Trabia Garden

When I watch things with my housemates, I don't always write about it on here because, well, you can't really pause episodes to scribble down your thoughts while other people are watching them with you. I thought I'd try to pull together a few lines each about some of the things we've watched over the last couple of years, though. Here we go!


Gargoyles (1994): Rei remembered this cartoon fondly from their childhood, but I had never seen it before. It was an interesting watch! Darker and more complex than I tend to expect from nineties Western cartoons, and Elisa and Xanatos are great characters; I'd have loved to see the two of them interact more. I'm annoyed by the 'Macbeth was just misunderstood' plotline, though; don't take away everything that makes Macbeth interesting as a character!

Cowboy Bebop (1998): This was an interesting anime, very stylishly directed, but it felt a bit like two different shows clumsily jammed together. I think it could have benefitted from cutting most of the 'bounty hunting procedural' aspect and becoming a shorter, more focused series. Spike is a fascinating character who feels severely underused, which is perplexing, given that he's the protagonist.

Wynonna Earp (2016): This was fun! It felt a bit like a version of Supernatural from an alternate universe; if Supernatural had been created by women and had female lead actors, I suspect it might look a bit like Wynonna Earp. Wynonna, in particular, feels very like a female equivalent to Dean Winchester; she's a wisecracking disaster who's incapable of coping with anything healthily. She's great. I love her.

Milo Murphy's Law (2016): A cartoon by the creators of Phineas and Ferb, about a boy who's plagued by misfortune. I loved this! In particular, I find Milo himself very endearing; I like his resourceful nature and positive attitude in the face of the certainty that everything's going to go wrong around him. Also, lumberjack-themed boy band song 'Chop Away at My Heart' is a banger.

Trinkets (2019): I'm a little sad that, although the ending was beautiful and perfect, the rest of the show wasn't quite good enough for me to run around recommending it. It's about three girls who meet at a programme for recovering shoplifters. Their friendship is great and I had a lot of feelings about it, but the show as a whole is so Constant Teen Drama that it's slightly exhausting. The finale was wonderful! I cried! The show as a whole is okay.

Batwoman (2019): We only watched the first series of this (and, in fact, I can't remember whether we finished that series). I really enjoyed what a catastrophe Kate Kane was, and her love-hate relationship with Alice was delightfully intense and messy; I feel it's a sort of relationship you don't often get to see between female antagonists! The show felt relentlessly miserable in a way that wasn't that fun to watch, though. We didn't make an active decision to stop watching it, but we drifted away.

The Owl House (2020): I really enjoyed this! Very cute and fun; very Gravity Falls vibes, which makes sense, given that it was created by Alex Hirsch's partner. It does seem like a disproportionate number of the episodes focus on teaching Luz that she shouldn't lie to impress people, though; if your protagonist learns the same lesson in half the episodes of your cartoon, I think you have to accept that she's never going to internalise the lesson! King is very reminiscent of our cat Zuko, who is a beautiful, perfect boy with absolutely no brain.

We Are Lady Parts (2021): A sitcom about an all-girl Muslim punk band. I got much more emotionally invested than I was prepared for; I thought this was just going to be a silly comedy! But then I met angry, self-sabotaging disaster Saira, and obviously I was doomed to love her.

Arcane (2021): A fantasy series based on League of Legends, a game I know absolutely nothing about. This is the most engaging show I've watched in a very long time. It genuinely surprised me on multiple occasions; I quickly gave up trying to predict what would happen in it, because I clearly had no idea! Every character is a disaster and it's great. An excellent series if you enjoy characters screwing up and tearing themselves apart over it. Gorgeously animated, too.

Queer Eye Germany (2022): A heads-up for anyone who enjoys Queer Eye: the German version is just as delightful! Ayan, the interior design guy, is my favourite of the Fab Fünf; he's extremely earnest and sweet.

I have returned from the Mancunian Adventure! Which... oh, wait, I didn't mention that I was going on the Mancunian Adventure here, did I? Well, for the past five days I have been in Manchester, hanging out with wanttobeatree and sazzlette. I fell over all the freaking time. They mocked me. It was entirely amazing.

I hope you enjoyed your transition into the new year! (I fell off the arm of Sazz's sofa twenty minutes into 2009. It was not a proud moment for me.)

There are several things I need to make entries about (the Twilight film, One Tree Hill, shut up shut up shut up), but first, some more general notes from the adventure:

- On Tuesday, we played a game of Scrabble. wanttobeatree won for ever by putting down the word 'Castieling'. It was beautiful.

- We saw in the new year with a sort of charades-ish game: everyone wrote down the names of celebrities and characters and stuffed them into a hat, then each player had to draw out slips of paper and verbally describe as many characters to their team as they could in a minute. Unfortunately, I am hopeless with celebrities. Matt Damon: 'He's a racing driver! ...he's not a racing driver.' Then sazzlette put 'Damon Hill' in the next batch of names, just to cause me pain. (I also thought that Julia Roberts was a chef. Stop judging me.)

- In the second round, using the same names, the player had to describe the subject of the slip of paper using three words or fewer. Julia Roberts, of course, could now be described with 'not a chef'. wanttobeatree confused us all enormously by describing Batman simply with 'BLACK EARS'. I drew 'Daleks' and realised halfway through saying 'teapot Who villains' that I meant 'pepperpot'. sazzlette and pinkegogirl leapt upon this:

'WILL-YOU-HAVE-A-JAF-FA-CAKE?'
'WHAT-IS-A-JAF-FA-CAKE?'
'IS-IT-A-CAKE-IS-IT-A-BIS-CUIT?'
'DOES-NOT-COM-PUTE.'
'EX-TER-MI-NATE-ALL-JAF-FA-CAKES.'

- The third round involved portraying the character without words, if you're thinking of playing it yourself. Of course, this doesn't lend itself well to textual description. I will mention, however, that in order to portray Bella from Twilight I fell over, and, having learnt how ridiculously clumsy I am, nobody seemed sure whether it was part of the clue or not.

- There is graffiti in Manchester that says 'I AM LORD VOLDEMORT'. Graffiti! And I thought he couldn't become any more evil!


Thank you so much to thebaconfat, squeemu and averysmallthing for your lovely cards!

Well, I'll say this about The Dark Knight: it knows how to make me take notice within the first minute. WHY HELLO THERE, AGENT MAHONE. Clearly this is a Mahone driven mad by the Scofield investigation. "CRIMINALS USED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS."

(For some reason, I keep expecting Mahone's actor to have a soft upper-middle-class English accent, something Rupert Giles-ish, and it always surprises me when he speaks and I remember that oh, yes, he's American.)

The Joker is terrifying and fascinating and brilliant. Shortly after returning from the film, I found myself looking through all the packs of cards I could find in the house and collecting together all the Jokers. I don't know why. I, er, hope I'm not going to do anything sinister with them.

At the moment, I am in the slightly unfortunate position of having huge amounts of pent-up fannishness within me but being unable to express this fannishness on the Internet because, as I am still watching episodes that came out two years ago, setting one foot in the wrong place will result in my being bombarded with spoilers. Suffice it to say that I am very much in love with Prison Break at the moment. Oh, themes of familial love and devotion, you know I can never resist you.

(Here's the thing about Prison Break, though: you can't watch it with complacency. You can't think 'oh, it's all right, they can't kill him off, he's a main character', because they can and they freaking will. When a character in Prison Break is in a dangerous situation, you're not thinking 'hmmm, I wonder how he'll get out of this one'; you're panicking, because you genuinely have no idea which way it's going to go. It is destroying my nerves.)

I have watched up to 'Unearthed', the ninth episode of the second season. Please don't spoil me!

(EDIT: Also, er, Batman? That voice? Yeah. I really can't take you seriously.)