Deja Boo: The Brave Little Toaster

Baby's first introduction to the inevitability of death

I will confess to you now that The Brave Little Toaster never made me cry. It’s not the sort of movie that made me fear that there was a monster under the bed, or anything like that. But I do remember, vaguely, being fascinated by the film all the same. I couldn’t really tell you why; I liked talking cars, so that last musical number had an enduring appeal to me. But, as those of us who have actually watched this film could tell you, the actual content of that musical number will in retrospect make people question my upbringing.

This is a movie that I remembered fondly throughout my youth but for the longest time never actually sat down to rewatch. I rediscovered the soundtrack on a Reddit thread (more on that later) and would listen to it during certain tough times. I did not, however, dedicatedly watch the film again. The film is from 1987. I was born in 1996. I watched it in the early 2000s. And in the Year of Our Lord 2026, I watched it again, staring down the gunbarrel of thirty years old.

I must admit: this film is dark for a children’s film, but is dark in a way that is perhaps not obvious to a child. Your basic plot is that five appliances—a toaster, an electric blanket, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, and a radio—have been left at the country cottage of a city family. The appliances miss the child that they had provided for for so long, whom they call “the Master.” After years and years of being left in the cottage with little sight of the Master, the appliances get together and decide to brave the wilderness to find the Master and resume their lives of faithful service. It turns out, though, that the Master has grown up. He is no longer a child, and in fact he is setting off to go to college, and from there adulthood.

In that premise alone there is a lot to unpack. This is set during high Reaganism, the age of “greed is good,” the age when America assumed what was profitable and what was good were in fact one and the same. What is striking is one of the assumptions made by the film (based off of a 1980 novella by acclaimed science fiction writer Thomas Disch) about its characters: the idea that their fulfillment is found in service. This is an idea that, by itself, sounds very Reagan-era. The film literalizes the concept of a “dream job” by downright stating that these characters are pining for a state of continued servitude. But, if you cock your head a bit in a certain direction, you can see this in a much more liberatory way. Everyone wants to make a living doing what they love, what they’re good at, and you can read the appliances’ quest as a quest for self-actualization. But if this is a metaphor for self-actualization, the metaphor fails a bit; tools are designed to be used for specific purposes. Human beings are simply born.

The appliances march through a dangerous wilderness to the city. This wilderness isn’t particularly dangerous to human beings; indeed Indigenous people had lived in them for millennia (the nature of this film looks vaguely like that of the Mountain West—the radio mentions Utah as being a different place, so I am very tentatively willing to guess that the film is set in Colorado, but really it could be somewhere between there and northern California), though I would suppose that a city-dweller would need some teaching. In any case, these are not humans, but human creations. They have to navigate the wilderness using a vacuum’s wheels and a battery tied to an office chair, and to get out of scrapes, they have to use the vacuum’s cord (they use it to swing across a river once, and another time use it to get the blanket down from a tree). But what they all discover, with emotional force so intense they sing about it, is that this world can be utterly beautiful. Their own sense of purpose has locked them in a house, pining for somebody who isn’t there, and they have denied themselves so much because of it.

They eventually find themselves in the possession of a man who works with appliances like them for a living, a rotund tinkerer-cum-salesman by the name of Elmo St. Peters. He works what is, for our main characters, a grisly trade: he sells appliances, and more disturbingly, he sells appliance parts. Your characters are therefore plunged into an actual horror story for beings of their nature. You get another musical number, led by a hanging lamp with an unnerving resemblance to Peter Lorre. Elmo St. Peters is a man who can be read as the evil doppelganger of the Master: the Master uses his appliances to help himself, thereby actualizing them, while Elmo St. Peters uses his appliances to help himself, thereby dismembering them. You, and they, are confronted with the wildly different meanings of the verb “to use.“

The appliances eventually make it to the Master’s new home, an apartment in the city. They are met by the shiny new appliances, cutting edge for the 1980s and hideously dated by modern standards. That’s where the film shows its age the most; the old vacuum looks very much like a modern vacuum, and the titular toaster is very close to the one I have in my house. The computers and stereos and all the other things in the new apartment, however, look very ‘80s, and this becomes ever more in your face as they sing about how new they are in a tune that is filled to the brim with synthesizers of that era (as well as an obvious Carmen Miranda parody at one point).

And then we get to the junkyard scene. This is the part of the movie that I remembered vividly, even in the twenty-some years I didn’t watch it. This is the song that I found in a Reddit thread that became a talisman for me in times of misery. I listened to it a lot right after I graduated high school, before finding a proper summer job, having been put through the rite of passage that those of us my age, give or take a few years, went through: being driven from store to store by your parents and ordered to ask if they had any job openings, only to be told to apply online (maybe one store let me fill something out there—this was summer 2015). I listened to it a lot during my mental health crash my sophomore year of college (I showed it to at least one therapist). I listened to it, again, in the wake of my suicide attempt, an attempt born out of guilt.

But describing it in words won’t do it justice. Take a few minutes and watch it.

Look into my virtual eyes and tell me this isn’t the darkest shit you’ve ever seen in a children’s film. Occasionally, in college, the swing dance and ballroom dance clubs I was in would share the songs from the movies they loved as children. Most would have some sugary song from the Disney Renaissance. I would show them this, and they would give me weird looks.

Again, I think that I liked this bit as a child because of the talking cars. It’s certainly a catchy tune, with bits of surf rock and a driving beat that would make it easy to swing dance to (I have never had the pleasure, unfortunately), written by the acclaimed Van Dyke Parks. As an adult, this scene encapsulates the themes of the film in a terrifying way. You are literally staring into the jaws of death! How did anyone let this get put in a children’s film? (A big part, by my understanding, was having it made independently rather than financed by Disney). This is a song about feeling left behind, the feeling that you belonged to a different era. Long-time science fiction readers may notice a thematic overlap with George R. R. Martin’s 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag. That is a work dominated by nostalgia and the fear of being left behind. The characters are aging rockers whose heyday was the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love and peace and the antiwar movement. It is a book that is the hypercapitalist, reactionary, money-obsessed ‘80s looking back at the freewheeling, anti-establishment ‘60s, asking where the time had gone.

I’m going to go through that song car by car. I think it deserves it:

The first car we don’t get that good of a look at, but he’s a common person’s car, a means to get from here to there. He’s very much the person who’s thrown too much time into their job and has lost any sense of self. He reminds me of my father.

The second car is more artistically clear in her intent: she’s a car of the optimistic Space Age of the ‘50s, with her sleek design that calls to mind rockets. She is a paean to lost optimism.

The third car is a ‘50s hot rod, with the raspy voice of an aging rock star whose voice has been destroyed by booze and cigarettes. He’s one way of looking at lost youth, tied to a very specific time and place.

The fourth car is a race car of the type common in the interwar years, who realistically couldn’t hold a candle to the cars of the ‘80s. He’s about how skills and senses degrade as you age, and how the highs of youth cannot be recreated afterwards. He’s the car most comparable to an athlete.

The fifth and sixth cars are a limousine and a hearse, respectively. The former sings of a wedding, the latter a funeral, and these are implied to be for the same man. They are clearly the same model of car in different livery to suit different purposes, and sent together into the maw of death. Sex and death are so commonly intertwined in art, and that is the case here. One begets the other.

The sixth car is the reason why, whenever I want to listen to this song, I listen to a version ripped directly from the film rather than the official soundtrack. For on the soundtrack they bowdlerized her lyrics and overlaid a weird-sounding new line that juts out like a nail. I understand why they felt the need to do this, as it is the most openly sexual of any of the verses. This car is reminiscent of the VW vans that the hippies loved, and the surfboard on her roof is self-explanatory. She is the embodiment of the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love, and (as Jack Weinberg put it) never trusting anyone over the age of 30. By the time this film was made, those bright young people would mostly have settled down, reached middle age, taken corporate jobs, and started families—and I suspect that several of them would have watched this film with their children. This segment is another catchy song with talking cars for children, but I can imagine it was a shot across the bow for their parents.

The last car is downright tragic. He is a work truck, left forgotten to rot, deemed superfluous as his owners looked for a better future in the city (here, Santa Fe). Notably, this is specifically stated to be on a reservation, and from the mention of the Hopi later on we can guess this is the Hopi reservation of Arizona (surrounded, incidentally, by the larger Navajo reservation). The time this car was made useful would have been the age of the Red Power movement, when the Indigenous peoples of the continent demanded that the settler state and the settler society remember that they were still living, breathing peoples, not dead ones. This truck is a forgotten tool of a forgotten people, and those layers of forgottenness leave him only one course of action: he is the only car to voluntarily take his place on the conveyor belt to total destruction.

This is a film that is frankly much scarier as an adult than as a child. I am now months away from thirty, the age that society has decided is the end of your fun and the end of your youth, the year you are supposed to be an “adult,” whatever that means. I am autistic, and I have ADHD, which means that I have been “behind” several “adult” milestones. I still live with my parents, because everything in Northern Virginia is hideously expensive. I only got my first job at 25, and I am still there, because the job application process is hell for people like me. I have never had a relationship. I have never even dated anyone. As someone who has spent his entire life chasing an ideal that I simply cannot reach, the themes of obsolescence of this movie resonate with me deeply. Part of me wonders if such great thematic work is wasted on children, but on the other hand, I would never have seen it as an adult had I never seen it as a child. It is a seed that grew into a great and mighty tree that has borne many fruits, and it has done so because the fear it is based on comes for us all.

And, if you're so inclined, it's now on Disney Plus.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Chris Kempshall

A very specific type of Star Wars fan gets what they always wanted

There’s a segment of fandom communities, and I can vouch that this is particularly strong in alternate history communities, that likes taking a look at a fantastic setting and seeing how it could be made to make some degree of sense. Of course, many of these settings violate the laws of physics, but you can look at them and impose logical consistency. Being a Star Wars fan, I have often thought of how you could make that universe make sense—and, of course, the Expanded Universe, both before and after the Disney buyout, did this in spades. But now, Disney has done something the franchise, to my knowledge, has never done: released a history book about the Star Wars setting: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Chris Kempshall.

Reading this book I could not help but feel that us Star Wars fans were given a great gift in that the universe conspired to get Mr. Kempshall to write a book like this; he himself admits that he had been wanting to write this book for most of his life. He is also a professional historian, specializing in World War I, and having done a lot of work on the representation of history in video games. What you get, then, is a book that feels like it was written by a fan, in the sense that sheer enthusiasm drips off of every page, and by a professional, in that there is a structural rigor undergirding the project that gives it greater depth than simple fan works might.

One of the things that really helps the verisimilitude of the book is that Kempshall knows how history as a discipline works. I am familiar with this type of faux-history book style of writing, as I have been involved with online alternate history communities for the better part of twenty years (and that makes me feel very old to say), and one of the things that become very obvious after a certain point of learning history on your own is that many of them have only gotten facts from Wikipedia and other easily accessible sources that nevertheless lack depth. They write in vagaries and treat facts as bits of trivia and not as pieces of information in a much larger panorama. The works are, as my dear friend and colleague Colin Salt once said while interpreting me, trinketized. As I wrote many years ago:

“How can the neophyte alternate historian improve their questions? I think it’s ultimately a matter of mindset. A mistake many newcomers make (and this is a notion encouraged by many online historical discussion fora, not just alternate historical spaces) is assuming that history is simply the aggregation of bits of trivia, whose own complex interrelationships are neglected. This reduces the study of history to a collection of trinkets rather than the system of the world that many academics spend entire lives studying but a tiny portion. This is not something that newcomers should feel overly guilty over; this is how history is taught as in many school systems before the university level.”

What Kempshall’s book reminded me of very strongly was Robert Sobel’s 1971 work of alternate history, For Want of a Nail, a book about the American Revolution failing, much of what in our world became the eastern United States remaining British and thereby becoming a super-Canada of sorts, and the patriots and their descendants moving into what we would call Texas (they call it the state of Jefferson), intervening in a Mexican civil war, and merging their country and that larger country into the United States of Mexico. Sobel’s book discusses the long-standing rivalry between these two countries over a period of centuries. It is a book that goes to great care to not only detail history, but historiography. He has a whole section of totally fictitious sources at the end, and it is as long as the sources in a real history book would be. There are footnotes throughout the text. More crucially, he frames his work within a longstanding historian’s fight between North American and Mexican historians about the intertwined genesis of their two nations, and complies with an in-universe historiographical convention to have a historian from the other country (in respect to the background of the in-universe author) write the conclusion to a book written about the interaction between both. Looking back on Sobel, I see a commitment not just to emulating history, but emulating how people think about their own history.

Kempshall has done both of these in his book. He has a plethora of footnotes, although no lengthy bibliography at the end. Notably, a large chunk of these sources are audio logs, as well as primary source military records and postwar memoirs. This feels different from an actual history book in setting, but not in aim, as this is a universe that does not have a large production of paper books (befitting a space opera). The in-universe author of this book, a clear stand-in for Kempshall, nevertheless is not simply a pastiche. He took up arms to fight the First Order, and that experience colors his entire view of the events of the previous wars (he argues that it may make more sense to view the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, and the war against the First Order as one single decades-long war, not unlike the European Civil War thesis, for example).

Your narrator is, likewise, a politically inclined being. There is a point where he is contemplating the racial capitalism that the Galactic Empire practiced, with humans as a dominant caste and nonhumans as a subordinate caste consigned to second-class citizenship and degrading grunt work (the Wookiees, for example, are exported to various worlds to be used as slave labor. Similarly, Geonosians were used as slaves to build the Death Star), and he ruminates on how there is a blind spot in having a human like himself writing the history of the Galactic Empire, a state built on vicious human supremacy. He has great empathy for the victims of the Empire, demanding that the galaxy respect the decision of a species, for whom a refusal to acknowledge someone is the worst insult imaginable, to refuse to mention the Empire at all. Furthermore, he has seen the cost of warfare, and the cost of totalitarianism, within his own life. He has come to the conclusion that an injury to one is an injury to all, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that none of us are free until all of us are free; and that is a lesson he is intent on imparting to us. It is a lesson, not unlike that in Andor, that is quite relevant to us in our own galaxy.

Kempshall, and his in-universe counterpart, are very good at getting the vastness of the Star Wars setting across. I remember once realizing that the part of me that loved reading many Expanded Universe books, and how they interwove little references to each other, was the same part of me that loved reading different history books on broadly the same period and seeing how they interconnected, and Kempshall realizes that too. An alternate historian friend once talked of how online alternate history has an “accent” of sorts, an unspoken assumption that any historical figure or event that is unfamiliar to the reader can simply be googled by said reader, allowing the actual story to not be bogged down in too much detail (I phrased it, in that same conversation, as an assumption that the reader has Wikipedia open in the next tab over). That is how Kempshall treats a variety of Expanded Universe happenings, several of which I recognized, but also a lot that I didn’t. For those wanting a deep dive into the Star Wars universe, you will be pleased, and you will have more to read (he has reminded me that I really need to get around to reading Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy at some point).

But Kempshall is also very good at discussing the individual. He frames the Galactic Empire as a personalist dictatorship under the malevolent rule of Sheev Palpatine, and as such the psychology of the dictator played a massive role in determining how the Empire actually ruled. It is here where I think Kemphall makes his best interpretations of the Star Wars lore, and particularly one tension that has always existed within it: the conflict between the mystical aspect of the setting and the critique of imperialism within the setting. Tony Gilroy, the man who wrote Rogue One and Andor, wrote that he found Darth Vader to be very difficult to write for in the former, and ultimately decided not to include him in the latter as the mystical feeling of the man who used to be Anakin Skywalker clashed with the very on-the-ground, view-from-the-bottom nature of the latter show.

Kempshall resolves this tension well by being very cognizant of what the average denizen of the galaxy far, far away would actually know about the nature of the Jedi, the Sith, and the Force. His in-universe avatar talks of the journey he underwent in the research for this book, which ultimately convinced him that the Force was real. He considers Palpatine not only as a politician, but as a religious extremist following a creed that is shrouded in secrecy. He, like most of the Galaxy, had only a vague idea of who the Jedi actually were before they were destroyed. He takes the fact that both Jedi and Sith believed in their religions seriously and examines how their creeds affected their behavior. He has only the briefest idea of what the Bendu was, and how he affected the Battle of Atollon (this is in the Rebels show). He believes what transpired when Mace Windu confronted Palpatine to be lost in the mists of history. But he is quite correct in realizing that what Darth Sidious and Darth Vader wanted was not necessarily what the Republic and the Empire wanted.

This judicious evaluation of what the average citizen of the galaxy actually knows, or could potentially know, extends to the workings of the Empire at large. Like a real history book, there are insets in the text that are filled with images. Notably, he says that two pictures of the conference room scene in A New Hope, infamous for Darth Vader nearly choking Admiral Conan Antonio Motti to death, are only allegedly from the Death Star and that their actual provenance cannot be demonstrated with certainty as the battle station was nearly destroyed. Likewise, there are major gaps in what can be understood in regards to Imperial doctrine as well as the lives of Sheev Palpatine among others. This, I found, did a lot of work in persuading me for a moment that this was a real, actual history book.

Kempshall, in his own way, is deconstructing the “cool” image that the Galactic Empire has had for the past few decades in popular culture. This state is not a ruthlessly efficient engine of war that made the railspeeders run on time. This state was an incoherent morass of infighting, egos, and pettiness, all bound together by the megalomania of Sheev Palpatine. He was a man who was so arrogant to believe that he would live forever, and was paranoid to a fault. Even in death the man loved to punish for its own sake, most obviously in Operation Cinder as portrayed in the first Alphabet Squadron book and the new Battlefront II (a move that reminds me very much of Sanji Iwabuchi’s order to his IJA troops, upon seeing that Manila would fall to the Americans any day now, to destroy as many buildings as possible and to rape as many women as possible, to give the Americans and the Filipinos nothing worth liberating). This was a man who, for decades, used a younger image of himself to avoid looking feeble, calling to mind Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s discussion of how strongmen think (Palpatine's depiction here reminds me of John Ganz's conception of a “creep loser” form of fascism). Much as Andor showed the coldness and the misery of the Empire on a personal level, Kempshall shows the dysfunction and immaturity underlying the Empire on a political level. The Death Stars are cast as impractical Nazi-like Wunderwaffen, intended to win any civil war through fear, neglecting that you also need doctrine. One bit near the end is telling: Kempshall talks of how, during the New Republic, Imperial reenactment groups proliferated while most of the rest of the galaxy, especially nonhumans, found the very idea offensive. I cannot help but read this as a critique of the real-world 501st Legion, the legion of fans who dress up in stormtrooper costumes and parade around, who on the one hand probably don’t know that the word “stormtrooper” came from World War I German shock troops, but have also gotten love from canon by becoming the namesake of Darth Vader’s personal formation of stormtroopers.

(Incidentally—this book solidified my belief that the closest real-world analogue to Darth Vader is Yevgeny Prigozhin.)

The book is very good in how it handles the fact that the Empire committed myriad atrocities, up to and including genocide. He treats Alderaan as not merely a spectacular explosion on screen, but as the calculated destruction of an entire way of life. He is very clearly horrified that his book cannot capture the wholeness of the death that the Empire meted out, and you can tell, as a veteran of the war against those who wanted to bring it all back, that it haunts him. He makes an interesting case that Order 66 should be considered the first Imperial genocide, which feels odd until you remember that he is treating the Jedi Order as a religious group, a group that was targeted because it stood for hope.

Kempshall succeeds in doing something I would have thought difficult: building out the universe in the sequel era. I have conflicted feelings about the sequel trilogy; I think, ultimately, that they are entertaining films when viewed by themselves, but it is clear that there was no thematic spine uniting them in the way that there was, for all its flaws, in the prequel trilogy. More damningly, in my mind, they failed to really build out the universe in an interesting way. Kempshall finds the thematic core that the sequels should have had, and runs with it: that era is about the consequences of winning the fight against tyranny, and how to build a better society on its ruins. The age of the First Order, he contends, is the age of the fight for the value of democracy, and how it must be fought again and again, inside every heart.

I finished this book wanting more like it, and not just for Star Wars; there’s a part of me that wants this for StarCraft, and Transformers, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and Command & Conquer. While I was reading this book on the Indigenous People’s Day holiday, I went to the local Barnes & Noble and bought Kempshall’s newest Star Wars book, on the history of space combat (which, I promise you, dear reader, I shall review for this blog in due course). This is the sort of book a very specific type of nerd has dreamed of for years, and now we are so lucky to have it. It is the type of book that takes worldbuilding seriously as an aspect of storytelling, while never letting worldbuilding overtake storytelling. It is a reminder to us that rebellions are built on hope, a lesson we, in this galaxy, need more than ever.

Reference: Kempshall, Chris. The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire [Dorling Kindersley, 2024].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Deja Boo: Babes in Toyland (1986)

#JusticeforTrollog

Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.

But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.

Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.

I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.

So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.

Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.

Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.

The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.

Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.

This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.

Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.

To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon,  where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:

“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”

Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.

I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.

He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.

That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.

After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.

With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):

“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”

Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.

The end.

But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!

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

Deja Boo: Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Killer clowns are objectively scary, we'd all say. But somehow as a kid I couldn't realize what a joke this movie was.

Remember back in 2016 when creepy clowns started appearing all over the globe? It was easy for would-be scarers to do, because it seems like clowns are near universally frightening to many people. I was definitely scared of them as a kid, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space served no small part in this gigantic fear. 

I was fortunate enough to never be exposed to Pennywise from It, though I knew he was in the pop culture ether. No, my first exposure came from two things: an Emmet Kelley clown poster my own mother decided for some reason to hang above my bed, and a clown lamp that also appeared around the same time. They didn't last very long, and I definitely remember a dramatic scene when they had to be quickly removed. 

What scared me then

I didn't carry too much clown trauma going into the late '80s, but Killer Klowns from Outer Space became an HBO fixture, and therein lies my clown fright re-imagining. I do not remember watching it from start to finish ever, strangely enough, but I saw previews and clips while my parents were watching it on TV. I knew my parents enjoyed it, but they were in their late 20s and prone to enjoying dark comedies.

What I do remember, I remember in brief, impressionistic swatches, like some sort of modernist author from the 1920s. The absolutely horrific clowns (only later would I appreciate the extraordinary practical effects it took to bring them to life) are running amok in an unnamed city after their circus bigtop space ship crash lands on Earth. I remember the bright pink, cotton candy cocoons that enswathed their victims, and found myself feeling claustrophobic at the prospect.

Normal, everyday clowns are creepy enough, but these guys are grotesque, distorted, malevolent beings that kill and maim. No thank you.

There is also a slightly unhinged, rock and roll theme song titled the same as the film that is also somehow very disconcerting. It's slightly menacing, but also very, very catching.

This is all I really remember, honestly, about the movie, besides harboring a strangely antagonistic feeling towards it for 35 years. I haven't watched it since, but remember it being unsettling. As an adult, when I clicked past it while searching for movies on streaming platforms, I'd chuckle and say, "Oh, I'm not watching that ever again." And so it remained in the outskirts of my mind for a lifetime.

What scares me now

Reader, there is nothing scary about this movie. Yes, the clowns are gruesome, but if anything, I was in awe of the production value and how well-done they were. 

You may notice that I left out a plot subsection in this review, but I did this purposefully because there's not really one to speak of. The clown aliens crash land on earth, then start killing people. End of plot. It was so bad that I actually found myself watching it in 5-10 minute increments because it was just so boring. This is a win, I suppose, for my adult self and my lack of fear. It's nice to know that some things are just unable to be reconciled when you're young.

I honestly can't believe I didn't revisit this film for a lifetime because of a few poorly sketched clown memories. I approached it with an open heart, though. I found myself thinking about the premise itself — alien clown beings that have traveled the universe and are violent. Perhaps it's like the classic chestnut of a million monkeys with a million typewriters somehow managing to type out Hamlet. Maybe, in a million galaxies, a sentient, traveling species emerged as circus clowns, with popcorn guns and a penchant for balloon animals. Sure.

But after I mused poetically at this for a few moments, I began to just be annoyed. Even at 88 minutes, it dragged and dragged. The movie is mainly visual bits that relate to circus activities: at one point, a killer clown is entertaining passersby on the street with a shadow puppet show. As the grand finale, he makes a scary monster that leaps from the shadow and devours the watchers. To kill a killer clown, you need only take aim at his big red honking nose. 

I could go on and on, but it would only bore us both. Of all the movies I plan on watching for this Deja Boo series, I am most embarrassed by this one. There's no accounting for taste, I guess, and also no accounting for fear as a young, impressionable child. Clowns have firmly occupied a space in society as things of terror, and when you couple that with alien, murdering clowns, it's perfect fodder for an anxious child to latch on to. And latch I did!

Nuance is missing from a youthful perspective, as kids can't separate comedy from horror, and that's exactly what this movie is about: the hilarious results of killer alien clowns wreaking havoc on a small community. It worked with Halloween and Friday the 13th, and it worked (to some small, niche extent) with Killer Klowns from Outer Space. 

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Highlights:

• Not every movie has its own rock and roll theme song
• The commitment to the circus bits is admirable
• Great practical effects
• Not scary one bit

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Book Review: The Starving Saints, by Caitlin Starling

Do not let the honey touch your lips

cover artist: Owen Corrigan

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling is one of a raft of medieval fantasies from the last few years (possibly led by 2012’s Between Two Fires by Chris Buehlman, reissued in 2026). They are an interesting subgenre of stories that take fantasy seriously but also take medieval Europe seriously – putting the work in to get at both the sensibility of a holistic world but also at the cultures, political currents and day to day lives of people from this long period of time. 

Specifically I often find European stories featuring periods where religious life is central to living underbaked and, honestly, completely misrepresent the nature of a religious life as I understand it, especially one in which the entire world is seen as intrinsically connected. A holistic worldview is so far from the modern world (even for people who still centre magical thinking which is absolutely not the same thing at all despite claims otherwise) that writing it feels very challenging and it’s not surprise that so many writers just glide over it with a much more modern atomistic capitalist approach to culture and society.

 

Starling’s The Starving Saints feels like it gets it – that she is able to build a world where life revolves around ritual and repetition and, crucially, place. Not just the place itself – in this case a small castle housing a fleeing king and his entourage among the normal citizens but the place of people within that society, ordained by religious faith to know who they are, what is wanted of them and who stands above and below them on the ladder. All of this is by way of saying that Starling manages to conjure a sense of time and place that feels alien and familiar all at once, a world which we would be utterly lost in but also one we can recognise as being entirely coherent for its inhabitants without an ounce of absurdity or knowing wink at the possible silliness of their lives.

 

Into this landscape she tells a genre defying tale of devotion, exploration, survival and grief. This is very much a lockdown novel, not just because everyone in the book is trapped in a castle and slowly losing their minds over the pressure of it but because it’s about who we find ourselves to be when pressed like this. 

 

I came out of lockdown (I didn’t contract Long Covid until the middle of 2024) with two convictions that have only deepened over time. The first is that we have no sense of the collective trauma we experienced, not simply because of lockdown but because of Covid itself. I see it slowly blossoming in my now adult children and have not the mirror to understand how it reflects in me. All I can say is that I do not think we’ve still understood the extent of our reaction to it and our need for a catharsis as a society. The Starving Saints captures that trauma in its months-long application to people who just prior to this were living normal lives that made sense, who could plan for the future and know what tomorrow would bring. 

 

The second is this: we don’t know how to talk about it, not individually although that’s true enough, but socially. There is no great Covid literature, not directly and not that’s broken containment to become the thing we’ve all stood around discussing. I am not surprised – the more I read about the 1918 flu and its complete absence from literature and collective thought in the years following, the more I realise that we too will perform the same dance of forgetting as quickly and as determinedly as possible. The Starving Saints plays with memory, with how we remember and how easy it is for us to blank suffering in the name of recovery, in the name of trying to get back to normal. It plays with the idea that we will willingly exchange one kind of suffering for another, our own suffering for someone else’s, and we will celebrate our metamorphosis given the chance. It is deeply disturbing to see the metaphor here so clearly played out in the real world. It is also deeply uncomfortable to see people portrayed as knowing what they do, how they make this trade of one pain for another for the sake of the idea of relief (and not relief itself). Starling’s characters find one pain so unbearable they are willing to trade for another form of suffering knowing it won’t set them free. If that sounds horrific, it is. 

 

Starling takes it further by making all of this deeply carnal, the world inside her castle is fleshy and physical, full of meat and blood and wine and honey and bone and stink and fluid. There is no escape from these bodies, from their needs and their deterioration when those needs aren’t met. 

 

In that sense The Starving Saints is wholly about grief – about the grief of things coming to birth and being lost in the process, about worlds we knew dying even as we’re trapped unable to affect any kind of outcome. This grief is dipped in honey throughout her novel, coming to us pretending to be something other, something calming, a balm for our confused and shocked souls. Instead the moment the honey touches our lips we succumb and in that succumbing we lose ourselves because no amount of external comfort can soothe our aching souls. 

 

There is no finding oneself again. There is no freedom. Saints posits that there’s only belonging to one force or another. And it is brilliant for it. Our heroes are surviving. Maybe. And in that survival there is collaboration and betrayal, a little success and a lot of failure. 

 

I felt like I was reading something designed to poison the romantic soul, something Shelley or Inchbold would have been disgusted by and I was glad to be part of it. 

 

This is a story in which magic, the act of knowing, cannibalism/starvation, loss, anger, hope, faith and grief are central. It’s a story in which the act of survival leaves us weakened and traumatised because to survive means there has been a catastrophe for us to emerge from – broken and battered. This is not heroism masquerading as overcoming the odds. This is survival by the skin of our teeth, survival when so many others don’t make it. 

 

Lastly it’s a story that also considers faith, not in the protestant evangelical sense that pervades so much of western culture but in the sense of its practice, of the road lives take when they hold onto faith and how that is both a comfort and a struggle. It wrestles with the possibility of faith being nothing more (and nothing less) than our attempt to make sense of a world, not alone, but as a community of people. How our shared ideas offer us meaning and how that meaning naturally breaks down when its foundations are eroded by catastrophic uncertainty.

 

Knowing tomorrow will bring pain is more manageable than not knowing if tomorrow will be bring salvation or suffering. It is the uncertainty that kills us.

 

This won’t be to everyone’s tastes – it is gruesome and horrific as much as it has notes of beauty and hope, but this reader loved it.

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The Math

Highlights:

• A familiar but fantastical world that understands itself and its place
• A compelling tale of the trauma of lockdown on society

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

A powerful novel about faith and hope and suffering that considers loss amid the maelstrom of superficial comfort that we'll gladly take even if it transforms our suffering into something equally traumatic.

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA 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.

Film Review: Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising

Superheroism is good and all, but who saves the saviors?

When we last visited the Madoka Magica universe in the Rebellion movie, our favorite relentless antivillain Homura rewrote the rules of the universe that her dear friend and savior Madoka had already rewritten. Instead of allowing a system where Madoka is a divine force awaiting all magical girls when they reach the end of their hope reserves, Homura brought Madoka down to Earth, erased her memory, and fulfilled her initial wish that Madoka should never become a magical girl. For the alien Incubators, this state of affairs is uncharted territory. Now it’s Homura who runs the show, and the Incubators don’t have a clue what to do. Where could the story go from there? We were all left wondering, an unbelievable thirteen years ago (gosh, I feel old). Well, Madoka Magica is finally back. The new movie, Walpurgisnacht Rising, once again rewrites all the rules, revealing surprising bits of the setting’s lore and highlighting the questions that have been at the core of this story since the beginning.

The axis around which this whole cosmic epic revolves is the not-entirely-healthy friendship between Homura and Madoka. As you’ll recall, all the way back in the original TV series, Homura made the wish to be the one who would protect Madoka, while Madoka made the wish to save all magical girls from succumbing to hopelessness. This created an unstable dynamic that exposes some of the problems with the very concept of heroism. In order to change a basic law of the universe, Madoka had to renounce her mortal life and become a goddess. But Homura, as Madoka’s magically designated protector, will always have some measure of power over Madoka. Some inevitable questions emerge: Is it fair that Madoka had to sacrifice her humanity? Is protection a form of domination? Is Madoka OK with saving all magical girls except herself? Did Homura have the right to drag Madoka back to life if it meant annulling Madoka’s choice?

Walpurgisnacht Rising presents us with an unexpected extra complication: It’s little use for Homura to crown herself ruler of the universe when there are forces outside of the universe that don’t answer to her. Those forces irrupt into the story since early in the movie, seeking to punish Homura for her Faustian excesses of ambition. Turns out the dead magical girls that Madoka selflessly offered to save had their own opinions on whether they wanted to be saved, which means that the bulk of the movie is spent discovering the multiple competing agendas that threaten to break apart Homura’s utopia. If you thought the ending of Rebellion was a bit too hard to follow, buckle up, because Walpurgisnacht Rising comes with no training wheels. You’re expected to remember how the story was left off thirteen years ago, and to pick up the continuation immediately. So I can’t recommend watching this movie as your first taste of Madoka Magica; you’d end up hopelessly confused. Go back for a couple days. It’s just three prior movies (or a TV season plus a movie, if you prefer). You’ve had all these years to catch up. This movie has massive loads of plot to tell and no time to ease the viewer in.

Among the reforms that Homura has made to the universe, we learn of a new way of fighting evil spirits. She no longer lets the Incubators recruit new magical girls; instead, she grants temporary powers to a random girl, valid for one fight, and afterward erases her memory of it. That way there’s always some heroine available to defend humanity, but without the cost of losing a girl’s soul. The Incubators are understandably not happy with this arrangement, because now they can’t collect the emotional energy they came to Earth for. This new way of doing things goes on nicely until three unknown magical girls show up out of nowhere and start blocking Homura’s attempts to keep distributing powers. Each of these new girls comes with her own plan for how to re-re-reform the magical girl system. From this point on, it gets somewhat dizzying to keep track of who is a villain according to whom, but let me try to summarize.

First, as you may have guessed from the movie’s title, we’re shown the backstory of the super-mega-witch on steroids that Madoka defeated in the TV series: the dreaded Walpurgisnacht. We learn what kind of magical girl she used to be, why she turned into a witch, how she got so inconceivably strong, and what she has to do with the present plot. Since Madoka was the only magical girl with enough power to defeat Walpurgisnacht on her own, there’s someone who reasons that forcing Madoka to become a witch would release immense amounts of energy, helping the Incubators’ mission to delay entropy and keep the universe running. This subplot is rather brief, but it poses interesting questions about what it means to be a self-sacrificing hero. Lastly, we get to the central conundrum of the entire series: Will Homura allow Madoka to fulfill her cosmic role? One of the many revelations of this movie is that, in the same way that neither Homura’s method with temporary powers nor Madoka’s Law of the Cycle is the original way things were, the same is true of witches. Long ago, it used to be the case that magical girls experienced an arguably worse fate than becoming witches. Someone made an altruistic wish to fix that, and the result was that witches came into existence. Such a drastic retcon demands an explanation for how Incubators collected energy under the former rules, but this isn’t too significant for the dramatic effect of the story.

What matters about this retcon is that it goes back to the same theme we’ve seen before with Madoka and Homura, i.e. the idea that coming up with a perfect solution to help others necessarily takes away something from you. The karmic balance in the Madoka Magica series operates by a ruthless transactional logic. To save others, you have to lose yourself. To save you, someone else has to get lost. This unbreakable tradeoff underlies the fundamental tragedy of being a magical girl. It’s a clever bit of dramatic irony that an Incubator isn’t a monkey’s paw; it doesn’t twist your wishes to screw you over a technicality. No, what happens is even more heartbreaking: the Incubator gives you your wish exactly the way you wanted it, and even then it doesn’t suffice to make you happy. In the earlier movies, Madoka’s big gamble to fix everything, followed by Homura’s big gamble to fix everything, only redistributed the weights of the problem instead of getting rid of it. In a universe where emotions follow the math of thermodynamics, some bit of happiness must by necessity be lost in every transaction.

I’m not sure I came out of the theater with a full idea of what exactly happens at the end of Walpurgisnacht Rising. The more we progress along the story, the more surreal the battle becomes, and at least to me it wasn’t clear who managed to save whom. But I don’t mind being confused when the artistry on screen is so absolutely breathtaking. The animation in Madoka Magica has always distinguished itself by a unique aesthetic that combines digital composition with physical collage to produce an incomparable atmosphere of weirdness. This new movie pushes its own style to even higher standards of visual experimentation. Don’t worry too much if you get lost in the plot. Relax in your seat and enjoy the marvelous look of this masterpiece of animation.

(And if you somehow figure out what on Earth that ending was about, please tell me. I still want to know.)

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Book Review: The Only Way Out Is Up by Django Wexler

Robot battles, class politics, and numbers going up

 

Django Wexler has had an incredibly consistent career across a wide range of subgenres, ranging from the flintlock military fantasy of The Shadow Campaigns to the excellent YA fantasy of The Wells of Sorcery to the genuinely funny Dark Lord Davi duology and more. Dark Lord Davi was openly an affectionate pastiche of isekai (i.e. a specific Japanese iteration of portal fantasy) anime. This stuff has a huge and increasing fanbase among the anglosphere, well known within anime fandom, though I’m not quite sure how familiar traditional written SFF fandom and much of its attached critical apparatus is with the same.

Wexler takes this mining of popular spaces that are potentially unfamiliar to traditional SFF fandom up a notch with The Only Way Out Is Up. The book is a progression (science) fantasy, where our protagonist, Taj, and his probably sentient robot, Star, fight their way literally up from the bottom of a garbage heap to power and influence. As I will discuss a bit more below, this is another excellent effort from Wexler, engaging and fast-paced without being shallow. But before I turn to the book itself, forgive a digression into definitions here. Having just said I think this is a subgenre many won’t be familiar with, and being greeted with slight bafflement by a number of social media acquaintances when I’ve said “progression fantasy”, I hope this is both useful and potentially interesting.

Progression fantasy is arguably more a collection of subgenres than a single clearly defined thing. Its influences include Xianxia (i.e. Chinese cultivation fiction), manga, anime, light novels, JRPG video games and TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons (as an example of how this all comes together, one of the key early influences is Record of Lodoss War, a Japanese series that started as a narrated serialisation of the author’s TTRPG campaign, was converted into a light novel series, and has spawned video game and anime spinoffs). These are in fact quite disparate urtexts, which contain different cultural and literary assumptions. They are united basically by only one single theme: Number Goes Up (i.e. the protagonist grows in power over time). 

Some of these influences are literally games, and at the crunchy end of the field (LitRPG), books have full-on stat screens and dice rolls as part of the action: think Dungeon Crawler Carl or the "trapped in a video game" subgenre of Japanese media, of which Sword Art Online is probably the most famous, though not quite the earliest. But not everything broadly in the progression fantasy realm is quite so literal in its gamification: I'd argue much of Brandon Sanderson's work teeters on the edge of progression fantasy with its focus on exploiting detailed magic systems. And in between those poles is a rich stew of iterations, from Sarah Lin's enjoyable, idiosyncratic, "architecture of a literal house inside your soul dictates power growth" Weirkey Chronicles to Tobias Begley's quantum magic school Journals of Evander Taylor to Will Wight's mega-selling Cradle series (which is clearly heavily Xianxia influenced). There are also a range of themes: outright individual power fantasy is probably the most common, but protagonists using their growing power to support the building of communities with their friends is also a recurring theme, and series with actively revolutionary politics directed at capitalist oppressors are also quite frequent.

The progression fantasy field in English is dominated by self-published authors and web serials published on sites like Royal Road (Indeed, Wexler is currently posting *another* progression fantasy, The Thirteenth God, on Royal Road). The quality is wildly variable: the best is very good fun and occasionally significantly more than that, but a large amount is individualistic power fantasies in leaden prose. In addition, one side effect of this serial fiction publishing context is that often this is the author’s first time writing for an audience. Even for more experienced writers in this space quite often the opening arc takes an absolute age to find its feet in its world, with its narrative, and with its characters. When these are turned into formal volumes for sale, either via self-publishing or when picked up for traditional publication, the first book is very often notably weaker that what follows (this is true even of stuff I overall enjoy, like John Bierce's Mage Errant and the aforementioned Dungeon Crawler Carl). 

This traditional publication pickup is a relatively new thing: SFF publishers failed to pay much attention to this collection of subgenres even though they had absolutely been doing the numbers online for years (For example, Unsouled, the first book in Wight's Cradle series, had 65,576 ratings on Goodreads at time of writing). Alongside republishing existing works, publishers now seem to be actively courting this zeitgeist and putting out original work in the progression fantasy space (the dynamic reminds me of a more male-coded attempt at repeating the flood of cozy fantasy we saw after the success of Legends and Lattes). The Only Way Out Is Up is an early and very good example of major publisher resources being put into such work. Wexler has no problems with a meandering or muddled start: the book begins with immediately engaging action and continues impressively from there. 

As noted above, Taj is a young man (twenty years old) who lives at the bottom of a city built in tiers around a giant hole several hundred metres deep and several kilometres across. There are three main tiers, each containing a city of increasing economic and social status as you go up. Periodically, various construction and electronic junk from the mysterious Above (i.e. the outside world) will drop through the aperture at the top of the hole (dubbed, rather evocatively, "the Asshole"). This forms a giant pile of e-waste—the Heap—at the bottom of the hole, below even the lowest city tier. Taj and his adoptive family make a precarious life around this huge mass of the detritus of those wealthier and more powerful than them.

The progression element here, at least for the first book, focuses on Taj upgrading his robot (called “runics” in-world) to fight in increasingly high stakes battles, both for money and to advantageously position himself and his friends politically. This means that a lot of the action set pieces are these robot battles, which are hugely entertaining, like a souped up science fantasy version of the old BBC programme, Robot Wars. The runics are built from metal and powered and controlled by sigils, seemingly magic runes charged by a person’s life force to make inanimate objects either do something (verb sigils) or change the way it is done (noun and modifier sigils). This is largely understood in-world as a standard programming language with standard operators, though Star, Taj’s runic, seems to be largely self-aware in a way other runics are not, and there are hints that it is possible to create nonstandard sigils. This is not a large feature of this book, but the title of the series (The Sigilist) suggests it may well become so, and may well become Taj’s route to the ever-expanding power and agency that is at the core of progression fantasy’s plot drive. 

Outside the world of sigils and robot battles, the plot focuses on Taj’s attempts to keep his family safe, housed, and fed (no small task in the precarious world of the Heap) and on the political manoeuvering of the deuteragonist we meet early in the novel (Ky, a young woman from the fancy upper tier city). The book is first and foremost hugely entertaining; a pacy romp through a slightly implausible, slightly gamified world. But there is also a bit more going on than pure confection. The character work is operating within generally expected archetypes, but the dialogue and integration with setting is skillful and naturalistic, quickly building rapport between the reader and Taj. Star is a very effective snarky robot sidekick, and Ky, our deuteragonist, has her own motivations and character and is far more than a distressed damsel for Taj to moon over. The gender and class politics of the setting are pretty clearly critiqued; the fact that the system sets up a no-win situation where those at those top pit everyone below them against each laid bare. This is very much a book one, so none of these issues are completely resolved here, but one plot arc is resolved and the board has very effectively been set for the rest to be explored as the series continues. 

Writing this review, one of the things that I struggled with most is how to get across just what it is this book does well beyond "good fun" (which it absolutely is). I'm a sucker for what Wexler serves up, and I think, like his previous work, The Only Way Out Is Up is definitely a cut above merely competent and enjoyable commercial SFF. He's a very good writer. But Wexler is not, to pick another contemporary author I think writes works similarly a cut above, the flashy prose stylist Freya Marske can be. He doesn't play the games with form and narrative the similarly consistent and excellent Jenn Lyons does. Where I think Wexler excels is in between this sentence level and volume-level creativity: he's as good as anyone currently working at conjuring atmosphere and character and plot drive across a paragraph or a scene. 

This mid-level structural mastery makes for a quick, breezy read that still vividly evokes setting and character. This is, I think, very hard to do, but while you're in the middle of it, whipping through a perfectly paced fight scene, it's easy not to notice how much skill is deployed. This is me noticing, and I hope readers of this review and Wexler's work will pay attention and appreciate it. Wexler is a hugely able purveyor of this sort of high-quality commercial SFF, and The Only Way Out is Up is another excellent example. It's also very clearly knowledgeable and respectful of the slightly out of the spotlight traditions it's drawing on, pulling us into the thrill of watching the weak and downtrodden get stronger and stick it to the rich and powerful, without ever veering into the bland, power fantasies of the less impressive examples of those traditions. Bring on book two.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Faced-paced, engaging action
• Appealing, naturalistic character work
• Excellent gateway book for the sometimes impenetrable world of progression fantasy

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference:  Django Wexler, The Only Way Out Is Up [Orbit, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social