Oshi No Ko – Episode 1
My feelings veered wildly between “Love this!” and “oh NO!”, settling on loving it. Oshi no Ko powerfully explores women’s emotional labour in the idol industry and more broadly.
Posts by Toni Sun Prickett
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Stella of the Theater: World Dai Star – Episode 1
World Dai Star is interested in the actual process of acting, of how actors inhabit the minds of their characters and use all the tools of physicality and stagecraft to create the artifice of inner life. And it is a joy to watch in this way.
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The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses – Episode 1
This show is bad in an interesting way, in that it reveals the interfaces between sexism and capitalism. Just go with it.
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My Home Hero – Episode 1
Whoever is responsible for this, I salute you. I deplore you.
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Tengoku Daimakyou (Heavenly Delusion) – Episode 1
It’s hard to write about Heavenly Delusion right now, because what we got doesn’t feel like a full episode. It ends on an enormous cliffhanger, where we are just starting to peek into the menace of the world. It’s even more challenging because what we did get was largely a beautifully atmospheric mood piece, punctuated by only minor intrusions of gender nonsense.
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Ugly Things Cannot Be Loved: Penguindrum and the dilemma of Yuri
Yuri’s assault on Ringo is emblematic of how the tensions and arguable flaws in Penguindrum point to larger tensions and unresolved questions in our movements for transformative justice, abolition, and queer liberation.
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Against the World: Madoka Rebellion, saviorism, and abolitionist schooling
As somebody who has witnessed repeatedly the failure of would-be individual saviors to undo entire oppressive systems, I want to try to come to a deeper understanding than what is afforded on the surface by Rebellion’s final twist. What happens when hope is institutionalized? How do oppressive ideologies shape the worlds we can imagine? And the question that has haunted me most: if in the moment we destroyed an oppressive world we were given the full power to create a new one before we had any time to heal, would we like what we make?
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How Can I Connect to You? Breaking out of toxic masculinity and capitalist ideologies in SARAZANMAI
Both Kazuki and Toi emerge from similar circumstances of capitalism, oppression, and the hypermasculine coping mechanisms they’ve been given to deal with the pain of that oppression. It is only through learning to care for one another—and learning that they can care for one another—that they can both be free.
