Tag: Marvel

The Worst of 2022

On By reenchantmentoftheworldIn books, fiction, movie, Ola, Piotrek, TV series, Two-shot48 Comments

We’ve presented The Best of 2022 in our previous post; now, it’s PSA time 😉

Fortunately for you, it’s going to be a much shorter post. There’s no need to wallow in misery of the disappointments and unfortunate choices, or to taste the lingering, unpleasant rot of bad books, movies and TV series more than strictly necessary. And also, this past year was marked by careful deliberation and lucky strikes on our part, thus rendering the list of the bad and worse rather short.

Ola: Let’s start traditionally, with books. My biggest bookish disapointment of 2022 was, in a way, something to be expected: Joe Abercrombie’s The Wisdom of Crowds (2021) did not constitute a sudden dip in quality, a remarkable pivot in writing skill or storytelling panache; on the contrary, this was a culmination of a long and winding way to perdition through the sins of authorial hubris and sloth. This was the moment of parting ways between me and Abercrombie, and although I’m certain he and his fanbase won’t notice my absence, it does bear some significance for me – a confirmation of a long-held suspicion that grimdark is in its essence as juvenile and simplistic as whatever it rages against.

My next disappointing read came from Netgalley and could serve as the illustration of the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Gideon Defoe’s An Atlas of Extinct Countries (2021) promised a fun romp through history and geography, but emphatically did not deliver. Avoid this like a plague. Ooops, these days this saying kind of acquired additional meanings ;).

The title I want to mention belongs to the manga category. One of them is Tite Kubo’s Bleach, a long-time fan-favourite which proved so traumatically bad that I renamed it to Bleh. If you want to see the worst in manga, you don’t need to look any further. Try Bleh, or One Punch Man, and you’ll realize manga also has its tropes, weaknesses, and shameful pandering to the lowest instincts of teenage boys. To be fair, there were also some pretty weak volumes of Naruto along the way, but I am willing to overlook their weaknesses because they are followed by some truly great ones. That’s the thing about manga – it lasts for hundreds of volumes, and inevitably some of these will be fillers, but for the titles I read and love the overall quality remains astonishingly high.

And lastly, one re-read. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Even the wonderful narration of Stephen Fry couldn’t help this rotten egg of a book. Oh, the teenage angst! As I mentioned in my GR review,

“It’s way too long, boring and terribly angsty, and for me it’s simply the worst part of the whole series. I had a hard time going through the entire book, because Harry’s angry special snowflakiness just grated on my nerves so much. Also, the glaring logical holes that this time around I couldn’t overlook even when I tried.

It was a re-read, and sadly looks like none of HP books can entirely live up to the first encounter – the first time around this one got 6/10 stars ;)”

Piotrek: I had some strong candidates to my “Best of 2022” lists. “Worst of…” lists aren’t as full. I was cautious in my selection, and most of the things I did not particularly like where kind of good, just not my thing.

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Familiar Sunshine Territory Tag ;)

On By Ola GIn books, graphic novels, movie, Ola, tag, TV series43 Comments

Ages ago, I’ve been tagged by Red Metal to do their 11 very intriguing questions. Many thanks for the tag!

Since Piotrek is understandably busy arranging his wedding, I’m going to do this one on my own – so no double answers this time, sorry 😉

Between music, film/television, and game critics, which do you find the least consistently reliable?

Between music, film/television, and game critics, which do you find the most consistently reliable?

I’m going to answer the two above together. I must admit I don’t spend much time following critics of any kind, not even book critics (with the exception of you guys ;)) and particularly not movie critics. I’ve been burned too many times to pay any attention to what most of them has to say 😉 These days I very rarely read commercial reviews; I prefer to form my own opinion about any form of artistic expression, be it a movie, a TV series, a music album, or a video game. From time to time I check aggregate opinions on BoardGameGeek, sometimes Polygon, IGN and IMDB 😉 I grew tired of RT, their aggregates seem skewed by arbitrary algorithms and I find myself disagreeing with the majority of the critical reviews compiled there.

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The Worst of 2020

On By reenchantmentoftheworldIn books, Goodreads, graphic novels, NetGalley, Ola, Piotrek, silva rerum, TV series80 Comments

Oh, 2020. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… And here we’ll focus on the worst 😉 Or, to be more fair, just on the most disappointing for us personally, for as you will see, most of the works mentioned below enjoyed quite a lot of acclaim and following.

To be true to our title, we should probably start and stop this post at COVID-19, the wellspring of our woes (though there are a few hopeful signs along the way, from the evidence of effective and efficient trust-based cooperation above the national level to the human-caused limitation of greenhouse gases emissions). But as this is predominantly a book blog, with a small but significant addition of comics, TV series and movies, we feel we need to elaborate a bit and avoid easy finger-pointing.

As in the previous summary post, we wanted to divide our choices into a few categories: Fiction, Non-fiction, Comics, TV Series; but as Non-fiction this year proved to be a major hit without any misses (YAY!), we’ll omit this category.

Ola’s Worst of 2020 in Fiction

Here the choices are easy, at least for me – though for many might seem quite controversial, as some of these books seem to have become fan favorites ;). But what can I say? By now you really shouldn’t be surprised by any of this 😛 So without further ado, here it is:

R. F. Kuang, The Poppy War (2018)

That’s the only book on this list that I wrote a review of; I felt this instant favorite of the bookish community deserved a critique, and whether I achieved the goal of making it measured and not just scathing, it’s for you to judge. So let me just quote the crux of my review here:

Nanking Massacre was a truly horrible event, an atrocity for which there can be no excuse. The world should learn more about it, so that it stops being a footnote in history books. But using it in a fantasy book as a plot device designed to further the main character’s evolution into a vessel for a demonic/demigod entity and as a rationale for her own acts of genocide seems beyond bad taste.

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Real Neat Blog Award

On By reenchantmentoftheworldIn Ola, Piotrek, tag64 Comments

We’ve been doing many TAGs recently, but we found it’s a nice way to collaboratively write something fun quickly 😉 We still have a few we wanna do, this time – it’s the Real Neat Blog Award – many thanks to Lashaan of Bookidote for the nomination! We will be using his set of questions, so remember – there are no stupid questions, and answers are our sole responsibility 🙂

1. If you could do something better than you’re already doing right now, what would it be?

Piotrek: Organizing my time. I don’t have too much to do, just a bit more than I used to – and there goes good bit of my reading time, and, sadly, most of my blogging time. Less politics, less FB, better concentration – should help, if I find the willpower 😉

Ola: Surfing. Achieving zen-like peacefulness in the middle of the week. Watercolor painting. I could go on and on, but that’s enough work for now 😀

surfing

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Aleksandra Gruszczyk, The Punisher: A Cultural Image of the ‘Moral Wound’ (2020)

On By Ola GIn meta, Ola31 Comments

Most of you won’t remember, but way back in 2017 we did a post on Marvel’s The Punisher Netflix series. It was a cool, energetic discussion, limited out of necessity, and we hinted there at some other posts on the topic coming soon. While this didn’t happen, something even better did, and the initial idea of delving deeper into the eponymous vigilante’s character and motivations has been transformed into a much more ambitious endeavor ;).

The-Punisher-przyjaciele-i-wrogowie-Franka-Castle_article

Finally it is here: the highly academical (beware!) essay I wrote about the Punisher and his role and roots in American culture and identity has been published by Berkeley’s Cultural Analysis (with many thanks to my editor Robert Guyker!). You can read it here.