"City of Angles" is a web serial, since republished as a novel trilogy, by Stefan Gagne. The first chapters went online in 2013, and the series was completed over the following couple of years. The author apparently did some video game writing a while back (he was involved in Neverwinter Nights II, among other titles), and has also published a few other webnovels, but nothing I've personally encountered.
I think his best known work is probably Sailor Nothing, which is pretty well regarded in some circles as a dark magical girl story that predates Madoka by a decade. It's been a score of years since I read it, but I remember liking it at the time. It's not comedic, though.
I think his best known work is probably Sailor Nothing, which is pretty well regarded in some circles as a dark magical girl story that predates Madoka by a decade. It's been a score of years since I read it, but I remember liking it at the time. It's not comedic, though.
Oh, shit. I'd forgotten his name, but I remember the guy. I've read Sailor Nothing. It's, like, the original dark deconstruction of the magical girl genre. And I read some of the other stories that he had online 20+ years ago, like Unreal Estate and his trilogy of Slayers fanfic. And played the fanmade modules for Neverwinter Nights that he'd made, like Penultima.
And interesting thing about his webnovels was that they weren't just "prose that's posted on the web" like we tend to use the term now, but liked to really use the medium to do things like play with the formatting of the text and color of the page, or a chapter broken up into four parts that could be read in any order, or a chapter in the form of a flash animation game.
I had no idea that he was still writing, much less had gotten anything published.
Oh yeah, I've read his first Slayers fanfic and at least most of Starting Out Sideways, though I never got much farther than that. Probably because the survivors' base is way less interesting than his unfinished logo job that somehow is also a map of the city.
Every SFF novella published in the 60s is like the boldest, most wildly imaginative ideas you've ever seen, making you wonder how we fell from such creativity to the widespread clichés of today, followed by the limpest, most anticlimactic ending imaginable, and also every character is a sociopath. You gotta love it.
I'm saying that I think that use-per-day is a bad mechanic for multiple reasons, including how making a "one-shot" ability like a spell slot strong enough to be worth using will often make it so powerful that it will largely render irrelevant those characters who only have unlimited-use abilities, and even if you tried to add some mechanical tradeoff to resting like the enemies growing stronger over time, it would still be bad game design for narrative reasons, because it introduces an expectation to have the opportunity to bring the events to a grinding halt for an extended period to restore resources. Think of all the films you've seen where most of the events take place in a single day, or otherwise in rapid succession, without any opportunity for the heroes to stop and get eight hours of sleep: Star Wars, Die Hard and Die Hard With A Vengeance, Alien, Commando, High Noon, Escape From New York, Jurassic Park, The Warriors, The Goonies, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing. You can't really tell stories like those effectively in a game that works primarily on use-per-day mechanics.
We've been off-topic for a while now, but I think you're conflating "games with this mechanic cannot and should not emulate these touchstones I already know and like" with "this mechanic is bad". Your preferred game mechanics probably produce some excellent games! But, like, please don't insult baseball for not being soccer.
Huh. I wouldn't class Neverwhere as horror so much as, like, con-adjacent travelogue*, but that fits.
*With a darn weird character arc. There was a perfect opportunity for the thing that let the main character survive the suicide cave in the allegory-for-being-homeless dimension be that his common-law-wife-except-it's-England chased him down, and then instead he just survives where no one else did for no particular reason, and she forgets him and there's hints that he'll get together with the teenager he was arguing with her about helping.
By the way, the newest entry in the queue (as of writing) is listed as 'Scrooge McDuck' instead of 'DuckTales' since it's the Carl Barks comic specifically
Oh, shit. I'd forgotten his name, but I remember the guy. I've read Sailor Nothing. It's, like, the original dark deconstruction of the magical girl genre. And I read some of the other stories that he had online 20+ years ago, like Unreal Estate and his trilogy of Slayers fanfic. And played the fanmade modules for Neverwinter Nights that he'd made, like Penultima.
He's actually written more Slayers fanfics than that. I believe he's written five and three of them were a trilogy. And he wrote some Ranma stuff, too. I think my favorite of his fanfics was Slayers Demiurge. But, like you, I don't think I've read any of this stuff written in the last couple decades, so I'm glad to hear his new stuff sounds good, too.
Yes, the author carried over the quest's shitpost suggestions into the webcomic version as parts of Bina's mental narration. On one hand, it makes the reader wonder just how poor Bina's mental health was even before she stumbled into the reality-warping horror. On the other hand, it does provide some much needed moments of levity in what would otherwise be an oppressively dark and unhappy tale.
I think a silly snarky headvoice in stressful situations doesn't obviously reflect poor mental health? It seems a little odd to me that you'd even say that. We doubtless have different experiences, though.
It's extra powerful when you consider that one of the maggot's agents is indeed a violent man who pretends to be harmless. And that the atemporal entity's ability to change the past as well as the present maps pretty readily to gaslighting tactics.
With how close the title is to City of Angels, I'm now trying to imagine Dave Smith being played by Nicolas Cage.
Also, Leila's told me she's not taking commissions for documentary reviews. Mockumentaries I presume are still okay though, since we've got one in the queue, in case anyone wants to commission I dunno Spinal Tap
Also, Leila's told me she's not taking commissions for documentary reviews. Mockumentaries I presume are still okay though, since we've got one in the queue, in case anyone wants to commission I dunno Spinal Tap
Jodorowsky's Dune, the multi-award-winning documentary on the failed adaptation. Said adaptation would've been insane, and not just because it was trying to make a blockbuster space opera pre-Star Wars.
It had Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, H.R. Giger, Moebius, and Pink Floyd all on board, a predicted runtime of twenty hours long, a mass shitting scene, and Paul dying only for everybody to become the Kwisatz Haderach.
Weirdly, just like the later Lynch adaptation, it also forgot that Paul isn't supposed to be the messiah, that being the whole point.
Said failed adaptation has been called 'the most important film never made' due to how much came about because of it. The Alien series was the big one, since Dan O'Bannon and H.R. Giger first met working on this film. Jodorowsky would also recycle some of his ideas for Dune into The Incal, one of the most critically acclaimed French comics ever.
Edit: You can check out some of the concept art for the failed adaptation here. Tumblr seems to have really taken to femboy Feyd Rautha
Welcome back, boys, girls, and [all-inclusive nonbinary identities category], to the AMAAAAAAAAZING digital circus! In our last exciting episode, which was also our first exciting episode, an unknown individual who can't remember her name but who we're all calling Pomni now was either absorbed orrrrrrrrrr personality-copied into a virtual reality video game seemingly meant for very young children, but inhabited by the imprisoned consciousnesses of an increasingly sanity-deprived gaggle of...well, nobody knows who any of them used to be! There's no leaving the so-called AMAAAAAAAAZING digital circus, and the artificial intelligence overseeing it can't seem to comprehend what they're even asking for when they beg it to release them. How KU-raaaazy is that?
...
Okay, I'm sorry, I'll stop. Caine's voice is just incredibly fun and surprisingly easy to write in.
Also, speaking of him, I thought he was named "Cane" on account of the cane he's always holding, but the creator has apparently explained that it's actually Creative Artificially Intelligent Networking Entity. So, it's spelled like the biblical Caine.
Anyway, episode 2, "Candy Carrier Chaos," is an all-around improvement on the pilot. Which is pretty encouraging, because the pilot was already good. While the bleakness of the comedy continues to verge on overbearing, it's mitigated by both some moments of genuine, sincere hope and warmth, and by hints that this story is actually going somewhere. There are more complex themes being set up, and plot details laid out toward some kind of eventual payoff. The series has some kind of Thing it wants to do, not just trippy black comedy.
The episode gives Pomni a little self-contained arc that opens and closes in the first and last scenes. An arc that's mostly about her overcoming the despair and trauma of her new environment, but also, I suspect, implies some things about who she was before being trapped in the game. It starts with her suffering a nightmare.
On one hand, I'm a little disappointed that we're still in the same animation style, when this would be a good opportunity to remind the audience that "Pomni" comes from a live action (or at least much more realistic-looking) world and the N64 aesthetic isn't natural for her. On the other, we know that she can't remember her name, so it's likely she doesn't remember any faces either, which would mean nothing to have a realistic-looking dream with. So, I get it. Anyway!
Pomni's dream has her spontaneously transforming into a glitch monster, and Caine and the other humans being smugly dismissive of her as she's tossed into the pit with all the others.
This might be sort of in-character for Jax the rabbit-guy. He's the one who copes by being unpleasant and hostile to everyone around him at every opportunity (though even he wouldn't be bro-ing it up with Caine like this, I don't think). It's absolutely not in character for Ragatha or any of the others. And, notably, while the broad sense of "not belonging" would naturally be haunting Pomni during her first virtual night, the specific focus on social rejection and failure to perform as expected is not at all an intuitive leap from her situation.
We're getting a look at something she brought with her from the real world, with the faces of her new peers standing in for the ones she can't recall.
...
Also? Very trans. Like, textbook trans. Even moreso than the trans-analogous stuff in the previous episode.
...
The next morning, with Pomni still reeling from the everything both dreamed and otherwise, Caine inflicts a new minigame on the group. He excitedly boasts that this is his most immersive, most actualized virtual scenario to date. Most of the episode's runtime is spent in this new simulation of Caine's, and I feel like this has to be a send-up of AI art.
The scenario is that the Candy Kingdom has had its capital city raided by bandits, who made off with an enormous armored truck full of precious maple syrup. The Princess of Candyland - an anthropomorphic cookie with hideously uneven facial features - welcomes these "brave knights" into her kingdom before sending them after the bandits. In a war rig. Which she refers to by name as a "war rig." It actually looks like the one from Mad Max: Fury Road, only made of frosting and gingerbread.
Also? The common citizens of the Candy Kingdom aren't candy people like you'd expect. They're featureless wireframe mannequins.
The bandits, meanwhile, are a band of thuggish anthropomorphic crocodiles with roughneck Australian accents, to go with the Mad Max influence.
My favorite part of this is that you can totally see the logic chains that a generative AI might follow to result in this clusterfuck. Like, what's the most generic fantasy RPG sidequest ever? Go get stuff back from bandits. This is a family-friendly adventure, though, so...fantasy...kingdom...candy kingdom! We have a match! As for the bandits now, well, we're chasing them on a road. Road chase with bandits. Mad Max: Fury Road. Australia. Crocodiles. Yup, these pieces definitely all belong together, the associations check out!
...heh. This has me thinking about Super Mario Odyssey. Odyssey's aesthetics and art styles were just about as schizophrenic as this, but it worked despite that due to them having tonal continuity. Everything still acts like it's part of a Mario game, even if it doesn't look or sound like it. Hence, the disparate aesthetics come across as a joke that the game is telling you, rather than a joke at the game's expense. As we'll see in a moment, Caine is unable to grasp these kinds of nuances.
On top of that, the unimportant background NPC's being undecorated wire frames suggests things about Caine. In the pilot, he said that he doesn't like people to see his unfinished work. In this episode, he's really excited to throw them into this new minigame he claims to have just finished. The obvious implication here is that he can't always actually distinguish between his unfinished work and his finished work.
...
...hmm. I'm beginning to have a theory about Caine. The way that he bluescreens and glitches over some of his dialogue, even in situations where it should all be pre-scripted. The way his manifestation looks like free-floating bodyparts hovering around an empty suit. The way he doesn't seem able to comprehend some things that a game master AI definitely should be able to, and how he's had to make inelegant workarounds for those things.
Caine isn't just malfunctioning. He's incomplete. This VR game and its overseer AI were cancelled mid-development, but somehow ended up running in this half-built state on a server somewhere, and somehow people are getting trapped/copied into it.
He's also glitched the fuck out even on top of that, though. Perhaps as a result of trying to do his job while lacking all of the software he needs to do it. Essentially driving himself insane laboring at his impossible task. For instance, there's no way in hell that having the candy people decorate their palace with a stained glass depiction of "God" could have ever belonged in the algorithm.
Princess Cookie's word, not mine.
...
The gang goes chasing the bandits, and their vehicles clash in a series of candy-themed reprises of setpieces from Fury Road. It works for me in the way that this kind of "allegedly parody something just by doing a thing from it" comedy often doesn't, and the lampshading that the characters do doesn't seem like insincere ass-covering. The reason being that the obvious intended joke here isn't that we're doing a Mad Max thing, it's Caine's creative bankruptcy.
Anyway. The altercation results in both vehicles offroading each other, with Pomni on the bandits' vehicle. The gang's war rig falls into a lake of molten fudge where they need to talk down a chocolatey expie of the shit monster from Conker's Bad Furday.
This subplot is the lighter one of the episode, and an opportunity for the show to flesh out the other prisoners some more. Mostly via the personality conflict between Ragatha the sweet ragdoll lady and Jax the asshole rabbit, with the others kinda being collateral damage. Notably, the barely-sane old-timer King has a few moments where he seems to know more about the Digital Circus than he lets on, and quickly changes the subject before anyone can ask about it. Hmm. There's a story there. Curious.
Meanwhile, the bandits' rig, which Pomni had just boarded, goes flying off at a weird angle that catches it in a weird crook of the rocks, where it promptly glitches through the floor.
It's able to blink itself back rightside up on the ground a moment later. But Pomni and the bandit leader have already fallen off into a secret world below.
Wandering around a little bit, the two of them independently find their way to the Gary's Mod templates for this game. Which means the bandit finds himself staring at an inanimate version of himself and his cronies.
When Caine said that this was his most immersive and detailed creation to date, he meant that the (named, non-wireframe) characters all have richly detailed backstories, dynamic personalities, and the ability to change and develop in response to player input. And, remember when I said that Caine doesn't quite get the concept of tone beyond the level of "keep it family friendly?" Well. These dorky crocodile-men come from a semi-nomadic village fallen on hard times, and they've turned to banditry out of desperation. In particular, the leader is desperate to provide medical treatment for his dying mother who raised him by herself after losing her husband during his early childhood, and the maple syrup they took (either it has medicinal properties, or it can be traded for such) was his last desperate hope of doing so.
Now, the bandit realizes that he can't picture his mother's face. The village that he thinks he comes from is off the map. It never actually existed. He was created with juuust enough memories of it to feel convincing during his potential dialogue with the players.
His situation isn't exactly like Pomni's, but it's easily close enough for her to relate. Unable to remember his loved ones, or even really himself. Set on an utterly futile succession of tasks that never had any stakes or consequences, despite being made to feel like they do. It isn't stated in as many words, but a few of Pomni's reactions suggest that she's thinking of the obvious existential horror angle as well: does she actually know that she's a digitized human consciousness herself? She remembers putting on the headset that sent her here, but is that memory genuine? Is she an NPC herself, with Caine having simply lost track of which is which?
The bandit might not actually be sentient. His reactions to learning what he and his world really are might just be Chat GPT stuff. But, he seems awfully convincing. If he isn't a p-zombie, then that means that Caine's NPC creations can in fact be self-aware. In which case, it is entirely possible that Pomni is an NPC. "I think, therefore I am" might not be an applicable metric.
And really. If the Circus can absorb or copy human minds, why couldn't it create human-equivalent ones from scratch? The ability to do one all but necessitates the ability to do the other.
Pomni seems to be thinking along these lines herself when she does her best to comfort the bandit. And also, by proxie, herself.
If his life is a lie and he doesn't actually exist, well...at least he's not alone in that. They can be here for each other. And really, isn't that what life is all about? Togetherness? The relationships you cultivate? If they're capable of having friendships, of caring about each other, then isn't that the better part of "reality" and "meaning?"
Also, his name is Gummygoo. Pomni's reaction ("Yeah, that's just about as stupid as mine.") is one of the better one-liners of the episode.
He agrees to come back to the Circus hubworld with her and the others, if Caine will allow it. He'll join the humans (if they really are humans). They manage to glitch themselves back onto the map with a replica of the stolen syrup truck, and regroup with the others who have just captured the other bandits.
The other crocomen are sent off to their nonexistent village with the replica truck, while Gummygoo returns the original one to Candytown to complete the quest.
It's not at all surprising when Caine wordlessly deletes Gummygoo upon them bringing him back to the hub. Expected, but that doesn't make it hurt less. Caine's explanation for his action here, though, is interesting. He says that if he lets NPC's persist too long inside of the hub, he might start to mix up which are which. And, just for a moment, he looks and sounds genuinely haunted.
It's the most humanlike show of emotion from Caine thus far.
...
On one hand, this makes it more likely that Pomni and the others are in fact human, or copied from humans.
On the other hand, it seems like Caine did make this mixup once before. And that the trauma of realizing what he'd done might have done even more damage to the developing AI. His inhumanity and incomprehension may be at least partly self-inflicted.
I wonder. Did Caine ever an Abel?
...
After Caine fucks off to do whatever he does when not visible to the humans, Ragatha - the most compassionate of the other prisoners - invites Pomni to the funeral service they're holding for the recently abstracted Kaughmo. He's technically still alive, in horrible suffering glitchmonster form, but they still have a tradition of doing memorials for people when this happens to them.
Seeing everyone laugh and cry as they recount their memories of Kaughmo, and thinking about her brief experience getting to know and help Gummygoo, Pomni has her first genuine smile of the series. It's weak, but it's genuine.
Even if they're trapped forever in kiddy sugarbowl hell, even if any of them could be killed or rendered worse than dead at any time, they have the thing that makes life worth living in each other. Pomni's nightmare in the beginning, of not being missed, of not passing muster, has had two antidotes applied to it. Gummygoo had his failure to perform as he was "meant to," with his existential breakdown, but she still found value in him. She sees the way the others mourn Kaughmo, and she knows that they care about each other as well; if she could have empathy for Gummygoo, then surely she herself can be accepted and valued by the others.
And hey, Gummygoo might not even be dead. According to Ragatha, Caine does like to reuse NPC's sometimes.
Jax is the only prisoner who doesn't attend the memorial. But, we have a brief moment with him that suggests that - much like Caine - he has reasons for avoiding attachment.
Maybe there's hope for him as well, much as he tries to quench it.
A poignant episode, with an uplifting throughline despite the continuing darkness and hopelessness. Whatever one suffers, just not being alone is what makes it endurable. It's perhaps the only thing in life, regardless of what kind of life, that really, really matters, ultimately. In that way, perhaps Pomni is actually better off here than she was in her human life. Or better off than her human original self currently is, as the case may be.
Not that there isn't serious room for improvement, of course. But still.
On a lighter note, I'm amused by the conjunction of "Nintendo Gnostic" with the commentary on AI art. A flawed creation, empty, lifeless, and unspiritual, made by a flawed creator to blind humanity to the truth. It works pretty damned well. Especially with Caine leaning toward the more sympathetic interpretations of the gnostic demiurge. A pathetic figure, broken and trying his best even though doing so just breaks himself even more. Isn't that the state of what passes for "AI" development these days?
Anyway. The altercation results in both vehicles offroading each other, with Pomni on the bandits' vehicle. The gang's war rig falls into a lake of molten fudge where they need to talk down a chocolatey expie of the shit monster from Conker's Bad Furday.
Both ADC and Conker are probably drawing from an even older source: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=r2H6L4MmPUo
Man there were a lot of shoggoths in old kid's animations. Well ok mainly this one and the My Little Pony one I know offhand, but twice is a lot.
Since we've got Bewitched coming up next (a Halloween episode too), I wanted to address something first.
People often say that Bewitched was the inspiration for the entire Magical Girl genre. That's only partly true. Himitsu no Akko-chan, the first ever Magical Girl manga, predates Bewitched by two years (and Sabrina the Teenage Witch by a few months).
Now the first ever Magical Girl anime, Sally the Witch, was indeed inspired by Bewitched. But naturally it still had other inspirations, the children's novel The Magic Stick being one of them.
Calling Bewitched the inspiration for the otherwise distinct Magical Girlfriend genre might be more accurate, a main example of which we've also got coming up
Both ADC and Conker are probably drawing from an even older source: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=r2H6L4MmPUo
Man there were a lot of shoggoths in old kid's animations. Well ok mainly this one and the My Little Pony one I know offhand, but twice is a lot.
Okay, I'm sorry, I'll stop. Caine's voice is just incredibly fun and surprisingly easy to write in.
Also, speaking of him, I thought he was named "Cane" on account of the cane he's always holding, but the creator has apparently explained that it's actually Creative Artificially Intelligent Networking Entity. So, it's spelled like the biblical Caine.
To weigh in on the debate, the only place I've seen it spelled 'Caine' with an 'e' on the end is Vampire the Masquerade.
But that was technically the biblical character, so if it's an alternate rendering of the name from the way the Bibles I've seen had translated it, it would explain why they went that route.
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a good source that enabled screencaps, so this review will have to be text-only.
Have you ever seen a story that is trying to say something, but accidentally says much more than it intended to?
The 1965 American sitcom series "Bewitched" is possibly the strongest case of this that I've ever run across, and "The Witches are Out" is one of the episodes that does it the most.
I'd seen bits and pieces of "Bewitched" reruns on TV as a kid. Never paid much attention to it. Just seemed like another of those corny old 1960's sitcoms whose fantasy elements didn't do much to make it more interesting. I heard more interesting things about it as I got older, though, and after watching the episode for today's review I decided to also go back and watch the pilot to give myself more context. And...well. Like I said. This is a knowingly political work. The creators are on record saying they intended it as such. But I don't know if they realized just how far their own political subtext actually went.
The premise of "Bewitched" is that, in a proto-masquerade urban fantasy world, a young witch named Samantha has decided to marry a mortal human man named Darrin, and - in an act of rebellion against her people's traditions - reveal the existence of witches and warlocks to him. The two of them try to keep Samantha's nature a secret from the rest of Darrin's family and social group, while also dealing with disapproval, condescension, and occasional supernatural dickery from Samantha's clan. The series is best remembered for Samantha's signature move of doing magic by wiggling her nose (usually with comical musical accompaniment); a movement that actress Elizabeth Montgomery could do and most people can't.
It's unsurprising that Bewitched came from the mind of a Jewish showrunner who had been an adult during the rise and fall of the nazis, and who was writing during the height of the US civil rights saga and just a few years before the Stonewall riots. Writer and actors have all stated in later interviews that they talked backstage about Samantha and Darrin's marriage being both queer-coded and miscegenation-coded while keeping it quiet around the studio suits.
Sounds all lovely and progressive. But. Well.
"The Witches are Out" is a Halloween episode, and it concerns the witches' generational resentment of their portrayal in mortal media. When Samantha was a kid, her family would outright take a vacation to India or somewhere to get away from the Halloween aesthetic with its endless microaggressions. The episode begins with Samantha being paid a visit by her aunts and the lot of them commiserating over how unpleasant this time of year is.
In this scene, Samantha comes across as a total pickme. Spending the entire conversation defending mortal witch-hatred with the justification that most of them don't know witches are real. While also serving tea and cleaning dishes by hand, because she's trying to avoid using magic in order to be a good, non-weird housewife for Darrin, as her aunts urge her to just save herself all this trouble and effort and use her telekinesis. She's not endearing herself to me here. Still, she accepts that they could at least be doing something to try and change things for the better, and that since her husband works in advertising maybe he can help them put a pro-witch message out there.
Meanwhile, Darrin is handed a major project, coming up with a mascot and logo for a candy company's Halloween specials. The client wants it to be a witch. Specifically, a warty, green-skinned, long-nosed hag with a diabolical grin. He accepts, and that day at home Samantha walks into his studio to ask him about improving the portrayal of witches in pop culture only to find him literally sketching her people's Happy Merchant equivalent for an ad aimed at children.
The fight that they have in the wake of this is...awkward. It's weird. On one hand, Darrin's actual argument ("how can the people I'm catering to with this be bigoted against a group they literally think is fictional!") is one that has some merit within the silly world of the story. On the other hand, his delivery, Samantha's own arguments, and the general tone and vibe of the scene are a hell of a lot realer than that. To the point where I'm a little discombobulated by him arguably being at least sort-of in the right. I think this is what TVtropes calls a "Space Whale Aesop?" Where a fantasy metaphor is sort of undercut by the nature of its fantasism.
Darrin eventually gives in, after realizing how badly he's in the process of alienating his wife. His new version of the logo features a sexy witch that bears more than a passing resemblance to Samantha. It's funny, because the slutification of anything and everything Halloween-related in the last couple decades would make sexy witch logos (even on child-targeted ads, creepily enough) perfectly normal nowadays, buuuuut this is the 1960's. Being an archetypal dorky sitcom husband, Darrin is unable to come up with an argument in defence of his changes other than "just imagine how insulting a real witch would find this portrayal, if witches were real!" With dire results for his job security.
The plot is resolved by Samantha and her aunts appearing to the client in his midnight home and terrorizing him into reconsidering his determination to make witches seem ugly and evil. The ad campaign ends up being a smashing success, because a lot of Halloween shopping turns out to be done by dads rather than moms and/or kids, and the sexy witch pinup definitely gets their attention. Silly, on-brand sort of resolution.
As a sitcom, it's pretty much "okay." Some really good gags throughout, and brilliant comedic facial expressions from the cast members that help sell the humor of the scenarios. But there's also a lot of really lame gags that I don't think would have been any less lame in the sixties, and a really obnoxious laugh track that cuts in at the most inexplicable moments. But the humor - successful and otherwise - isn't what merits the real analysis here.
Something that really jumped out at me in the "terrorizing the client" scene, though, is that Samantha specifically seems to be taking a sadistic pleasure in what they're doing, and her aunts don't.
Considering Samantha's earlier pickme characterization, her determination to not use magic, to not do anything "witchy" in her day-to-day life, this feels a loooooot like externalized self-loathing. Like maybe the evil, ugly witch is actually something she (unlike her aunts) actually identifies with, she isn't happy about it, and she takes a perverse delight in making others unhappy about it as well when she can justify it to herself.
And...there's more to this as well.
From the pilot onward, part of the show's premise is that Samantha has to not use magic in order to be a satisfactory wife for Darrin. On a surface level, you could just call this a silly sitcom plot device that the characters are getting worked up about for no really convincing reason. Subtextually, it's a non-normative couple (queer, interracial, take your pick. Not many things were normative for mid-twentieth century white America) struggling to pass muster in a society that won't tolerate deviance, with most of the burden falling on one partner while the more privileged one is at least somewhat oblivious. But on a different subtextual plane...this is a woman completely disempowering herself in order to satisfy her husband, and then surreptitiously reprising that power to spitefully lash out at other people behind his back.
And there's still more.
Like all too many sitcoms, "Bewitched" pairs a smart, interesting, sexy wife with a mediocre, childish, dorky husband. "Bewitched" is better than most in at least letting the husband be good looking and artistic, so you can see why she might theoretically be into him, but overall he's still mostly the archetypal sitcom manchild dad. In some ways, this pairing is subversive of patriarchal norms, showing the woman being the real competent adult in the household. In others, it's the opposite of subversive. Even the dumb, mediocre guy is entitled to a super-hot, super-talented woman, and she'll endlessly bend over backwards for him and forgive the manifold insensitivities and indignities he bombards her with, because that's the natural hierarchy.
In this case though, the hypercompetent sitcom dreamgirl wife isn't just subordinating herself to a mediocre shmuck. She's literally disempowering herself for him, explicitly for the purpose of "being a proper wife." And also, this episode strongly implies, cutting her own witch family out of her life whenever he or his own family and friends are watching (she repeatedly makes a point of having her aunts in and out before he can see them). And...at that point, we're not even just talking about gender anymore. We're also talking about race again. But not in the same way as before.
...
Granted, the pilot did have a scene that works against this reading. Samantha's conversation with her overbearing, disapproving mother about her decision to marry a mortal reads as an aristocratic parent being outraged at their child for shacking up with a peasant, casting the witches rather than the mortals as the priveleged ingroup (and that does make more sense, inherently. This is a subject that I've seen discussed repeatedly with regard to stuff like X-Men, with the persecuted minority being the ones with superpowers sort of defeating the purpose).
But the rest of the show that I've seen has the power dynamics going the opposite way, if only because of Samantha's ostensible self-hate. No matter how powerful witches are compared to mortals, and how befuddled and bedevilled Darrin is by Samantha's family, it's somehow always still HIS world that they are hiding in the cracks of.
...
This show is depicting how everyone and everything besides traditional white men are consumed, reprocessed, and subordinated under traditional white maleness. Agency, culture, tradition, all must be wiped away in the transformation of the feminine, the free, the foreign, the savage, into effectively a consumer product for the hegemonic ingroup.
The real source of conflict in "Bewitched" isn't mortals not liking witches, it's the existence of the nuclear family structure within the imperial core. The antagonist isn't bigotry, it's their marriage itself. She shouldn't have married him. She shouldn't have ever wanted to marry him. Their matrimony is anathema to everything she is, and her acceptance of it is nothing short of spiritual suicide.
So, like I said, I'm not sure if this show ever realized what it was actually saying. Maybe it did. But I don't think so.
So, wait, by the end was the show subtextually opposed to interracial marriage, or at least marriage between someone from an oppressed group and someone from a dominant group?
I'm thinking about this paragraph, specifically:
"The real source of conflict in "Bewitched" isn't mortals not liking witches, it's the existence of the nuclear family structure within the imperial core. The antagonist isn't bigotry, it's their marriage itself. She shouldn't have married him. She shouldn't have ever wanted to marry him. Their matrimony is anathema to everything she is, and her acceptance of it is nothing short of spiritual suicide.
So, like I said, I'm not sure if this show ever realized what it was actually saying. Maybe it did. But I don't think so."
EDIT: I guess the metaphor here might instead be a feminist one, that any relationship in which one partner has to suppress and degrade so much of herself to be part of it isn't worth participating in in the first place.
You can see why a lot of the praise Malcolm in the Middle got was for not having one.
I've heard there are later episodes that address Samantha's self-loathing and say that her bottling up her magic isn't healthy, though given the sitcom format I doubt they change the course of the show much.
It's telling there's never been a major Bewitched reboot, despite how being old yet still popular would make it a prime target for one. There's been a couple of foreign remakes, a spinoff about Samantha's daughter, and that meta 2005 movie about actors playing Bewitched characters a la Kiss Me Kate, and that's it (also that one WandaVision episode if it counts).
Every other attempted reboot has gone nowhere, and that's probably because Bewitched is just too retroactively uncomfortable for the reasons Leila went over. At least it's easier to go back to than say The Donna Reed Show.
It still amuses me to imagine a far-right chud watching Bewitched thinking it'd be a perfect example of tradwifery, only for this episode to pull the rug from under them as they find Samantha chewing out her husband for an offensive caricature
I maintained from an early age, when like all latchkey children of my generation I watched 60s sitcoms after school and in the early morning, because that was what was on, that I Dream of Jeannie was the superior Magical Girlfriend Show, and I think this review made it click in my head as to why I found that one more enjoyable. All the subtext of Jeannie and Major Nelson's relationship was a lot less unpleasant, and Jeannie literally called him 'Master' all the time, because he was.
To emphasize this--the relationship where there was actual ownership struck me on a fundamental level as more healthy and having more give and take than what we saw in Bewitched.
To emphasize this--the relationship where there was actual ownership struck me on a fundamental level as more healthy and having more give and take than what we saw in Bewitched.
From what little of the episode or two I've seen I think that the guy didn't usually treat her as property outside of trying to convince her to act like she's not a magical creature bound to him in front of others.
