tethered to a burning sphere

We finally got around to watching the latest John Wick installment, Ballerina (2025)!

Given how great Wick chapters 2 through 4 were we naturally had high hopes, but what ended up being the real delight of this film is how it treats its female lead, and especially how it dresses its female lead. I can honestly say that this is the only action movie I have ever seen where a female lead gets to dress badass in exactly the same way that a male lead gets to dress badass, as opposed to either a) femme fatale shit or b) Sexy Paramilitary. You know how people used to be like, “I wish we could have female James Bond, but not the way the movies would inevitably do this, just, everything is literally exactly the same, but James Bond is played by a woman”? James Bond may never have the balls, but apparently John Wick of all things does, because Eve Macarro spends 90% of this film dressed exactly like Keanu Reeves, murdering like Keanu Reeves, and, for the most part, being treated by the narrative like Keanu Reeves, which is not at all what I was expecting. I had been sure that we’d get something in the vein of Rina Sawayama in Wick 4—who was phenomenal, and I can’t imagine a cooler first-ever-film-role for someone to have, but who was definitely still doing those spectacular fight sequences in sexy elven archer armor while Keanu Reeves was in his usual black suit.

I have just never seen a female lead in an action movie about whom it is possible to have the “I want to be that” reaction before! Absolutely female power fantasy material. And seeing as, in the year of our lord 2k26, at the age of thirty-something, I can still count the number of actual female power fantasies I have encountered in the media ON ONE HAND (three. This film perhaps makes three, and one of those doesn’t even really count, because Mass Effect was literally written about a male character and then they decided to add a female voiceover option at the last minute), that earns this movie so many points from me, even before you get to the part where it has a flamethrower fight. (And the flamethrower fight was awesome, once again I can’t wait to look up the BTS.)

——In light of all of which it is absolutely killing me that the Blu-Ray cover and most of the theatrical posters for this film use the one (1) total scene where Eve wears a dress, marketing really went “Wait, we can’t just tell people we let a woman Be John Wick, quick, make it more male gaze—”

Some spoilery comments

The fact that Wick appears in this film and ends up saving Eve a couple times at the end (rather than the film giving her truly equal status as The God Mode Player in a First-Person Shooter) perhaps slightly undermines this, and it’s undeniably a bit lol that they make her, technically, an Elite Bodyguard as opposed to an Elite Assassin (and at least marginally concerned with the welfare of a little kid, yes yes). But also a) we all know Keanu sells tickets, in-universe Wick IS the god of all assassins, and anyway the moment he had his one fight sequence I was saying to Gregory ugh he's just so fun to watch, keanu is so GOOD at this, which makes it difficult to complain; b) I did actually like the whole Kikimora thing + Eve not being a total psychopath, she reminds me of Jyn Erso rather; c) NOT THAT YOU COULD TELL, ANYWAY, given the amount of carnage she causes from about the 30% mark, lmfao; and d) at no point in this movie is it remotely believable that Eve’s motivation is anything other than Revenger Murder Revenge. The bad guy may think she’s after Elle, but both Gregory and I were like—uhhh, my guy, are you sure she even remembers that Elle exists?? And indeed there is every sign that she doesn’t, right up until she literally trips over her at the end, lol.

All this just to say that on the whole these decisions don’t actually detract from Eve being treated basically like the male lead of this same series; on a meta level I’m sure these probably were rooted in attempts to gesture towards [the caring feminine nature] or whatever the fuck, but in actual practice they are uhhh, mostly not there at all, and also this stuff does work well within the story, obviously Eve having some humanity in addition to being a murder machine is not actually a bad thing. And also the ending implicitly puts her on equal footing with Wick by also making her hunted by the Continental! Love that!

The bit of “fight like a girl” dialogue and the end credits song were the only two moments that felt really ham-fisted about Female Power™, but these are such minor points in the grand scheme that I’m whatever (and obviously fact that weight devisions exist in judo + men are usually physically heavier is true, it’s just that this really does feel like the cheesiest most Girl Power way they could have possibly phrased this problem).

Anyway! Was this as great as Wick 3 and 4, perhaps not, but it was good and absolutely stylistically on-theme and I enjoyed it a great deal. This is the right direction!! More of this please!! I would absolutely watch three more films of Eve Macarro murdering her way through assorted mooks. (Oh, and of course Le Castle Vania’s soundtracks were terrific as always, no notes, the bass drop in that club scene was [chef’s kiss].)

Obligatory Russian language note: every single person in this film puts the stress on the wrong syllable of the word “kikimora” and it is physically painful to me, it is keeKEEmora (кики́мора) (and with o -> a vowel reduction in the last syllable so it sounds more like “kikimara,” but never mind), not kikiMORa, please, I am begging. You gotta pronounce it as if it is a Japanese surname! (And also Wick should still be the Babai, not the Baba Yaga, I will die on this hill.)

In case anyone else might find it useful, I made a dw feed for ao3 status notifications a while back: otwstatus_feed

(I wrote most of this post in a feverish 4-hour chunk of lost time on Thursday night and then couldn’t decide whether to actually post it, but, you know what, here it is, I’ve been so preoccupied with this whole subject all week it has to go somewhere. Having a normal one, obviously.)

As mentioned in a previous post I finally got around to starting Christopher Isherwood’s 1939–1960 diaries over the weekend, which promptly reminded me of a) how much I love Isherwood’s writing and b) how totally fascinating I found his friendship with Auden, and indeed Auden as a person in general. The latter led down a rabbit hole that has now resulted in reading all or part of each of the following (two of these I’ll need to come back to in order to read the non-Auden parts later, another I’m about 80% of the way through, but first I had to pause to write this post for reasons that will shortly be made clear):

• ( Lions and Shadows, Isherwood )
• ( Parts of Isherwood’s American Diaries + The Lost Years )
• ( Auden in Love, Dorothy Farnan )
• ( Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, Harold Norse )
• ( “The Poet and the Rake,” Robert Craft )

——And it was at this point that I staggered to a halt this afternoon on account of finally connecting the dots about what now feels like a blindingly obvious epiphany, which is that Auden was so clearly autistic, oh my god. This is in fact so apparent from the record that I’m genuinely a little surprised that it’s not even vaguely alluded to in any analyses of his life and work, though of course I understand why—armchair diagnosis of historical literary figures is just not done! blah blah blah—but, MAN. You can tell, and having this realization immediately makes sense of so much of his life, suddenly everything I’ve spent the last several days reading actually forms a coherent picture. Relevant data points:

( This is the SHORT version. )

Honestly can’t believe it took this long to click for me, though probably it’s from reading Isherwood first; Isherwood just writes about Auden with so much love and was subject to so much of Auden’s affection and enthusiasm, how Auden came off to other people blurs between the lines.

Also, the thing that gets me in the wake of this realization is—I’d been thinking, as I read Isherwood’s diary entries from the ’40s to the ’70s, how you can really feel the depth of their friendship from the way Isherwood seems to have always easily shrugged off actions or behavior from Auden that he found frustrating or ridiculous. He is (as he himself observed in the ’30s) sometimes annoyed, but he’s only annoyed, easily able to move past whatever it was with no impact on their relationship. All of which struck me as feeling very familiar: said I to Gregory, it’s so clearly that thing one has with one’s oldest and dearest friends, you know, the one where you already know all of their bugbears and find it easy enough to take them in stride. We tolerate all sorts of foibles and hangups in our best friends.

Which is true! But in retrospect the reason this felt so familiar is that it reminds me specifically of the kindness and tolerance that my own closest friends show for my (severe, clinical) OCD. And having gained this context for Auden, like—yeah, actually, that’s exactly what was going on there. Isherwood might not have thought about it that way, but he was Auden’s closest friend for 40 years; the reason those diary entries read that way is, in fact, because he knew what Auden was like and also loved him and cared for him, and so accommodated those aspects of him. Like you do, for your friends with weird brains.

Got sucked into reading Isherwood’s autobiographical stuff again this weekend (longer letter later), which also led to finally reading the sonnet series Auden wrote for Journey to a War, of which these two especially struck me:

Here war is harm­less like a mon­u­ment …

Here war is harm­less like a mon­u­ment:
A tele­phone is talk­ing to a man;
Flags on a map de­clare that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For liv­ing men in ter­ror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
Who can be lost and are, who miss their wives
And, un­like an idea, can die too soon.

Yet ideas can be true, al­though men die:
For we have seen a myr­iad faces
Ec­static from one lie,

And maps can re­ally point to places
Where life is evil now.
Nanking. Dachau.

Our global story is not yet com­pleted …

Our global story is not yet com­pleted,
Crime, dar­ing, com­merce, chat­ter will go on,
But, as nar­ra­tors find their mem­ory gone,
Home­less, dis­terred, these know them­selves de­feated.

Some could not like nor change the young and mourn for
Some wounded myth that once made chil­dren good,
Some lost a world they never un­der­stood,
Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.

Loss is their shadow-wife, Anx­i­ety
Re­ceives them like a grand ho­tel, but where
They may re­gret they must: their doom to bear

Love for some far for­bid­den coun­try, see
A na­tive dis­ap­prove them with a stare
And Free­dom’s back in ev­ery door and tree.

1) Insane to see Auden writing the first one in 1938, before WWII had even happened; and 2) boy does the second one ever resonate incidentally with [the collapse of one’s democracy], whoof.

As per usual my experience of reading Auden is finding his work 50/50 totally impenetrable or total knockout; if I manage to make any sense of the poem at all it’s probably really fucking good! But it definitely is if.

Owing to a combination of factors—reading a ton of fan fiction, loads of rereading (which I don’t track), lots of reading in Russian, lots of Fallen London—my number of new-to-me books for the year was lower than usual, but here they are:

( Books read in 2025 )

Also some stuff I read a solid chunk of but did not finish (I don’t formally track these but was reminded since I went to go through my Kindle to check if there was stuff I forgot to add to Goodreads):

( Books partially read in 2025 )

Still really want to finish writing up at least a few thoughts about the Steerswoman books, which were 10/10 INCREDIBLE and included what might be one of my favorite sci-fi plot developments I’ve ever come across in anything, and also about the last book in Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought series, which left me really wanting to write a fix-it fic (so maybe I should do that instead, except I’m fairly certain that it would have an audience of exactly 0, lol). Also should jot down some thoughts about Dead Hand Rule, which was so much fun! Maybe this month sometime if I can muster the spoons (optimism, always optimism).

Happy New Year to everyone <3

If you gave me your address your postcard is now in the post!

This week Gregory and I finally watched Season 2 of Andor, and I had this whole post lined up in my head after episode 8 about how it’s Not Good but I can be chill about it, since after all Season 1 was so much better than my wildest dreams that it doesn’t even matter if this one bombs, though I did still want to talk about what the issues were and how the season should have been handled to provide an effective connecting narrative between S1 and Rogue One...

...And then tonight we watched the last four episodes (the last three apparently written by Tom Bissell, a self-proclaimed Star Wars geek (...)) and those episodes were so absolutely, full-on unwatchably bad that actually I’m not chill about this, I’m viscerally offended by this crime against Rogue One in general and Cassian Andor in particular, holy fucking shit, that was TERRIBLE. Like, “had to stop actually watching and open another window to get through the last 30 minutes,” “wish I could drink alcohol” levels of terrible, just. WOW.

So actually I am not going to write that post today, I am going to go rinse out my brain and take a break from thinking about Star Wars! And possibly tomorrow I will write my essay about what S2 might have looked like from writers who actually understood the themes of......anything.....or even just basic narrative cohesion.....honestly, I’m not sure even filming during the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes with no involvement from Gilroy for 6+ months is sufficient to explain the results here, holy incompetence by committee Batman.

Part 3 of notes on recent reads:

Hot Lights, Cold Steel, Michael J. Collins
Memoir of a surgical resident at the Mayo Clinic. This was well-written and variously entertaining or existential but so full of casual old-school sexism, ugh. Not exactly surprising, since judging by the pop culture references and the fact that this guy had coworkers who’d been in Vietnam the memoir’s timeframe must be the ’70s, but still kind of exhausting. I was also kind of appalled by an anecdote of doing bone screws without anesthesia that came out to a moral of “we do what we can and it sucks that sometimes people get severe medical trauma” because actually, like, I do think that one was entirely the fault of the surgeon who went “it’s fine he’s already in pain” and (presumably this is the real reason, even if unstated) “general anesthesia for a quick procedure is too expensive”… Anyway, my core takeaway between reading this book and scrolling through a bunch of r/Residency a while back is that residents everywhere desperately need to unionize, because judging from the available evidence there is simply no valid reason to be literally working new doctors to death. (At least the hours this guy was working appear to be illegal now per ACGME, but then apparently those limitations are basically the opposite of enforced…)

The Owl Service, Alan Garner
Asked the library to get this a while back and remembered nothing whatsoever about it by the time they did, so was very disconcerted to discover that the titular owl service is not an organization of owls but a set of plates with owls on them, lol. Anyway: this was extremely Welsh and very sharply class-conflict-aware and really, really interesting; Garner has an extremely bare narrative style that leaves it to the reader to pull the meaning out of what’s happening or being said 100% of the time and never does any direct exposition, which is something I’ve never encountered before and found fascinating to read. (Though this did make a fairly pivotal paragraph in the ending borderline incomprehensible to me; I reread it about three times and then went and read a paper and some blog posts about the ending, which confirmed that I’d parsed the overall gist of the finale correctly but didn’t address those particular lines. I’m assuming the idea here is that ( spoilers )

Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami
The Rat series #3. The love interest from the previous book does finally get a name in this one, god, small mercies. That being said, for a book literally titled Dance Dance Dance Murakami’s protagonist spends a truly excessive amount of time aimlessly spinning his wheels; honestly kind of a slog, though it had its moments with the two main characters besides the narrator (the moody twelve-year-old girl with the neglectful celebrity parents and ( spoilers )

Overall my verdict on this one was that it’s kind of a mess, the resolution with the romance at the end felt really hackneyed + not compelling at all after the build-up with the Sheep Man.

The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed
Finally posted the rest of my language notes. I liked the ending culminating in ( spoilerish )

Yu-Gi-Oh, Kazuki Takahashi (everything up until Millennium World, which I haven’t finished yet)
Reread for the first time since grade school because that’s just the kind of year I’m having, this series remains absolutely deranged and a delight, enjoyed it a lot. Reading it as an adult one really does get the feeling that Atem came out of his 3000 years of imprisonment inside the Millennium Puzzle absolutely feral and proceeded to totally overdo it with punishing Yugi’s various bullies with shadow games, oml. ( cut for length )

Part 2 (of 3, now, felt like it made sense to break off this batch of DWJs into their own thing) of notes on recent books:

Cart and Cwidder, Diana Wynne Jones
Liked Moril’s reaction to his own actions at the end of this, and the way he realizes/absorbs pieces of what was going on with Clennen and Lenina (both separately and together) that he’d never noticed prior to ( spoilers )

Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones
DWJ writes sailing so clearly and coherently that I am now of course dying to know if she did sail! Her descriptions of how the tiller and boom/sail affect the motion and stability of the boat + how the boat responds to things like currents, shallows, turns, big waves feel very real; there’s a big section of the book where the protagonist kids run away aboard a small racing sailboat and eventually get caught in a storm, and the environment in that part is such an integral part of the storytelling, I can’t imagine pulling that off if you don’t personally know how a small sailboat handles/feels in the water. Really enjoyed reading that, it’s never boring and (obviously, since this is a children’s book) not over-the-top technical like you get with Patrick “need to consult a martime glossary just to make sense of what’s happening in this paragraph” O’Brian, lol.

The Spellcoats, Diana Wynne Jones
I was NOT expecting this to be as good as it turned out to be, wow, this honestly might be one of her best. Absolutely genius use of the first person and in-universe language, loved the narrator’s very unique voice (and the way it was very clearly In Translation!) and the whole concept of the story being told through the spellcoats (the temporal arrangement of the events vs. the storytelling! the narrator looking back at her own narrative to figure out what she’s doing! the specific way in which she narrated an event turning out to be salient to the story!! the fact that she explicitly tells us she’s leaving out lots of dialogue!). Amazing execution, terrific ending and in-universe postscript, DWJ really knocked it out of the park with this one. A narrative confection.

The Crown of Dalemark, Diana Wynne Jones
I had a ton of fun reading this, I love everyone in this bar (Navis!!! Maewen and Moril and Mitt and Kialan! everybody is so good, so many of their interactions are so good), but definitely felt like the plot got away from DWJ towards the end; ( spoilers and also me screaming because [redacted]’s plot thread is somehow the SINGLE SADDEST THING DWJ HAS EVER WRITTEN, oh my god??? )

Reading The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed and while I have various other thoughts on this book the thing I really need to drop a flyby comment about is that Reed’s Russian is the wildest combination of well-researched and totally wrong that I have ever seen, lol. I guess this is what you get writing from a place of “I researched this, but I don’t speak it and online translators don’t exist yet”?

E.g.: Absolutely knocked out by a female character being addressed as “tovarisha” (cursed, women are also addressed as “tovarish,” the word “comrade” is gender neutral,* that’s, like, the whole ideological shtick) and especially by the following exchange, which on the one hand manages to use an obscure Russian idiom absolutely correctly in context, and on the other hand mistranslates it so completely that it loses all meaning in English:

“Thank you.” I sat down, relief stinging my eyes. “I should have known. I guess I’m a little paranoid—oh, all right, I’m a lot paranoid. A felon on News One has to be. If one hint of my past made it out on the Net, I’d disappear, you know, kak korova yazykom menya slizala.”

“Like a what?”

I smiled, grateful for the change of subject. “As though a cow had licked me with its tongue. Meaning completely. The way you do when you run afoul of the Weavers.”

It’s not “as though a cow had licked me with its tongue,” it’s “as though a cow’s tongue had licked me away” (or, less precisely but more appropriately: “as though a cow had licked me up”) i.e., caused her to disappear, the way something does when lapped up by the huge tongue of a cow!

By no means the most consternation-inducing thing in this book but very predictably KILLING ME because of who I am as a person,

* Russian Wikipedia informs me that the actual feminine form оf this word is “tovarka,” which I’d never heard before due to the aforementioned reason of “tovarish” being used regardless of gender! (Both when used as an official form of address and in the colloquial sense of “mate/friend.”)