Horizon: Zero Dawn - An Absolute Masterpiece

What I love most about Horizon Zero Dawn is that now that it's finished, I don't feel the need to look for fanfiction. I feel satisfied. I'm stoked beyond belief for the DLC, don't get me wrong - plus, I ordered the art book while the credits were rolling.

My roommate and I finished this game last night after pouring 46 hours into it. Exploring until we had nothing left to uncover. I enjoyed every moment of it.

I play a lot of video games, my dudes, and I've never felt satisfied like this after a game was finished.

The soundtrack, the acting, the scenery... Above all, the sense of wonder I felt while playing it...? I'm only disappointed that I've played it already because that means I won't be able to play it ever again with fresh eyes. It is so visually appealing, and so hopeful towards what the world could be in the event of an apocalypse... I always tend to lean towards more hopeful post-apocalyptic scenarios, like how the world will grow back in the 'life, uh, finds a way' type of mindset. Sure, the world will end one day, but the trees don't need us to maintain them. This game takes that into account, and the time spent exploring 'ancient ruins', which is something so simple as actual ruins of real places standing today in our world, is fascinating. Climbing skeletons of skyscrapers? Finding ancient artifacts which are wristwatches? Finding the metal skeletons of cars? Absolutely fascinating.

From the opening scene I was hooked. Matriarchal society? Outcast Dad-figure raising a baby into a hardened warrior who still retains her curiosity? Sci-fi universe in a post apocalyptic earth now run by tribal colonies of the humans who are left, most of whom aren't white people? Casual LGBT content that you barely notice because people are just who they are and it's no big deal? I'm in.

This game does what others haven't. Lady main character who is vulnerable, who is so scared all the time, and yet so brave. You struggle with Aloy, you cry for Aloy, you cheer for Aloy.

I can't talk about most of the story because of spoilers, and that's okay, because I want everyone who plays this game to go in knowing as little as possible. This game is an absolute masterpiece, and I am so thankful to Guerrilla Games for sharing it with us.

If you are able, I highly recommend this game. Check out the trailer here, and listen to the entire soundtrack on Spotify.

I read My Brother's Husband

After I did my review of My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, people asked me if I was planning on reading My Brother's Husband. Little did they know I had already ordered it and was waiting impatiently for it.

Warned to have tissues handy, I prepared myself for a wild ride.

I have to say that after reading My Lesbian Experience, My Brother's Husband was tame in comparison. I got teary, but never wept.

I was thankful for this, in the end.

My Brother's Husband is about a family whose lives are turned upside down when Yaichi and his daughter Kana are introduced to a large Canadian man named Mike who shows up at their door in Japan one day claiming to be Yaichi's twin brother's husband.

Ryoji, Yaichi's twin, has passed away recently, and Mike has no family other than his brother in law and his niece.

So, the family tries to get to know each other.

What results is a charming and painful look at cultural differences and their views on homophobia and how it is handled, both by the locals, and by Yaichi himself, coming to terms with the idea of his brother being gay, and how much Mike really loved Ryoji.

I was surprised, honestly, to read such a family friendly comic by artist Gengoroh Tagame, who usually does books like this. It was refreshing, and Kana, the daughter, was a delight, explaining simple things to her father with the innocence of a child. Why do these men kiss each other? Because they're in love. It's simple.

The volume that I purchased contains volumes 1 and 2 of the manga, and it came out in May 2017. I've scoured the internet wondering when the second half will be out, but I can't find any information regarding that.

Still, I will keep my eyes open for it, because the volume I read was an absolute delight. Check it out if you get the chance!

Legend of Korra: Turf Wars Part One

Note: I will not spoil the content of the comic because I would rather you go out and buy the comic yourself.

Irene Koh is a great artist. I've been following her on Twitter for awhile now, and when I saw that she was going to be doing the art for the new Korra comic, I was like, wow, that's cool.

Then I heard the comic would be Korrasami centric and thought, finally, the lgbt content we deserve.

This comic didn't disappoint. With great story by Michael DiMartino (as usual, the Avatar series is one of my favorites), beautiful coloring by Vivian Ng and art by Irene Koh, I was very much looking forward to this story.

Unfortunately, as the internet tends to do, I was spoiled for every. single. lgbt related. piece of content in the book.

Thanks a lot, Twitter.

That said, I still enjoyed reading the story as a whole. My biggest disappointment in any of these Avatar comics is the six month wait between each part. I closed the comic, saw that the next part will come out in January 2018 and yelled in frustration.

Oh well, them's the breaks, I suppose.

Korra and Asami come back from their vacation in the Spirit World to find out that a big corporation wants to use the space that the portal resides in to make an amusement park.

On the other end of things, there is gang activity that is only increasing, political unrest (what else is new in Republic City), and the city's edge is filled with refugees looking for homes to call their own.

This is a lot to balance when coming back from a restful vacation with your new girlfriend.

The LGBT related content is refreshing and respectful. I related a lot to all of the coming out scenes in all forms of them.

I'm looking forward to seeing what January 2018 brings, and delighted by the fact that a mainstream comic has two women who love each other kiss on the second page.

If you like the Avatar series, please give it a read! All of the comics are great... This one needs a little extra support so we can continue to prove to comic industries that healthy LGBT content is the content we want.

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness - A Review

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness - by Nagata Kabi

Content Warning: Talk of depression and anxiety. This book is quite real in its descriptions of feelings and can and likely will be triggering for certain individuals.

Where do I even start?

I’ve heard about this charming manga for a while now; people have been talking about it on Twitter, passing word around in local comic scenes. I checked my local comic show and unfortunately the author wasn’t there that time. She went to TCAF, but not VanCaf! That’s alright.

So recently I did some adulting and rewarded myself by ordering this book, as well as My Brother’s Husband, which has yet to arrive in the mail.

Reading comics late at night when you have to work the next morning always seems like a good idea, don’t you think?

I’m glad I read it. It’s after 2am and I’m going to be so tired tomorrow, but I’m still so glad I read it.

Nagata writes in such a charming way, and yet is so real it hurts. I cried from the moment I opened the book to the moment I closed it. I am a very soft person, it’s true, but each page had something different that struck me.

Her anxiety and depression, her feeling like she didn’t deserve to eat, or didn’t deserve good things, and was constantly striving to please her parents - I get that. We as young(ish) people (I’m 31) are taught from our youth to live life a certain way, and expectations are heaped on our heads. I know that there are culture gaps in what I’m about to say, so I’ll just say what I know from my own experience in Western Canadian culture. It is expected of you to pass high school with good grades, go to post secondary and get a job in your field that pays well and supports you. You can move out and meet someone and get married and have two and a half children and a white picket fence, etc, etc. Right? Wrong.

Since Millennials seem to be killing everything these days, including the (North) American Dream, that’s not how things have been. It’s certainly not how my life has been. I related to this story in a lot of ways in that Nagata helped me feel like she was not only talking about herself, but also about so many people I know in my life who struggle with anxiety and depression.

I recognized things she said about feeling like she wasn’t good enough, didn’t deserve to eat, couldn’t try anymore, as things I’ve heard from close friends of mine.

Adults expect from us to be ‘salaried employees’, to have health insurance, to not need assistance, when the truth is - we can’t do this on our own. We need these human interactions, these relationships to function as normal human beings.

Reading Nagata’s desperate desire for human contact, in the form of hugs from an older woman to make up for affection she didn’t get from her mother, was eye-opening. There is so much that we as a society, Western or Eastern, any society, really, don’t talk about. We should be able to ask for affection if we need it. We should talk about it.

I’m pleased that Nagata did.

In regards to the whole scenario of her hiring an escort for her first time and then being completely confused because she didn’t understand her own body? I get that too. This book was incredibly real, and I found myself crying because I was so happy that Nagata’s first experience in a sexual situation was a pleasant one.

I felt her embarrassment, but also her confusion. Her writing and art were so perfectly, naturally, charmingly displayed, even while talking about how much easier death would have been.

Halfway through the book, I was overwhelmed and had to put it down to message a friend who struggles with depression and anxiety to tell her how much I love her and appreciate how hard she’s working to get out of bed every day. I understand her a little better, and probably a little bit about myself, too.

If you buy it to read it because there’s a nipple on the cover, you might find it’s not at all the kind of story you’re expecting. It’s not that kind of book at all. But you might be glad you read it anyway. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Thank you, Nagata Kabi, for writing this charming, yet heart-wrenching book, and showing us a real slice of what it’s like to live with depression. Time to go dry my tears.

Book Review - Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda

Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda (2015) - Becky Albertalli

This book was recommended to me by my friend Ian, a fellow writer and dear friend. We devour lgbt fiction like it’s our only sustenance, and are quick to recommend books to each other.

I’m so glad he recommended this one.

To summarize quickly, Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda is about closeted gay teen Simon Spier who meets an anonymous boy through a tumblr post made on their school’s tumblr account. They start emailing. His world comes crashing down when class-clown Martin discovers the emails one day when Simon forgets to logout of the school’s computer and uses the emails as a source of blackmail to get Simon to set Martin up with Simon’s best friend, Abby. Chaos and teen panic ensues.

This book was so charming I squealed multiple times and kept sending my friend pictures of pages as I was reading them, delighting him as well, because he got to re-experience which parts of the book made him smile and now was enjoying how much they also made me smile, almost like we were in a long-distance book club.

I proceeded to lend the book to my coworker who sent me angry texts while she was reading it, so I was almost able to tell by the page without pictorial evidence where she was in the book based on the level of anger in the texts, ranging from “I hate you how could you do this to me” to “I’m having flashbacks, my gay heart can’t handle this” to “Simon my sweet angel” to finally “That was a great book.”

I have to say, however, that the mark of a great writer is how angry the readers get while they’re reading it and I got plenty angry. One of the characters reminded me far too much of a friend I had while I was in high school, to the point where even her redemption scene in the end didn’t cause me to cheer for her. That may be a problem of my own; perhaps I am carrying some bitterness towards that friendship in my heart still, but it was hard to get past. That, and Martin is a little piece of garbage who I’m sure will resonate with many readers because we’ve all had a ‘friend’ like him.

This book does a good job of translating how uncomfortable it is to be a closeted gay teenager. Terrified, panicky, curious, uncertain...did I mention terrified?

Albertalli does a great job of portraying high school feelings - I was transported back (fifteen years) to my high school days and felt those emotions, ones you prefer to forget, and that isn’t easy to do so vividly. I admire Albertalli’s ability to sound like a teenager in her writing, instead of other instances where teens sound like adult men trying to write like teenagers.

Also her ‘about’ section is incredibly charming and full of fun ‘about me’ facts that aren’t typical, and I appreciate that.

I will definitely be watching for future works by Albertalli.

Happy N7 Day

Hi friends.

What does N7 day mean to me?

Well, I'm a newbie to the Mass Effect fandom, so it means a lot of different things. I haven't been part of this fandom for very long, less than a year, in fact, so sometimes I feel almost like it shouldn't mean as much to me, that I shouldn't own merch yet, that I shouldn't fawn over N7 tattoos that people have. 

I played Mass Effect for the first time at the end of January and for the next three months the three games consumed me. Molly and I were living in a crappy basement suite, we were unhappy, and honestly the only light in my day was video games.

I got let go from my job shortly after I beat the first Mass Effect game, so 2 and 3 kinda...carried me through before we moved to our other place.

Mass Effect means a lot to me in the typical 'discovery/be brave/true to yourself' kinda way, but in another way it helped me...not how I expected.

When I was a kid I used to be terrified of alien movies. The 'grays' as it were, were the scariest things to me, and I would check around corners, in my closets, would lie awake afraid of aliens coming to get me in my room (or any room) at night.

Alien movies have never sat well with me, giving me nightmares, so I just didn't bother watching them at all knowing they'd trigger poor sleep or scary images for months to follow.

Knowing Bioware by now through Dragon Age, I trusted them to handle the alien situation and dove in head first. I'd heard by now that apparently Garrus was pretty cool. 

Three games later and I love Garrus (because who doesn't), and now I'm working on my Renegade playthrough where I'm pursuing Thane (and we all know how that ends up). Aliens may make me nervous in a real-world sense of 'what if they're really out there', because they very well could be, but I'm a little less terrified of them now and can sleep at night.

I can thank a certain video game series for that.

Discussions on Sexual Fluidity with a Straight Man

Never mind that he's white and middle aged, today I had a discussion in regards to my sexuality, and sexuality in general with a straight man today.

Let me preface this properly. He's a lovely man, we've known each other for years. He works at a car dealership where I used to work, and we were friends then, and every now and again I drop by and we talk for at least an hour. He's a lovely man, and we respect each other very much.

Don't read this with him as a villain. He was asking me legitimate questions, trying his hardest to understand, no matter how I simplified it. I appreciated his earnestness to understand, even though he couldn't wrap his head around it. Trying to educate yourself in things you don't understand is important, and he tried.

The conversation started simply, asking how Molly is, because most of the people at the dealership knew when I first started dating her. Yes, we're doing well, yes, we're still together, oh guess what, we have hamsters now, would you like to see pictures of them on my phone? (I did that. I'm that kind of Hamster Mom.)

He asks me simply, warning me ever often to tell him if he's stepping over the line. I'll skip a few of the more personal questions because they are just that, personal, but I'll cover the gist of it. 

He asks me first how it all works, being that I say I like both genders. We'd been talking about my job situation in regards to losing the other one, I told him what the old boss said about me being a lesbian, and I threw in "I'm not a lesbian, but I'm in a lesbian relationship". For whatever reason that really threw him.

"What do you mean by that?" he asks me.

"What do you mean, what do I mean?" Because really, what...don't you understand?

He doesn't understand how I can be attracted to both genders. He asks me questions involving how can I be attracted to Molly, but also if I see a cute boy that I find attractive, wouldn't I want to sleep with him? Without making me sound like a slut of course, says he. "Please tell me if I'm being a pig."

No, I explain. I may find said cute boy attractive as all else, but Molly makes me happy and she's who I choose to be with. That's why I won't just up and sleep with this guy. If I had talked with Molly and we were in an open relationship, and all parties were okay with it, that's a different story. But if he can't understand being bisexual and how that works, can you imagine explaining polyamory to him?! Let alone different genders? I kept things as simple as possible, male, female, tried to keep my terminology simple... But he just couldn't wrap his head around it.

I can look at anyone and think 'damn, that's a good lookin' person', but that doesn't mean I want to sleep with them. I'm the type of person who needs to establish an emotional connection before I can even THINK about that sort of thing. That's just me. I know not all people are like that, and that's fine. I explained that to him, too. That made a little bit more sense to him for whatever reason.

He explained to me that he's wired like 'all men', and aren't all men horny all the time? Aren't women like that too? What do you mean they're not? Don't women think about sex all the time too?

No, not necessarily, I explain. Some people 'blossom', per se, later in life. Some people don't have any interest in it at all. 

That blew his mind.

I moved on from explaining that I wasn't going to leave Molly for a man at a whim into trying to explain asexuality. Knowing the spectrum is vast, please forgive me, fellow ace people who read this, I kept it as simple as possible with the 'asexual people aren't interested in sexual activity at all'. I told him there are many exceptions, but he was already struggling with the simple stuff, so I didn't want to overwhelm him. 

Explaining that people can be asexual for many reasons, or not engage in sexual activity for many reasons, he listened intently, trying to understand. I explained the difference between asexuality and celibacy, that no, they're not the same thing. 

I explained how some people who are asexual still engage in sex, with themselves, or with others, for many different reasons, but everyone is different. I explained that everything is up to the people involved, and as long as communication is open and consent is discussed and given, people can do what they want.

I explained how many asexual people feel like something is wrong with them, and since we're not taught about it in school, people who admit they are asexual are sometimes treated that way, and mistreated, some are abused to 'correct' them, are told things like "You just haven't had sex with the right person," or, "How can you not know if you like it if you've never tried it?" 

It took me an hour to discuss the simplest of things, like bisexuality and asexuality. Sure, they might not seem simple, but an hour, you guys. I still think that at the end of the conversation he still didn't understand.

We really need proper sexual education in this country. We can't have people told they're invalid, we can't have people told their sexuality isn't real. 

We need to discuss trans issues. 

We need to teach these things in school. 

You know where I learned them? Tumblr.

This is unacceptable.