beats into the present narrative. But such a reader would miss some things—like just why Tubal Last is such a threat, or the character development that the ship as well as the other characters have undergone to get to this point when they visit the station. I think it’s doable but not ideal (I’d point you toward You Sexy Thing and let you take it from there).

The series by its nature is episodic and (so far) continuing. Given the denouement of this book and how things are shaken up (yes, yet again), I look forward to more novels in the Disco Space Opera verse.

Highlights:

• Deeply immersive setting that spurs the reader’s imagination
• Engaging, inclusive and diverse found family set of main characters
• Heartwarming and engaging space opera

Reference: Rambo, Cat. Rumor Has It [Tor, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

¹ So I keep seeing a certain ’90s television show (with a movie) that keeps getting brought up again and again as the model for Found Family on a spacecraft among the stars. And I am here to tell you, friends, that the You Sexy Thing is a far, far more relevant, queer-friendly, diverse, and interesting found family to use for your comp than that show. You can’t take the skies from Niko Larsen and her crew.

Book Review: Wrath by Shäron Moalem and Daniel Kraus

Imagine Pinky and the Brain, minus the comedy, plus lots and lots of gore

Rats are fast learners, can survive on almost any food, can adapt to almost every climate, can squeeze into almost any space, and reproduce amazingly fast. The number of rats in the world is around the same as the total human population.

Fear the day they organize.

In the novel Wrath, written as a collaboration between a PhD geneticist and a veteran horror author, a cutting-edge biotech company has—sigh—disrupted the fancy pet market. After launching a series of transgenic novelties such as pretty glowing fish, chattier parrots, and ponies that are more pleasant to ride (not to mention a few off-the-books critters for the US Army), its newest creation is sure to catapult it to financial superstardom: a breed of rats with human genes for intelligence. Rat voices are too high-pitched for the human ear, so these smart rats come with a tablet app for them to type their thoughts. It’s the perfect companion for anyone who ever wished their pet could talk back.

Somehow the genius techbro didn’t expect the smart rat to form an opinion on the ethics of animal experimentation.

It’s become difficult to write a compelling techbro without resorting to the same tics of personality that we all know and hate. Our fancy pet salesman Noah is interchangeable with every other techbro you’ve met: a proud workaholic with a short temper, a monumental ego and no tether to the real world. If he sets a launch date for a new product, it absolutely must be met, quality control be damned. In several flashbacks (which could have been placed at better locations in the novel to improve its pacing), we learn about his scary, violent childhood and the small town life he left behind to dedicate himself to making piles and piles of money. Now he has everything, but he feels chronically dissatisfied because he never learned to connect to other people, and he simply doesn’t register the humanity of anyone on a lower income bracket. He spent his youth grinding his way to the top of the food chain, and now sits  there alone.

His accomplice in the fancy pet business is Sienna, a genetic engineer who believes in the mission of improving animals with almost religious zeal. She has invented a practically flawless technique of gene editing that gives much more predictable results than CRISPR, so whereas Noah is the public face that gives carefully tested speeches to move the masses toward needing more transgenic pets, Sienna is the brains of the operation. Unfortunately, her backstory is rather uninspired: her obsession with curing her infertility strained her marriage to its breaking point, and now she makes creatures in the lab to replace the children she can’t have. It’s tiresome that in the 21st century, in a novel that isn’t about motherhood, the only prominent female character is defined entirely by her desire for motherhood. More attention could have been given to her world-saving ambitions, which are only mentioned in a mocking tone.

Another point of view we follow is that of Prez, an experienced rat catcher who ends up employed as chief of security at Noah’s lab and always has relevant rat-related trivia to contribute when the story needs to explain a concept to the reader.

And then we have a lucky random passerby: Dallas, a boy whose miscalibrated hearing aids allow him to hear the transgenic rats’ high-pitched pleas for help. After finding himself in the right place at the right time, he rescues the star specimen that Noah was planning to showcase at a huge event, with two main consequences: Noah’s company suffers a costly public humiliation, and the smart rat gets a quick tour of how badly we’ve been treating other species. When this rat makes contact with the millions of fellow rats that inhabit New York, humankind’s thus far uncontested supremacy will topple.

The novel is practically divided in two parts, before and after Dallas rescues this rat. In the first part, we follow Noah’s despotic rule over his tiny kingdom, peppered with too many flashbacks that flesh out characterization at the cost of an awkward narrative rhythm. In the second part, we’re introduced to the rat as another narrator, a voice whose quickly growing intelligence is skillfully conveyed via increasingly complex sentences. The eventual revenge of ratkind takes up a lengthy portion of the book, and it generously splatters the page with countless slit throats, torn ears, ripped fingers, gouged eyes, and furry wave after furry wave of unrelenting, methodical, sharp-toothed hatred.

The way the conflict resolves feels a bit too convenient, almost frictionless, but it doesn’t erase the effect on the reader’s mind of the horrible images of a New York overrun with gray blankets of rats filling the streets and mutilating any human body they find. Next time you meet a rat in the city, maybe try to not give it a reason to hold a grudge against you. Who knows what secret conversations they’re having in the sewers.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Moalem, Shäron and Kraus, Daniel. Wrath [Union Square & Co., 2022].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Babylonia by Constanza Casati

Imagining the life of a historical figure whose life has been imagined and reimagined far more than the actual historical facts about her: Semiramis.

A young woman, in a nowhere town at the edges of Empire, daughter of a mother who has killed herself, living under the house of a father who can’t wait to marry her off and get rid of her, a young woman who dreams of a better life. But when her theft of a murdered governor’s rings brings her to the attention of a court official come to replace him, the young woman has a chance to not only escape her common life, but to transcend it entirely.

The book is Babylonia, by Constanza Casati.

This is Casati’s version of the story of Semiramis. Constanza Casati, known for her previous novel detailing the life of Clytemnestra, takes a further step toward historical fiction with this novel. What we know about the actual Semiramis as a historical character with attested resources is pretty thin, to be honest. We know there was a woman whom Semiramis was based on, with some authority in the otherwise fiercely patriarchal Neo-Assyrian Empire of the 8th century BC.

But beyond that and a few inscriptions, there is only a small amount of factual evidence about the real person behind Semiramis. So what Casati does here is invent out of whole cloth (but with a rigorous look at Neo-Assyrian Empire life and culture and society as far as we know them) a commoner background for Semiramis, trying to improve her life by any and all means, convinced she has a better destiny. I am reminded of Alma Alexander’s heroine Calladora (from her novel Empress) based on the Byzantine Empress Theodora, who likewise was convinced she had a better destiny than the common life she was born into. Casati’s invented Semiramis is right in Calladora’s mold.

But given the lack of actual facts of Semiramis’ life, what Casati does do is to fold in the heavy mythic tradition that Semiramis has accumulated around herself, far more than the actual historical record. It is Casati’s own thesis in the book that the strange event of a Queen on the Neo-Assyrian throne had an afterlife far beyond the historical record itself, inspiring a lot of authors, including right in the Classical era, to start inventing aspects of her life.

Diodorus Siculus is our main culprit here and our main ur-text for traditions on Semiramis, although the mythmaking on her began centuries earlier. He collects a lot of the myths, especially her superhuman ones, and medieval and later writers, knowingly or not, owe a debt to him. But really, once you start digging and getting interested, she is a historical personage that doesn’t have a lot of real facts about her.

Casati uses this mythology about Semiramis, in the same way she did with the Homeric tradition as well as Greek plays and myths in Clytemnestra. Just like that previous novel, she keeps the focus on realism, with no fantastic elements whatsoever, but immerses the narrative in a world where fantastic elements are accepted as part of everyday life. Take Semiramis' mother Derecto, who kills herself at the beginning of the book, abandoning her child. In the novel, she’s an ordinary mortal and distraught woman. In the mythic sources above, she’s a river goddess, or a water goddess or otherwise semi-divine, (and thus so is Semiramis). And in the narrative of the novel itself, especially as she rises to power, these myths come to be believed by people. The novel is not just the rise of Semiramis’ power and position and prestige, it is the very story of how the myths were shaped to begin with, how the pieces and inspirations for those myths were constructed.

But there is also a relationship triangle here that Casati takes from one of these mythic romances and remakes as her own. The points of view (with a few exceptions) bounce between Semiramis, Onnes, the “new governor” who brings her to the palace, and Ninus, the King of Assyria. A lot of the middle and end of the book is the tensions between these three characters as they resolve their feelings for each other, or at least come to terms to admit them. Given that this is a strongly patriarchal society with very strict laws, mores, and customs, this does not go well and provides a lot of the meaty drama as Semiramis tries to survive and thrive in a strongly patriarchal court.

Besides these, the most fearsome, ferocious and off-the-page character doesn’t get a point of view, and that is Ninat. Ninat is the queen mother, mother to the current king, wife of the king’s father (Shalmaneser) and is a ruthless and determined political operator and a survivor. In what is the very epitome of a “deadly decadent court” of intrigue, Ninat has survived and even thrived. She does not take the arrival of Semiramis well at all, as well as she might. She is barely controlling her son as it is at the moment and the arrival of Semiramis is a destabilizing factor that she cannot afford. We don’t get a point of view from her, which is a conflicting choice in my thinking. I would like to really know what she is thinking, given her adversarial role toward all of the characters that we do get a perspective of.

One gripe I have is with the title of the book. Babylonia: A Novel. If I told you nothing else about the book, what would you think the book was actually about, or who it was about. I, who have a modest general knowledge of ancient history, would not have guessed Semiramis as any of a dozen guesses. The historical Semiramis (Shammuramat, which is the Queen name that Semiramis takes by the end of the book upon her ascension) has no real connection to Babylon.

The mythic sources mentioned earlier have Semiramis doing everything and anything, including having her name on one of the gates of Babylon (Herodotus, predictably). But Babylon is never the focus of her wide ranging adventures, exploits and rule. And in the novel itself aside from Semiramis’ encounters and confrontations with a prince of Babylon, Marduk, Semiramis in the novel itself neither visits nor has any real connection to Babylon at all. When she gets crowned Queen, she is crowned Queen of Assyria and Queen of Babylon but that is really an afterthought and due to circumstances, not any real tie to the place.

There is one exception to all this, that might explain it and it is part of the Semiramis mythic literature I have not mentioned as yet. “The Whore of Babylon” is a mid 19th century text by a minister, Christopher Hislop, a religious anti-Catholic pamphlet that mixes, matches and invents a lot of Near Eastern history and mythology together to “prove” that the Catholic church is actually a polytheistic descendant of Babylonian religion. In the course of this, Semiramis is the titular Whore of Babylon and (somehow) is responsible for Goddess worship, which explains devotion to the Virgin Mary, et cetera.

So if I follow the title “Babylonia: A Novel”, it seems to be using memories of that pamphlet and its mischaracterization of Semiramis in order to come up with the book title. And I think it is an atrocious idea. For a novel that tries to reclaim Semiramis in a modern, and feminist sort of mold and story, and as we have seen in my review, does well at it, to revert to one of the more inventive and slanted and disgusting characterizations of someone we actually know very little about it is more than disappointing... it undercuts the actual project of the novel. It buries what you are trying to do with the book.

The novel is not meant to be a definitive entire life of Semiramis. The novel ends, basically, on her ascension as full Queen Regnant. Given that, again we know very little about the real Semiramis, who, like Clytemnestra (in the author’s previous work) is much more a character of myth than of actual fact, I am quite satisfied. In a touch that reminds me a bit of works like I, Claudius, we even get a strong implication at the end as to who is telling us this story, and given their thread through the book, you will not be surprised. It makes a lot of sense.

So what Casati does in the novel, ultimately, is not terribly different than what she does in Clytemnestra but is an extension of the same. There are more historical facts behind the person that the semi-mythical Semiramis is based on (Shammuramat) but there is so little that Casati is even freer in her invention that she was with Clytemnestra. There are definite parallels between her Clytemnestra and Semiramis (one could say that, based on two novels, that the author clearly likes to write a type). After all, a line from Clytemnestra certainly does apply to Semiramis throughout to the end of the book: “Queens are either hated, or they are forgotten.” Semiramis, like Clytemnestra, knows which one she would rather be.

--  

Highlights:

• Non-fantastical Near Eastern story of a character who is mostly mythical

• Strong feminist story in a culture even more patriarchal than her last novel

• Some elements of the book, including the title, undercut author’s intentions

Reference: Casati, Constanza, Babylonia: A Novel, [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2025]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Hollywood is Dead. Long Live Hollywood.

Netflix's Potential Purchase of Warner Bros. and the End of Hollywood (As We Know It… Now)

Last week, on December 4, 2025, news broke that Netflix had prevailed over Paramount and/or Comcast Universal to acquire Warner Bros. As I write this, news has just broken on December 8, 2025, that the Ellisons and Paramount have initiated a hostile takeover bid to prevent the Netflix purchase and bring Warner Bros. under the recently-expanded Paramount/CBS/Skydance umbrella. So we'll see what happens.

But whoever wins, the rest of us lose.

There will be different ramifications if Netflix buys Warner Bros. or if Paramount Skydance's shenanigans work out in their favor, but either way, the sale of Warner Bros. is the definitive closing of a chapter in Hollywood history. People have written "the end of Hollywood" pieces since before The Jazz Singer introduced talking pictures to the mainstream film audience in 1927, and yet Hollywood has managed to live on for another 100 years, so this piece will not be one of those. Movies and TV shows will persist as forms of entertainment moving forward, but this is the end of something, and what comes next will look different from what came before. The biggest questions in my mind are "What will be lost?" and "For what?"

What Will Be Lost?

First of all, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. When Disney bought Fox in 2019, there was some chatter that the majority of the job losses were going to be administrative, as the two studios merged their business operations. But the notion of relatively minimal job losses and the two studios' creative slates remaining independent was a fiction from the start. Disney immediately began shuttering specialty film groups like Fox 2000, which had been releasing cultural touchstone films like Fight Club, The Devil Wears Prada, and Hidden Figures since 1996.

So that brings us to what the audience is losing: the movies and TV shows that will never be made, the voices we will never hear, and maybe the spaces to share them.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005, there were six studios that could buy your project—Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony (formerly Columbia), and Paramount. There were other, smaller outfits that could buy projects because they had distribution deals with a studio or for straight-to-DVD releases, since DVD revenues were just absolutely insane at the time, and cable television channels that produced original content and were either wholly-owned subsidiaries or joint ventures between the major studios. Going a little farther back in time, MGM and United Artists used to be their own studios, too. So at one time, there were a lot of buyers, a lot of places that were mounting productions and employing crews, studio development departments shepherding feature film scripts, an entire pilot season apparatus where TV studios were making full pilots for shows that may or may not ever air, and an attendant set of opportunities for writers, actors, and directors to potentially break in or break through.

The loss of DVD revenue was transformative as the home media bubble burst alongside the advent of streaming, and industry contraction followed, alongside runaway production away from Los Angeles. There was a writers' strike, MGM folded, indie producers went under, but then Netflix jumped into original programming, and audiences soon found Peak TV dropped into their living rooms. Networks like AMC made must-watch programming like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and suddenly Netflix had a bottomless appetite for original programming, with Amazon and Apple jumping in, and the glut of new streamers from Disney+ to FreeVee making new content specific to their own new platforms.

And then Peak TV peaked. For years, the number of theatrical feature films had been declining, but the explosion of TV and streaming productions led to an employment boom, particularly for writers. But under the surface, things were sketchy as hell. The unfair employment practices led to the concurrent 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes (which I wrote about here). The face of that employment battle was David Zaslav, CEO of the recently-merged Warner Bros. Discovery, who was on the receiving end of a quarter-billion-dollar compensation package and had recently dropped into town acting like the second coming of legendary studio head Robert Evans (even buying Evans's fabled home). As it stands today, the Writers' Guild reports TV employment has fallen by 42% and Zaslav's Frankenstein monster of Warner Bros. Discovery is being split back apart and sold off. Good work if you can get it—$250+ million to destroy a company in three years.

So either Netflix or Paramount is going to roll Warner Bros. up under its corporate umbrella, and what will result are job losses, fewer movies, and fewer TV shows.

If Paramount prevails in its hostile takeover bid, the films and TV shows it does wind up producing going forward are likely to bend toward Trump-friendly, fascist-curious content. Exhibits A through D: A) firing Stephen Colbert, B) installing heterodox blogger (and higher ed grifter?) Bari Weiss as the head of CBS News, C) greenlighting Rush Hour 4 after credibly-accused sex pest and director Brett Ratner made a Melania Trump documentary, and D) Jared Kushner's involvement in Paramount's hostile takeover bid. In the last year, Warner Bros.' current studio heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy oversaw Ryan Coogler's Sinners, Zach Cregger's Weapons, and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. Say goodbye to movies like those. After Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, I weighed in along similar l ines, lamenting how the acquisition would shrink the range of releases that Disney would produce. Time has more than borne out that prediction, but it didn't have the ideological corollary, which makes the prospect of a shrinking media landscape even more troubling.

If Netflix's bid holds, a lot of smart industry watchers think it will mean the beginning of the terminal decline of movie theaters. Many speculate that Netflix only wants this acquisition in the first place as a way to remove the second-largest supplier of theatrical content (Warner Bros. lags behind only Disney) from the marketplace entirely. Last week, box office analyst Scott Mendelson told The Bulwark's cultural editor Sonny Bunch:

"Something that Netflix has done a lot of in the last few years is it seems like every time there’s this big, buzzy, crowd-pleasing festival flick that might theoretically do well in theaters, Netflix flies in, drops a $20 million check on it, grabs distribution rights, and then it dies in the algorithm. And I think, I would argue, that they are doing that at least partially intentionally because the worst thing that can happen for Netflix is for that film to be successful in theaters."

The argument here is that Netflix's entire business model is for you to watch movies at home, and anything that lures you out of the house to watch a movie is competition. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said almost as much, prompting pushback from arguably the most commercially-successful film director of all time, James Cameron.

I go to movies a lot these days. I probably see more movies in theaters now than I have at any point since high school, when a typical Friday night was just going to the megaplex and seeing whatever was new that week. But the catch is that I almost never see first-run movies in the theaters these days. I am an annual member of the amazing American Cinematheque non-profit organization in Los Angeles, and live around the corner from the revitalized Vidiots, so a couple times a month I'll be in a theater seeing an animation retrospective with the animator in person, or a 70-mm restoration of a sci-fi or western classic, or introducing my kids to samurai movies, or a midnight screening of a bizarre French film, or… or… or. And that's a future we might all be heading for.

Will movie theaters vanish? No. Could the multiplex? Yeah. We've only had movie theaters for about a hundred years. That's nothing. They are not immutable. If Netflix prevails in a push to keep new movies out of theaters and force first-run films into the algorithmic churn of a decreasing number of streamers willing to vanish $90-million-dollar movies because David Zaslav needs a tax write-off because of his dipshit merger decisions, then we're all stuck with the consequences as a audience. We might all need to find, or create, our local repertory film screening series if we want to see anything at all projected on a screen in community. We might be looking at the very real possibility that the theatrical experience becomes akin to the way most of us experience live theater here in 2025: some small number of people see a ton, most people see none.

And for what?

In the beginning, movie studios made movies. That's what they did, and they did it like factory work, with actors, directors, writers, technicians all under contract. If they made enough movies that brought in enough people, the movie studios made money. Then Howard Hughes decided Jane Russell should be a star, so he got involved in Hollywood as a producer. Hughes had more money than he knew what to do with, but wanted to spend it. So he built the Spruce Goose, and he bought RKO Pictures, one of the major Hollywood studios, and brought it under the umbrella of the Hughes Tool Company. This was about the time that James Stewart decided to skip a studio contract and struck out on his own, under the guidance of his agent Lew Wasserman of MCA. This shift in the business model ruptured the studio system that had been in place since the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood was never the same.

Hughes sold RKO to the General Tire and Rubber Company, of all places. The manufacturing conglomerate Gulf+Western bought Paramount Pictures for some reason in the 1960s, and Lew Wasserman's MCA wound up buying Universal. Ever since, the movie studios have been chips in higher-and-higher-stakes corporate merger poker games. Amazon owns MGM (and MGM+, which is different from Prime Video). Disney owns Hulu (which is different from Disney+), Comcast owns Universal, and before Zaslav and Discovery came in and bought Warner Bros. and HBO, for some reason AT&T owned HBO. The studios don't make movies. They don't make TV shows. They "return value to the shareholders." If releasing a surefire IP-based hit like The Minecraft Movie returns value to the shareholders, they'll do that. If *not* releasing Batgirl returns value to the shareholders, then they'll do that instead. If installing an opinion journalist and blogger over their news division greases the wheels for governmental approval of a merger, they'll do that. It's all just corporate bullshit to make line go up after quarterly investor calls. The audience isn't even the product, like we were during the network TV days when networks were selling our eyeballs to advertisers.

So who benefits from any of this? Not the fans, not the audience, not the creators. Netflix is a tech company. Amazon is a tech company. Apple is a tech company. Apple makes their TV shows at a loss for a reason that they'll figure out some day but for now just seems like as good a way to set a billion dollars on fire as any. If Amazon decides that the MGM brand is a better fit for, I don't know, a line of dog and cat food, then we'll all be getting MGM Leo the Lion Pet Food on Prime Day and no more James Bond movies.

I recognize the Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud vibe here, I do. But what I really want to emphasize is that these mergers didn't have to happen. These studios, provided a madman like Howard Hughes didn't systematically destroy them, probably could've kept going as they rebuilt after the fall of the studio system in the 1950s. Talking pictures came in the 1920s, and what came next was never the same. Television came, introducing a new medium and forcing filmmakers to innovate 3D and widescreen and VistaVision and CinemaScope and the R rating, and what came next was never the same. The studio system collapsed, but Blaxsploitation films, risk-taking visionaries like Robert Evans who gambled on Francis Ford Coppola, and upstarts like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper saved Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s, and what came next was never the same. A real estate boom in the 1990s led to the creation of the multiplex, and suddenly theater owners needed more, more, and more movies to fill their screens. So the independent cinema boom of the 1990s (seriously—just banger after banger after banger) changed the types of stories being told and the storytellers who had the opportunity to tell them, and what came next was never the same. The explosion of creativity that I got to witness at the megaplex in the 1990s on those Friday nights wasn't because there was something in the water, or everybody just got narratively hip all of a sudden, or because they took the lead out of the gasoline finally (OK, maybe that, a little bit), but it was because more people got to tell more stories that only they could tell.

The diversity of voices and opportunities gave us all better art, and created meaning in countless lives. How many people out there do you think have tattoos inspired by The Matrix? You ever had a case of The Mondays? I've got one right now. How many times have you looked at a rug and thought, "That rug really ties the room together"? My friend named his kid after a character from The Fifth Element. Suddenly the need for movies to put on all those screens made room for weird, idiosyncratic stories, queer filmmakers, more women, more people of color telling stories that spoke to individuals and communities and moments that would have not been seen or recognized before.

But that's the point, right? These days? Tighter control over who gets to tell their story? Fewer outlets? There are still a ton of cinema screens, but they're all showing the new Marvel movie, every half hour. On the apps, the algorithm serving up what the owner of the algorithm wants you to see? Hiding what it wants you *not* to see?

So, look. Whichever corporate entity prevails in this Warner Bros. buyout, it is the closing of a chapter. Not the closing of a book, I don't think, but whatever comes next will never be the same.

Hollywood is dead. Long live Hollywood.

Posted by Vance K -- Emmy Award-winning producer and director, cult film reviewer, and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together.

TV Review: Zomvivor

An entertaining succession of jump scares and survival stress.

Horror stories have been abundant in 2025, providing a cathartic outlet for processing contemporary stress. One of the latest contributions to horror’s zombie sub-genre is a new Netflix short series from Thailand. Zomvivor is the story of several groups of college students trying to survive a zombie outbreak on their locked down campus while trying to uncover and understand the true nature of the infected people who are trapped there with them. With plenty of blood, zombie bites, and moderate gore, the series works well as an entertaining succession of jump scares and survival stress, despite the fact that the larger story arc and backstory are much less satisfying.

The show begins in the midst of a zombie outbreak on a college campus in Thailand. Hordes of flesh-hungry, infected humans attack the remaining survivors on the campus. Once bitten, the victims also turn into a ravenous, vicious, but seemingly mindless, zombies. As students flee the escalating attacks, the survivors settle into several groups including a group of cheer squad guys in a greenhouse and a group of alpha personalities and their minions in a library. In an ironic flashback we see a student film project about a woman who has been turned into a zombie and is now tied to a chair as her colleagues figure out what to do with her. The student actress, Lily, agrees to the student director’s request that she cry tears in her bound zombie state and Lily ponders whether a person so damaged and infected would have the capacity for that type of self-reflection. 

A central plot point involves a genius student Ning who accepts an offer to work with a nervous Professor Wiroj on a project that may cure her comatose mother. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Ning and her younger brother Non were raised by their single mother in a working class household. Ning and Non are both students at the university where Ning is a promising honor student on a scholarship. Their mother becomes unexpectedly ill and eventually comatose. Professor Wiroj recruits Ning to help find a cure by working on a body-preserving project for rich people called Anisong. The project is funded by the mysterious benefactor who funds the university. However, through a series of unfortunate and deeply upsetting events, the benefactor’s awful son and heir gets infected with a defective serum and the research pivots to a cure to revive and regenerate his body and that of Ning's comatose mom. As part of the test trials, Dr. Wiroj targets poor, vulnerable, working class workers on the campus to be the test subjects. He feels bad about this, but not enough to stop, especially because he is secretly in love with Ning’s mom. As it turns out, the variant serum is volatile and the test subjects begin to display some very odd behavior. Meanwhile, back in the present, a group of students try to make a stand against the growing hordes of zombies. On group is focused on compassion and the other is focused on violence. Complicating things are the military / private security who want to kill all the students to contain both the outbreak and the secrets behind it. Some of the survivors are also impeded by an uninfected but delusional student who sabotages their safety. They are also hampered by power dynamics among the alpha leaders; and by many students’ feelings of guilt at having to kill their fellow classmates.

Zombie stories have so many commonalities that viewers often know what they're getting when they start to watch. Zomvivor adds some interesting twists to the usual zombie drama which make it quite entertaining, despite the predictable elements. One useful twist is having the story take place in an elite college setting. This allows the characters to have a more strategic engagement with the zombie outbreak since many of them are science students who can theorize on how the zombies behave and can try to create biological and chemical based options for responding, rather than just fighting, running, and hiding.

Another interesting twist is the contained nature of the outbreak. Many zombie horror films involve a zombie apocalypse where entire countries are devastated and only pockets of survivors remain. In Zomvivor, the zombie outbreak we see is essentially confined to the campus. The surviving students are unable to leave but so are the zombies. In the series, the rest of the country may theoretically still be living a normal life while the survivors and zombies remain caught in a confined, locked room adventure.

The story is also told from multiple points of view rather than focusing on a single, lead character. And, Ning, the character who has the most camera time, is an interestingly unreliable narrator and ultimately unlikeable character as she processes new revelations about her morally gray science project. There is, in fact, no central, pure heart hero with whom viewers can emotionally align themselves. The very large ensemble cast makes it hard to bond with a particular character. This is surprising given the show’s survival story concept but it also adds tension to the story by emphasizing the general sense of uncertainty.  On the other hand, the series does a nice job of showcasing kindness, through the altruism and compassion the cheer squad boys show to an infected friend and with each other. The show also briefly addresses class disparities and the way the working class people are treated as disposable, even by the lead characters. In a creepy twist, the zombies, particularly the original cleaning and custodial workers, continue to incoherently follow their pre zombie life routines on the campus, compulsively and sloppily mopping or sweeping with vacant eyes and bloodstained hands. The effect is nicely poignant.

However, despite these interesting elements, the larger sinister background plot feels a bit convoluted and ultimately not emotionally engaging. Key moments of revelations about the villains are hurried through, larger motivations are unclear, and the show ends on an incomplete cliffhanger. After so many satisfying, intense, and entertaining moments throughout the series, the finale is a bit frustrating and leaves viewers without closure. Instead, the ending intentionally leaves us with more questions. For those who like a twisty ambivalence, the adventure may be worth it. For everyone else, it may be a thoughtful and enjoyable ride with an unexpectedly abrupt exit.

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Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Entertaining jump scares and intensity
• Appealing side characters mixed with negative or unreliable narrators
• Leaves viewers with more questions than answers

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Graphic Novel Review: The One Hand and The Six Fingers, by V, Campbell, Watters, Kumar, Loughridge, Bidikar and Muller

 The Left hand can't know what the Right hand is doing

Cover Artist: Anand Radhakkrishnan

I don't read many graphic novels - mainly because I'm a latecomer to the field. I love stories - I read, I listen, I watch. Akira, which I first discovered as an imported graphic novel as teenager cemented a love of visual media. However I haven't ever really had the time for or interest in reading about superheroes. 

In a confession of my own ignorance I discovered only very late that western graphic novels were much broader than simply Marvel and DC. My exploration of what they do have to offer has led to me developing a bit of a habit which I’m sure keeps my local comic book shop happy. 

A recommendation for The One Hand and the Six Fingers came to me through a friend after he sold me on another of Ram V’s standalone stories – Rare Flavours. The One Hand and the Six Fingers has a central premise that’s outside of the story; that Ram V collaborated with two different other writers on the story to bring together essentially what is two stories about the same subject into one intertwining experiment in storytelling.

To understand how that works we have to explore the story itself a little (although no spoilers). The One Hand and the Six Fingers is a tale about a set of murders happening in a city that could be any big American city but mostly reads as New York or Chicago. We learn in the first chapter that the murders are serial murders and have been solved not once, but twice before by the same cop and now they’re back for a third spree it’s all falling apart.

The thing is the people locked up for the first and second set of murders each obviously did those murders. The cases against them were watertight. So what is going on and how is someone replicating the cases exactly, including elements that were never released to the public?

As it turns out the two sides of the story were planned as a complete arc but then the different people involved in each side got on with producing their pieces separately (with Ram V being the common writer across both sides). This is an audacious piece of plotting and artistic creativity because it means the telling has contextual divergence built into its fabric even if the meta-narrative is coherent.

There are the classic set of tropes – the cop due to retire, the maverick nature of their obsession with the murderer. We also have a murderer who’s not entirely sure if or why he’s doing what he’s doing. We have black police lieutenants ready to suspend the cop, we have accidentally caught up love interests who may or may not support the murderer.

Across the top of this we have the setting which is neo-noir but also cyberpunkish in a very Bladerunner 2049 sense. The detective has a long term relationship with a synthetic human, called here a Cog. The entire thing is at once familiar.

What is interesting to me though is what V and his collaborators do with the story. There are two extremely pertinent references beyond Bladerunner – Dark City, the 1998 film directed by Alex Proyas and the Matrix, the 1999 film written and directed by the Wachowskis. In that sense, The One Hand and the Six Fingers is treading well worn ground for people as old as I am. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun or interesting both from a dramatic and a philosophical point of view, just that it’s standing on the shoulders of giants.

The themes here, hidden behind gory murders and lush, economically structured panels and vistas are about meaning, information, the lives we perform for ourselves and how we create coherence in the worlds we build.

When I talk about world building I mean that in the personal sense of how I construct the world I encounter each day, the meaning in my experiences and what baggage I bring to it as well as grander ideas about how meaning is constructed.

V et al are very interested in deconstructing how we consider the world is put together. From Gerard 't Hooft’s holographic principle to Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis we are asked to question whether the world we encounter with our senses, while the ‘us’ exists somewhere internally, can be considered real. If the world is not ‘real’ then what does that imply for both our sense of self but also our sense of self through instantiation?

This is the kind of thing that you might think is a bit sophomore in nature – to be discussed at three am at a house party with strangers but the narrative here handles it pretty well. Certainly the framing device of the killer and the detective wrestling with the same crimes adds more flair and nuance than the simple contemplation of everything being constructed (i.e. the classic antirealist stance). 

Not that V tackles it here, but if the world is one that’s entirely constructed whether by our social consensus or through the illusionary constructs of our sense data then building racism, sexism and other prejudices into it becomes a deeply weird position to take.

The One Hand and the Six Fingers doesn’t offer a definitive answer – its characters are in one specific iteration of the nexus of these ideas (which I am being careful not to spoil!) and in true story telling style it follows them to the end of that idea, to a position that is very definitely reductio ad absurdum. 

This is where it fell a little short for me. It may well be because I’ve come across these ideas a lot in my own reading/studying/writing but the main characters are, in the end, sitting in the well of fatalism. They are most concerned with identifying that they’re in the well and when they do? At that point they stop fighting and that was kinda disappointing to me. 

That’s a me thing – I want existential puzzles to have meaning, to be an impetus to changing the world. Ram V’s story presents a different epistemology – in that the limits of knowledge are both emotional as well as physical and intellectual. For his characters the weltanschauung they dwell within is one that starts and ends in despair and the discoveries along the way being transformative are decidedly not transformative of the fundamental meaninglessness of existence.

The One Hand and the Six Fingers suggests that learning the truth might only offer us an escape from these limits through non-existence because only by non-being can we counter the futility of being. It’s bleak when you write it out longhand.

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Highlights:

• Serial killers
• Cyberpunk, noir, hard bitten detectives
• Weird as fuck world building

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, a familiar set of tropes given new life with a brilliantly structured, drawn and coloured story about meaning wrapped up in a serial killer mystery.

References: V, Ram. The One Hand and the Six Fingers [Image Comics 2024].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he co-owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.