Reading/Watching Log #129

It is finally SPRING. I’m sure we’ll manage a few more miserable days before summer kicks in, but thank goodness we made it through another winter down here in the southern hemisphere. It’s our turn for that heat wave… though I obviously don’t want things to get too dire. (Who am I kidding? I love the heat and we haven’t had a decent summer for the last two years. Bring it on).

The third season of House of the Dragon has recently wrapped up, and it served as an interesting reminder that I’ve spend the last decade or so experiencing Game of Thrones through pop-culture osmosis: never really getting involved, but being interested in how other people respond to the story – a story which in many ways is completely counterintuitive to how fandom operates these days.

One day I’ll hopefully write a longer post about my hypothesis that modern fandom is less interested in a compelling, thought-provoking story as it is about picking a character (or a ship, or a theory) and then gunning for it to “win,” either on moral or aesthetic or “just cos I want it to” grounds. In that sense, it’s understandable why House of the Dragon might be regarded as compatible with fandom, as it quite literally revolves around a competition between two factions (the Blacks and the Greens) to gain control over the Seven Kingdoms.

And yet for anyone actually paying attention, it’s clear that the point George R.R. Martin is trying to make is that monarchy is bad, and that everything about it should be burnt down (not literally of course, despite the presence of dragons) in favour of a fairer, more egalitarian system.

The civil war is between a family of inbred, imperial conquerors that nobody actually likes. They’ve just got the equivalent of nuclear weapons, so there’s not a lot the smallfolk can actually do about them (yet – we’ve still got season four to go, wherein the smallfolk do start making some political moves of their own). But this is lost on fandom, who are still arguing about what backside should be sitting on the Iron Throne, as though that’s anything even close to the point that Martin is trying to make.

In the clips I’ve seen, the show is finally starting to lean into the physical and mental toll this is taking on its erstwhile protagonist and queen, Rhaenyra. Having lost two of her sons, struggling with the day-to-day requirements of running a kingdom, and growing increasingly paranoid about the movements of her enemies, her seasonal arc culminates in a scene in which she declares herself “the Prince Who Was Promised,” to a crowd of people who don’t understand what she’s saying, and wouldn’t care in the slightest even if they did.

As usual, great swaths of fandom are focused on the aesthetics of the whole thing – the coolness of her armour, how great she sounds speaking Old Valyrian – without grasping in the slightest what is actually happening here. For the record, I’m not thrilled with yet another story about a woman going mad with power. It’s not off the table when it comes to storytelling choices, as there’s nothing stopping it from being compelling, and it’s clearly being written with more nuance than what happened to Daenerys, but in the broader scheme of things – I’ve had enough of crazy power-hungry women who need to be put down for their own good. The concept just isn’t contributing anything to the growing good of the world, you know?

But what struck me as interesting (and important) about the scene is that Rhaenyra calls upon her knowledge of the Prince Who Was Promised prophecy to justify her claim to the throne. This brought to mind the events of The Mad King, the stage play currently being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. A huge theme of that production seems to be that those who buy into the prophecy about the Prince (or Azoi Ahai) come to bitterly regret it. Lyanna for example, goes all in on the prophecy that she interprets as carrying Rhaegar’s child to provide “a third head” for the three-headed dragon – something that starts a civil war, takes the life of her brothers, and eventually claims hers as well.

(Heck, we’ve already seen this theme play out in Game of Thrones, in which Melisandre’s insistence that Stannis is the Chosen One only leads him into darkness and despair).

It was a fascinating similar note between the two stories despite each playing out in very different mediums, but one that fits with Martin’s general sense of contempt for those that base their decision-making on the amorphous words of prophecy. As Jaime Lannister says: “prophecy is like a half-trained mule. It looks as though it might be useful, but the moment you trust in it, it kicks you in the head.”

Yet muddying the waters is that prophecy and visions and “true dreaming” does have some veracity in the world of Westeros. Various characters have seen glimpses of the future that turn out to be real, not to mention the existence of undead warriors and other mystical creatures. And of course, people who command dragons that can burn down entire settlements with a single word are inevitably going to have dangerous superiority complexes. By simple dint of the fact they can do such things while others cannot indicate there must be SOMETHING special about the Targaryens.

That the theme of “don’t trust prophecy” is mingled with genuine displays of mystical power is confusing, as is the question of where exactly their prophetic dreams and visions originate from. Who or what is pulling the strings here? It’s here of course, we all walk into a brick wall, because we cannot properly examine this theme or what it means or how it’s going to play out without having access to the end of the story to lend it clarity. And George R.R. Martin certainly isn’t in a hurry to tell us.

The simple point I’m trying to make is that I found it immensely interesting that the stage play and the prequel series would strike a similar note on this issue, as (presuming that they have added intel provided by George R.R. Martin himself – which we know, as House of the Dragon revealed that Aegon’s Conquest was instigated by a dream that foretold of the Long Night and the coming of the White Walkers) provides direction on how A Song of Fire and Ice might conclude.

If, of course, it ever gets finished. Which it won’t.

Okay, so getting back to the reading/watching log… it seems like rather slim pickings this month, but I’ve got three weeks leave coming up, so you can bet I’m going to be filling it with as many books and films as I can.

Angela Barrett: The Random House Book of Shakespeare Stories

I’ve had this book since 2014, but only just this month found the time to sit down and enjoy it properly. Written by Andrew Matthews and released for Shakespeare’s 450th anniversary (though whether this was of his birth or the staging of his first play is unclear) this retells eight of his plays: four tragedies, three comedies and one history. This gives Angela Barrett a lot of scope, not only in tone and theme, but size as well. Some of her illustrations are full-page spreads, while others are just tiny vignettes.

The unique thing about this book is that Barrett provides some insight into her work at the back of the book, going through each story and her creative decisions in illustrating each one. For Romeo and Juliet, she notes that certain outfits and settings were based on real costumes and places, and that the clothes of the lovers were deliberately made bright in contrast to their dark and sad surroundings: “as befits their story.”

At one point she mentions trying to capture: “the oppressive heat of the sun and the cold feel of the stone,” and even though she’s talking about a different picture than the one I’ve chosen to discuss, it’s also a reasonable description of the below image.

Links and Updates

Another Links and Updates post with another sad passing to acknowledge: Sam Neill, one of the greats. This one was awful on a number of levels: that he had beaten cancer, that he was a national treasure, that it seemed as though he still had a lot of zest for life left in him.

Obviously Jurassic Park has come up frequently in the conversations around his death (and despite its many faults, at least Dominion did the right thing in reuniting him with Ellie), but I will always remember him best and most fondly as Uncle Hector from Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the titular character in the Merlin miniseries. That last one in particular was event viewing when I was a kid. My aunt worked at Blockbuster at the time and got sick to death of us nagging her to bring us a copy.

Dear universe, stop taking all the good men! We need them down on Earth more than ever!

Here in New Zealand we’re in the final month of winter, which comes as a great relief to me. I hate the dark and the cold, though it’s been a surprisingly mild three months with only one snowfall that didn’t even settle (and I’m aware that deadly heat waves in other parts of the world are definitely not preferable). But I still prefer light and warmth and long summer evenings, and now that we’re halfway through the year, Christmas is just around the corner.

Woman of the Month: Amelia Rojas

Pickings are slim when it comes to choosing a female character from the Sherlock Holmes canon – in fact, there are only three of any great note: Mary Morstan, Irene Adler and Mrs Hudson.

Yet that hasn’t stopped other writers from finding all sorts of ways to add more, whether it’s giving Sherlock a Lost Lenore (Elizabeth in Young Sherlock Holmes), a little sister (Enola Holmes, Beatrice in Young Sherlock) or a daughter (Amelia Rojas in Sherlock & Daughter). Some adaptations gender-flip preexisting characters (Joan Watson in Elementary) or expand the roles of minor characters (there are female Irregulars in both Netflix’s The Irregulars and Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars), while Irene Adler has been reimagined as anything from a master thief to a criminal mastermind. And sometimes they simply make up female characters wholesale (Jennifer Vandeleur in The Case of the Silk Stocking or Xiao Wei in Young Sherlock).

In a way it’s rather heartening that so many writers want to include more women, giving me plenty to choose from this month. Though the obvious pick would be Irene Adler, I’ve already discussed her extensively in the past, and a hot contender was the aforementioned Xiao Wei, who reminded me a lot of Sara Lance in just how cool she was. There are very few female characters out there who are allowed to simply luxuriate in how cool they are.

But I’m going with Amelia Rojas from Sherlock & Daughter, because who doesn’t love a Spirited Young Lady living in the Victorian Era? That time of restrictiveness and societal disapproval is the perfect setting for a headstrong girl to come along and upset the apple cart.

Sherlock & Daughter puts Amelia Rojas at its centre; a Native American girl who has travelled from California to London in search of Sherlock Holmes in a bid to solve her mother’s murder. She’s determined and resourceful, but also far more vulnerable than she’d like to admit and leery about the veracity of her mother’s final message to her: that Sherlock is her father.

He denies this revelation, but also sees an opportunity to use her as an investigative proxy in a particularly difficult case: and so her education in deduction begins.

I’d never seen actress Blu Hunt before this series, but she’s a real find. Equal parts cunning and naïve, Amelia takes to mystery-solving like a duck to water, driven not only by personal reasons but a growing sense of duty and justice. As she tentatively begins to form a relationship with her would-be father, she also becomes aware of the greater plots and schemes swirling around her, and rises to meet them – not without a few mistakes at first, but steadily improving as she goes. It was a great first season for her, and I’m glad a second has already been greenlit.

Reading/Watching Log #128

Well, no prizes for guessing what the theme of this month is. With the release of Enola Holmes 3 on the first of July, it pretty much chose itself, and way back in September 2024 I mentioned wanting to watch some of the other Sherlock Holmes adaptations that were floating around on YouTube.

The thing I found most interesting in watching so many in quick succession is the way they speak to each other across the years; how they’ve inspired and influenced each other. You can clearly see the shift from Watson as a doddering sidekick to a more respected partner, or the change in how subjects like colonialism and the British Empire are treated, or even the presence of the supernatural and its veracity.

For instance, it’s tempting to wonder if 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes inspired the 2009 Robert Downey Jr film in its use of an occult-tinged mystery. What’s more, the former’s use of colonization as a plot-point has profoundly changed by the time we get to 2026. Back then it was used to justify the existence of a creepy Egyptian cult in London and give the villains a sad backstory that is promptly ignored due to their habitual practice of sacrificing virgins. Fast-forward four decades and the British Empire’s treatment of its colonies makes for largely sympathetic “villains” in both Enola Holmes 3 and this year’s Young Sherlock series.

It’s just fascinating the way these stories reach back and forth the way they do, providing a linked chain across the years.

Also, I saw a record three live performances this month, largely thanks to the fact it was the school holidays and I am determined to instill a love of theatre into my little nephew. As well as that, two Babysitters Club books, the second instalments of trilogies from Philip Pullman, Scott Westerfeld and Philip Reeve, and a few Victorian-era Gaslamp period dramas. They went hand-in-glove with Sherlock Holmes.

Xena Warrior Princess: Back in the Bottle, Little Problems, Seeds of Faith

In these three very different episodes, we get the second sequel to “The Debt,” a comedy episode, and the next instalment of the seasonal arc, in which Eli returns and the Twilight of the Gods is teased. Highlights include the last episode set in Chin, a very young Rose McIver, Alex Tydings in a blooper so funny they left it in the episode, an answer to what’s going on with Xena’s pregnancy, and the swansong of both Eli and Callisto.

Let’s get to it…

Standing Tall #37

This giraffe featured a series of strange shapes by artist and graphic designer Ethan Attewell, described in the official souvenir booklet as “curious characters” that “wouldn’t look out of place in a children’s story book.” Because of how they’re painted on the slopes of the giraffe it’s a little hard to discern what they actually are: there are some small green leaves, a blue dolphin-shaped one, and… a few mandarin slices? And I’ve no idea what the red shape is meant to be. Furthermore, there’s also not a lot of them – most of the giraffe is solid white.

To my eyes, they look more alien than whimsical, or maybe a bit like fruit jubes you’d buy in a candy store. The name of the sculpture is Space Wild, so maybe that’s a clue as to what they’re supposed to be. Or perhaps the shapes weren’t made to signify anything at all. They’re just shapes. It’s a rather bemusing giraffe, and I’m not sure what to make of it.

This one was situated in Malvern Park, and unfortunately it was taken down after being vandalized. Luckily, we got to see it before that occurred, and it was repaired later for the auction.