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Saturday, May 17, 2025

Standing Tall #35

It has been over two years since my last Standing Tall post and over TEN years since I actually saw this cross-city sculpture trail in the first place. We’ve had two more since it concluded, one involving penguins and the other variations on Elmer the Elephant. Ah well, there’s nothing else for it but to keep chugging on, as we are closer to the finish line then we were back in 2022. (This is giraffe #35 out of #50).

Here in Aotearoa we love our native birds, so there was little surprise that they turned up so prevalently on these sculptures. This giraffe, situated in front of Jellie Park, one of the city’s largest public pools, is covered with them: the pukeko, the fantail, the wood pigeons – as well as some native flowers and fish (those yellow ones are kowhai, the red are pohutakawa).

I like the way it stretches from the stony river bed at the giraffe’s feet, up through the branches to the birds and monarch butterfly at the giraffe’s head. Designed by Ira Mitchell-Kirk, it’s called Reach for the Stars, presumably referring to the white stars on the solid blue background – though to be honest they look more like the stars on the Australian flag given they’re not outlined in red, and there are too many to denote the Southern Cross, the star constellation on our flag.

Still, it’s a nice work – I may have just been a bit distracted as I distinctly remember dropping my camera on the concrete steps.







Thursday, May 1, 2025

Woman of the Month: Demona

Demona from Gargoyles

With each year that passes, Demona feels less like a villain and more like an anti-hero. She wants to destroy all of humankind, and these days, who can really blame her? TV Tropes would probably describe her as a Well-Intentioned Extremist or a case of Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters, and if she was in a Marvel movie, she would be one of those patented “has noble motivations but is going about achieving their ends in the wrong way” left-coded antagonists, who fight for things such as equality and freedom and essential supplies for the underprivileged, but blow up buildings along the way so the audience doesn’t become too sympathetic to their cause.

Demona is someone who has a very real set of grievances, though back in the halcyon days of the nineties, the oppression she faces must be met with boundless patience and forbearance, as demonstrated by her partner Goliath, even when her fellow gargoyles aren’t allowed into the dining hall built upon their ancestral land without being called “beasts,” or hang out on the clifftops where their eyrie is situated without someone throwing a burning log at them.

Understandably, Demona despises this treatment, and so comes up with a plan to reclaim the land for her own people. Sounds pretty fair to me! But of course, nothing ever goes according to plan...

What follows is a saga that spans hundreds of years, forming the backbone of the show in its entirety. From surviving the massacre at Castle Wyvern to her generational feud with the Hunters, her immortality granted at the hands of the mysterious Weird Sisters to the stable time loop in which her future self appears to show a young Demona her what the future holds, thereby ensuring the entire tragedy is set into motion in the first place, Demona’s life story was Shakespearean in its grandeur. And I mean literally – a huge part of it involved Macbeth himself.

Goliath and the other clan members may have been the show’s protagonists, but you knew you were in for an incredible episode whenever Demona turned up.

Marina Sirtis voiced the character with an arch, sharp elegance, though the most compelling thing about Demona was that you could never fully discount her opinions on the cruelty of humanity or the state of the world. Still, the moral framework of the show made it clear that her one-woman war against mankind was a misguided cause, one that leaves her embittered and hateful, thereby rendering her the very thing she initially wished to destroy.

Yet despite her blind hatred and inability to take responsibility for her actions (perhaps her most telling line is when she looks upon the destruction at Castle Wyvern and cries: “what have I... what have they done to you?”) according to creator Greg Weisman’s website, his long-term plans for Demona would have eventually included a redemption arc, largely brought about by her love for her daughter Angela. I hope one day we get to see this story play out.

Until then, Demona remains one of the most complex and three-dimensional villainesses of all time. Truly, I’m struggling to think of anyone comparable, and that she appeared in a Disney cartoon back in the nineties is just astounding. As pitiable as she is terrifying, surely her most memorable moment would have to be at the end of “City of Stone,” in which the other characters implore her to tell them a password they need to reverse a timed chemical reaction that she’s sabotaged.

After some cajoling from mystical forces, she eventually divulges the word she chose to override the computer system: “alone.”

Whew. If that doesn’t break your heart, I don’t know what will.

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Reading/Watching Log #113

Late as usual, but here it is. April was about the two Alien movies (there are only two), Beatrix Potter, and plenty of Arthurian retellings – specifically three TV shows that are fascinating in how different they are from each other while still being recognizably based on the same source material.

Furthermore, none of them are very good. It made me wonder what a good adaptation would look like? It would have to span several decades, feature aging actors, contain dozens of narrative tangents and cul de sacs, and not be afraid to go to some very strange places. It would also have to settle on a central theme, which might be the most difficult thing of all considering the number of writers who have brought their own perspectives and ideas to the Matter of Britain across the centuries. 

Personally, I think that the legends do better in print than on-screen, and many talented authors that have handled the material come to mind: Rosemary Sutcliffe, T.H. White, Bernard Cornwall, Roger Lancelot Green, T.A. Barron, Mary Stewart, Kevin Crossley-King (though Im leaving out Marian Zimmer Bradley). One day Ill get through all of them, though I managed to check a few off the list this month.

Friday, April 25, 2025

BBC Robin Hood: 39 Episodes Ranked

Ages ago I mentioned doing a comprehensive write-up of the BBC’s Robin Hood, a show that ran from 2006 to 2009, was comprised of thirty-nine episodes in total, and which continues to be something of an albatross around my neck. It was the basis of my very first fandom experience, which involved watching the series unfold on a weekly basis before discussing each episode with others in chatrooms and on LiveJournal, and contributing a few stories to the pool of fanfiction. I made friends in that fandom who I am still in contact with to this day, and it inspired a lot of my own writing, whether it be fanfiction or original work.

That’s not to say it was objectively good. Along with messy storylines, inconsistent characterization and a tiny budget, it also contains one of the most inexplicably terrible creative decisions I’ve ever seen in my life (if you’re familiar with the show, you’ll know what I’m talking about).

That promised write-up is still forthcoming, as it’s very difficult to discuss something dispassionately when you have such strong feelings about it. In the meantime, I’ve recently concluded a rewatch of the show in its entirety with my friend, a first-time viewer. It was fun watching it through a pair of fresh eyes over the course of a year or so, and it inspired me – in lieu of a proper, in-depth review of the show – to rank all thirty-nine episodes.

This was slightly more complicated than it sounds. Sometimes episodes are bad or good not just in themselves, but regarding context – where they’re placed in the show and how positively I feel about what comes before and after them. For instance, many singular episodes are solidly put together but belong in series three, which I dislike on principle. I’d rather watch a weak series one episode (“Dead Man Walking”) that contains my favourite characters than one of the stronger season three episodes (“Do You Love Me?”) in which they’re dead or absent.

Some episodes showcase strong characterization or important plot-points in stories that are narratively all over the place, so what do we rank higher: well-constructed filler episodes (“The Angel of Death”) or tentpole episodes that are complete gibberish (“Let the Games Commence”)? There’s also personal bias when it comes to my favourite characters – I’m naturally going to enjoy the Will/Djaq/Allan-centric episodes more than anything that spotlights Tuck or Kate.

(Then there are those that contain genuinely offensive material like “A Dangerous Deal,” the most misogynistic forty-five minutes of television you’ve ever seen!)

What’s more important: coherent plots or narrative significance or entertainment value? Everyone’s going to have a different opinion, and I can’t pretend I’ve been in any way consistent with how I’ve chosen to rank these episodes. Some are higher because they’re crucial to the overarching storylines, some because they’re fun to watch, some because they’re well-written. Some rank lower despite being all these things because I don’t like the way the characters are treated, or because it’s time-wasting filler, or because they take place in series three.

In other words, I won’t pretend this list isn’t subjective, but it’s my list so I can do whatever I want with it.

The method with which I sorted these episodes was to divide them into five groups of seven, roughly ranging from the best to the worst, and then ranking the entries of each category with more accuracy. As it happens, some of the grading surprised me, certain episodes being higher or lower than I initially assumed they’d be.

So below the cut you’ll find the thirty-nine episodes of the BBC’s Robin Hood, divided into five categories ranked from the absolute worst to the very best, so we can get the negativity out of the way quickly (though just to wrap things up, there’s a bonus category of episodes which are so terrible they defy the ranking system).

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Woman of the Month: Medea

Medea from Greek Mythology

What is the most heinous crime a human being can commit? I think most would agree it’s filicide; the murder of one’s own children.

The act is perceived as particularly appalling when it’s at the hands of a child’s mother. Mothers are meant to be nurturers and caregivers, not to mention the incubators that grow babies inside of them for an extended period of time before giving birth. Mothers literally give people life, and humanity’s collective hang-ups regarding this supposed biological imperative is like, a whole thing.

With that societal/cultural/historical context in mind, it’s no wonder that Medea cannot escape the notoriety of killing her two sons. Even in adaptations of her story that end well before the crime is committed, the fact that she will eventually take the lives of her own children overshadows everything else in her life. Just as Oedipus is the guy who married his mother, Medea is the woman who killed her sons.

The thing about Greek mythology is that a fair number of the stories seek to embody an idea; a concept; a taboo. The aforementioned Oedipus brought forth the theory of the Oedipal Complex, in which little boys secretly want to get rid of their fathers in order to have their mothers all to themselves, just as Electra is the gender inverse of this; girls who imagine themselves in competition with their mothers for their father’s attention.

Within that psychological framework, the figure of Medea might simply represent a dark subconscious desire in mothers to rid themselves of their children, or at least the potential for it. Perhaps there are shades of post-natal depression to be found here, long before people had a term for it.

But within the story of Medea itself, there’s… well, a story to go with it. The reason given for the filicide is that it’s an act of vengeance against her husband Jason when he decides to put her aside in order to marry a younger woman; a match that will grant him political and social advantages. Unable to accept this, Medea kills their two sons to punish him for his betrayal. The ultimate woman scorned.

I’ve no doubt there’s a well-meaning novel out there in the current deluge of Greek mythology retellings that seeks to justify or at least recontextualize these murders. Perhaps Medea went temporarily mad, like Grace in The Others. Perhaps she was driven to desperation like Anna Karenina on realizing she had no home, status or protection without Jason, and that her children would suffer terribly as a result.

Perhaps she felt she had lost everything and so might as well finish the job, or that having sacrificed so much for her husband (including committing terrible acts for his sake, like desecrating her brother’s body) her pride would not allow her to simply give up and let him abandon her without a fight. Heck, maybe as a witch of Colchis, she had a profoundly different outlook on the nature of death and who has the right to deal it out.

Even Euripides’s play on the subject is not without a degree of sympathy for Medea’s plight, stating: “Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.”

Personally, I don’t buy any of these explanations. The whole point of the story is that Medea does a heinous thing, an unthinkable thing. It’s no use trying to alleviate or rationalize it, for the very crux of Medea’s story is that a mother killed her children – deliberately and with much consideration. Hate overcame love, as she makes clear in Euripides: “I have done it because I loathed you [Jason] more than I loved them.”

Her hate for Jason was stronger than her love for her children. What must that feel like? But what should she have done instead? Admit defeat, bow out quietly, and lose her children to their father? For almost every single mother in the world, the answer would be an incontrovertible yes, that they should indeed swallow their pride and passively accept defeat for the sake of their children.

But not Medea.

The unsettling thing about her is that her logic is sound, and her motivation understandable. Jason threw away her life, and so she had to repay him in kind. The great love she had for him was poisoned in the wake of his betrayal. She had given up so much for him, and was now on the brink of losing everything – including her sons, one way or the other. “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”

And so she does an evil thing, one that can never be defended, for if she despises Jason’s cruel treatment of her, then how can she justify all the innocent people she destroys to obtain her revenge? There’s an ongoing recent trend in fiction to try and soften female characters instead of letting them be cruel and complex, full of rage and hate; perhaps bourn out of people overidentifying with certain characters and so trying to mitigate their actions as a form of self-defense.

But we should be afraid of the dark places in ourselves and what we’re capable of – characters like Medea are what bring them out into the light so that we might examine them at a safe distance. She’s a wronged woman, and a proactive participant in her story, and a human being with all her faculties – and she’s a villain. She says so herself: “I understand too well the dreadful act I'm going to commit, but my judgement can't check my anger, and that incites the greatest evils human beings do.” The most we can do for Medea is let her own the terrible crime that she commits.

(Clytemnestra on the other hand – she did nothing wrong!)

Monday, March 31, 2025

Reading/Watching Log #112

I did it! For the first time in ages, I actually finished a Reading/Watching Log on time. Well mostly, it technically should have been posted yesterday, but that’s not that bad!

Because I found two documentaries on Greek heroes that I’d been searching for for ages, March turned into a fully-fledged Greek mythology month – especially where Medea was concerned. She appeared in four of the shows I watched these last few weeks, and was a strikingly different character in each of them.

Reading wise, I finished three more of my favourite authors as a belated birthday treat: Garth Nix, Susanna Clarke and Frances Hardinge, reminding myself all over again as to why exactly they’re my favourites. I finished another double-feature of period films starring Holliday Grainger, and the second season of Hustle.

Now, onwards to a chilly April and Arthurian legends...

Saturday, March 22, 2025

Angela Barrett: Rocking Horse Land and Other Classic Tales of Dolls and Toys

Oh dear, I see it’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. Never mind, I’m back to take a deeper look at the colours and compositions of some of my favourite Angela Barrett illustrations.

Rocking Horse Land and Other Classic Tales of Dolls and Toys was a book I only vaguely recall checking out of the library as a child, but I’ve recently managed to nab my own copy through Trademe. As the title attests, it’s an anthology of toy-related stories, which include the obvious candidates for any such collection: “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” by Hans Christian Anderson and editor Naomi Lewis’s own retelling of “Vasilissa, Baba Yaga and the Little Doll,” but also contributions from some lesser-known late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century writers for children: E. Nesbit’s “The Town in the Library,” Laurence Housman’s “Rocking Horse Land,” Ruth Ainsworth’s “Rag Bag,” and an excerpt from Mrs Fairstar’s “Memoirs of a London Doll.”

The illustrations are of three kinds: silhouetted frontispieces at the start of each story, very small bordered pictures within the text itself, and full-page spreads, all of which naturally show off Barrett’s talent for tiny detail; a trait perfectly suited for this particular subject matter.

After much consideration, the illustration I want to draw attention to is the cover itself (which is also featured on the inside cover as a two-page spread). It is fascinating in several ways, firstly that it combines several elements from the stories found within the collection: a flying rocking horse from “Rocking Horse Land,” the tin soldiers from “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and (most obviously) the magical doorway from “The Town in the Library,” in which two children are shrunk down to doll-size in order to explore their Christmas toys from a diminutive perspective.



Image source

The work is also notable for filling up every corner, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Tetris screen, with items from a nursery. Everything you see is either a book, a block or a clasped box, perfectly interlocked, reaching right up to the edges of the book itself. As a result, we cannot see a wider perspective of where these objects actually are; they block out any sign of a window or door or larger room.

The effect is to make us feel as small as the children, for our viewpoint is as limited as theirs. By denying us any indication of the larger “real” world around them, the strangeness of their size is emphasized. Are the books and blocks and box abnormally large, or are the children abnormally small? We don’t know, as the objects, wedged as they are into the small space of the cover’s physical edges, encompass the entirety of the world as we see it.

The decision also serves to better highlight the glimpse of the outside world that we do see; which is not portrayed around the items, but in their center, disconcertedly framed by books. Through that portal are tall trees and an immense night sky filled with stars, but it’s caught within a comparatively tiny space. Again, are we looking at something big, or something small?

The children that approach it face away from us, an old trick that invites the viewer to subconsciously project their own identities onto the concealed features. I also like the detail of them having to climb a few stairs to reach this magical portal; the girl still mid-step, and the boy’s hair ruffled by an unseen night breeze. Those stairs are the only thing in the picture that seem like they might belong to the ordinary world instead of this miniature doll-world, which adds to the mystery and mixed-upness of size and perspective at work here.

I’m also rather fond of the soldier on the far left, looking down at his own feet, deep in thought. What could a tin soldier be so contemplative about? I’ve no idea, but who’s to say he’s not pondering the mysteries of the universe?