cyphomandra

It's been all Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 all the time. I've finished the game and am now XP-hunting post-game to get a character to level 99 (which will get me a trophy), and then I have to start a new game + to get the only other trophy I need for platinum, because I missed it in the prologue in my first playthrough. I've enjoyed it a lot! The gameplay is fantastic - the parry/dodge mechanic holds out the glimmering possibility that you can get through a battle totally undamaged once you know the right timing - and the character mechanics are also great, although I'm still struggling to master Sciel's. The story is gloomy and intriguing and very touching, and the voice acting is amazing.

Are there things I don't like? Hmm. I could have done with clearer signalling about when to do the finale versus explore the rest of the world, because I assumed I needed to beef up a bit and I ended up wildly overlevelled. All the bosses have cut scenes/new attack gimmicks when you reduce their HP by certain amounts, so if you one-shot them you miss out. I should have downgraded my damage but it's tricky - initially you're capped to 9999 max damage, then you lose the cap entirely (I think my highest damage so far is about 7 million), but if you're dealing with a boss who has 5 million HP it's pretty slow if you go back to 9999. There are no manual save files, which fits thematically but is occasionally super unhelpful. And then there's the platforming - I am not a natural platformer, there are some clipping/box issues anyway, but I did grit my teeth and do the Only Up Gestral minigame (in which you have to jump up/climb between bits of structures for AGES, and if you fall it's all over unless you manage to land on a lower bit) over and over again until I finally got it.

But the characters are fantastic. Maelle, especially, and Esquie, and Lune, and Verso, and Gustav, and on, and on. It looks amazing. I love the shrunken overworld (which reminds me of Fantasian's dioramas) and the French bits, and the music. I have many, many thoughts about the ending I got, all of which are spoilers, but I will definitely replay it.

Six - pop musical where Henry the Eighth’s wives finally get their say. I went in without knowing any of the songs and liked this a lot. It’s short (80 minutes), punchy, emotional, and although it’s also not remotely subtle, I was hooked as soon as they started playing a techno version of Greensleeves on the intro :D (the four on-stage musicians are, like the cast, all women/nonbinary). My favourite song was Catherine Howard’s All You Wanna Do, because I am a sucker for repetition showing how relationships twist over time, the things we seek out originally becoming the same things that harm us etc (see also my otherwise inexplicable fondness for Nickelback’s Figured You Out), but I also like Catherine of Aragorn’s Beyoncé-ish No Way and Anne Boleyn’s Don’t Lose Ur Head (Anne of Cleeves goes completely off-script with a song about how fabulous it is to be wealthy and single in her own palace, postdivorce, which was also great). The audience were super enthusiastic, with quite a few in costume, and it was at the Civic, which is always an excellent venue.

Murder on the Orient Express - sometimes I just want to see a solid theatrical production with a great set, and this thoroughly delivered. It’s a relatively recent adaptation and it cuts down the number of suspects to eight, as well as removing some of the red herrings and not requiring the audience to actually study the train compartment diagram they’ve put in the program (it does, however, keep that fantastic bit of stage/detective craft with the wire mesh from the hatbox and the mostly burned letter, which I’ve always loved). The costumes are fabulous, as is the set - although we attended a preview and they had to stop twice in the first act because the carriages weren’t moving as planned - and it’s stagey without falling over too far into mockery, and Poirot manages to convey clearly the between wars setting and his own concerns about how justice is best served. Rima Ti Wiata is incredible as the much-divorced American actress, but I also really liked Sophie Henderson as Countess Andreyni, with her accent falling apart as Poirot confronts her with her past.

There were a few changes that didn’t work for me, and these were all more the adaptation rather than the performances. At one point someone said it was three years since Daisy’s death, which may have been a mistake but if not is way too recent, and the timing of the snowdrift stopping the train versus the murder itself seemed off, and there’s a key bit in the Countess’ speech that isn’t followed up on in the denouement. But I enjoyed it. It’s directed by Shane Bosher, who used to be the artistic director of the Silo Theatre from 2001-2014, who consistently put on the sort of excellent modern theatre that is the other thing that I want to see and that there seems to be a dearth of in the city nowadays. The ATC's next production is the latest Roger Hall, which I would not go to if you paid me (I haven't seen it but I have disliked his plays for ages) - they do have a Mary Shelley piece coming out in August, tho', which I could be persuaded to try.

What I really want to do is either play a new Horizon game or a new FFVII game, and the world has yet to cater to my whims. (Horizon III Nemesis does have a trailer but no release date, and part 3 of FFVII is another two years away at least). In the meantime I am doing a hard mode playthrough of FFVII Rebirth, which is indeed hard (no items for healing, tougher enemies etc). I’m up to chapter 12 and I can actually feel myself getting better at playing it - especially blocking, which in most fighting games I neglect in favour of stuffing myself with food/healing items to regain HP - and I do love everybody in the game. Do I love them enough to attempt platinum? Hmm. It is less a question of my undying affection and more my doubt in my ability to conquer ALL of the minigames. I am still traumatised by the piano and I have yet to get better than a B on Two Legs, plus I am avoiding that Shinra Party Animal sidequest at the Saucer that is All Minigames.

For contrast, I then played through Thank Goodness You’re Here!, which is a totally barmy surrealist dark comedy where you play as a (literally) tiny junior salesman, sent to the northern English town of Barnsworth to solve all their problems. It is disturbingly brilliant and very funny (and very, very, localised). Then I played The Stanley Parable, which is also disturbingly brilliant and about agency in gaming, and then I decided to go for something slightly less disturbing and played Astro Bot.

This cheerful platformer won GOTY last year and it is, indeed, fantastically well-designed (the haptic feedback is incredible) and a lot of fun to play. You are a tiny Sony bot who has crashlanded on a planet with your damaged PS5 spaceship, and you need to gather up your scattered bot colleagues from various other worlds and repair your spaceship. It is a love letter to Sony games, with bots and souvenirs taken from their extensive back catalogue. After each system boss, you get a world based on a franchise (Uncharted, God of War etc) and the last one I unlocked was Horizon, where I play as an AloyBot with bow & arrows, clambering up a Tallneck, zooming through cauldrons, and battling giant robots, with intermittent clusters of focal ghosts and even what I think is a skeletal bot Sobeck on a bench with flowers at the end.

I am not a natural platformer but I played this determinedly until I had the 300 bots needed to get all the achievements. I still have three levels I haven’t done in the main game (there are speed levels coming out as DLC), but they are unforgiving ones where you have to get every single move right, with no checkpoints, and the amount of actual enjoyment I get out of them diminishes. But it’s such an easy game to pick up, and so enjoyable.

I had planned to replay Horizon Forbidden West after that (especially due to the AloyBot!) but then Playstation Plus put out Dragon Age: The Veilguard as their March free game. This is a game that was in development for a long time, initially intended as a multiplayer before switching to solo RPG, and it’s been hit heavily by culture warriors on release aggrieved mainly by the nonbinary companion and the character customiser, all of which makes it a little difficult to judge. And my background with the series is patchy; I played Origins once and liked it a lot, despite feeling burnt out on conventional western fantasy (Mass Effect was more appealing on that front), I played DAII for a bit (maybe until the first major timeskip?) and then put it down for too long, and then I played quite a bit of Inquisition but could not get the hang of the combat when it came to fighting bosses and left it unfinished.

I am now in the final few act of Veilguard and I do like it but it definitely has issues. ( Discussion, no major plot spoilers but includes details of character selection and companions. )

I do think it's taken an unfair battering online, but I don't think I'm going to do much with it once I finish other than look up all the possible endings. It does make me want to go back and finish one of the others, though.

Wanted, An English Girl: The Adventures of an English Schoolgirl in Germany, Dorothea Moore. Moore was in the VAD in WWI and her brother Edmund was in the medical corps; this book is dedicated to him. It was published in 1916 and has a “ripped from the headlines” quality to it, and it’s also the first vintage girls’ school (technically - there isn’t any of it set at school) story I’ve read that needs a content warning for sexual violence and torture. It’s available as an ebook from Books to Treasure.

( Wanted is set mainly in Insterburg, a thinly veiled Luxembourg (Moore wrote Ruritanian stories as well as school ones). )

Most of the books I’ve read in this era go on about the atrocities committed by German troops in Belgium, and it’s presented over and over again as a reason for fighting (far more than the invasion itself). The Bryce Report, which looked into these allegations, was published in May 1915, and I am pretty sure Moore was using it as a reference. There is discussion about its accuracy, particularly some of the more lurid stories, but much of it seems supported by events; regardless, it was highly effective as propaganda (the Germans published a retaliatory report about all the horrible things Belgian civilians did to German soldiers and how justified their invasion was, but this appears to be far less based in reality). I was startled by how much violence Moore put in her book, but all these things would have been the topic of daily conversations and in the newspapers.

regshoe has recommended Moore's Head of the Lower School for more German spies - it's published after WWI but obviously evil does not rest. It's on Gutenberg so I will check it out.

From Billabong to London
Jim & Wally
Captain Jim

( Mary Grant Bruce )


The Cub
Captain Cub
Brigid and the Cub
( Ethel Turner )

The Bruce books are all on Project Gutenberg but although quite a few Turners are there, none of the Cub books are. I'd picked up two over the years but only managed to track down the third about three days before my actual talk. Turner, to me, has a more interesting take on the war - the Cub initially doesn't want to join, and although he fights well he also ends up having a breakdown, something Bruce's characters would disdain (she draws a clear distinction between the Tired People who just need a boost and those who become "jumpy" under fire and fail to harden into men). I am however aware that my own personal biases in favour of cities and science and civilisation may be interfering...

This inevitable ruin, Matt Dinniman
The luckiest girl in the school, Angela Brazil
The madcap of the school, Angela Brazil
A patriotic school girl, Angela Brazil
What did you eat yesterday 1,2, Fumi Yoshinaga
She loves to cook and she loves to eat 2,3, Sakaomi Yozaki
Dick Fight Island 1, Reibun Ike
A coming evil, Vivian van Velde

This Inevitable Ruin, Matt Dinniman. Book seven in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I read this serially on Patreon but stopped several chapters before the end so I could read it all in one glorious binge.

( “Spoilers.” )

The luckiest girl in the school, Angela Brazil
The madcap of the school, Angela Brazil
A patriotic school girl, Angela Brazil

I’m doing a talk on WWI in vintage children’s books and these are for the first part - books written/published roughly contemporaneously with the war itself. Will post separately but these are standard Brazils, complete with plucky uniquely named heroines, escapades, and triumphant resolutions. The war part is most interesting in the last.

What Did You Eat Yesterday, v 1&2, Fumi Yoshinaga (reread). Such a soothing series. I am intending to read all my copies in order as I own up to 19 and I haven’t read past seven due to various house moves and not being able to find them all at once. I was meaning to make more notes but I ended up just writing down recipe ideas.

She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, v 2&3, Sakaomi Yozaki. Nomoto Yuki relaxes by cooking, posting pictures of her creations to social media, but she doesn’t have much of an appetite. Her neighbour two doors down, Kasuga Totoko, accepts her offer of spare food one night when Yuki has cooked too much; Totoko loves food but was raised in a conservative family where men took priority. Slow burn relationship wise, this is a great manga about food and identity and community, and although it’s comforting, it’s not comfortable - it deals with sexism, homophobia, mental health issues and other social stresses, as well as the joy of sharing food you love with someone you love. It’s interesting to read with What Did You Eat Yesterday, which is really a generation earlier (there’s an obvious social media divide). Kinokuniya only had these volumes when I visited but I’ve subsequently tracked down 1&4, and 5 is out. There’s a live-action adaption that is meant to be good.

A Coming Evil, Vivan Van Velde. Conuly recommended this as a much better long-dead ghost occupied France holocaust novel, and it is! Much more grounded, and smaller stakes - but that means it’s about the survival of one small group of desperate people rather than an escape route saving hundreds, and it makes it more tense rather than less, because there are so many ways for them to be lost. Lisette’s parents send her out of Paris to her aunt’s farm in 1940; her aunt is hiding Jewish and Romani orphans. Lisette, who gets on badly with her cousin, stomps out at one point and meets the ghost of Gerard, a Knight Templar from the 14th century, when King Philip IV of France had arrested the Knights, framed them for heresy, tortured them for false confessions and, coincidentally, acquired all their assets. As such, he’s a more convincing addition than Catherine de Medici. Tense, with good emotion through lines, and a lack of tidy resolution that works.

Dick Fight Island, v1, Reibun Ike. A fantastic choice of English title for a manga that is called “The Eight Warriors” in Japanese. Harto returns to his homeland, a secret eight-island archipelago, in order to take part in a 4-yearly tournament (the Great Wyrm) that will determine the overall ruler - naturally, this consists of one-on-one contests between each island’s champions in which whoever comes first loses. Over time the champions have created elaborate penis armour as well as fiendish strategies such as vibrating whips (oh, and I should mention that in this island, once boys become men they are allowed to show their ass at all times) BUT Harto, who has been studying at an American college overseas, is the first champion ever to have discovered the secret of the prostate gland. Everyone in this story is totally committed to the premise and the art, especially the penis armour, is great. I made my sister buy me volume 2 when she went to Kinokuniya.

For the first time ever this Yuletide, I had my assignment mostly done by the standard deadline, and then wrote not just one but two treats (woo hoo!). It also probably helps that I a) did not get covid, which I’ve done for the last two Christmases, and b) did not move house or travel overseas (ditto).

I matched on Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which I played through as soon as it came out this year and liked a lot. The recipient wanted something about how the ghost of Link was present through the narrative, and I personally wanted to do something with the costumes Zelda picks up during her adventures, especially the cat outfit that gives you the power to communicate with cats (so that all the cats you’ve been able to interact with to make them say “miaow” are now giving you useful information, quests, their opinions etc).

I initially thought about doing all the outfits or mixing the outfits and accessories, but I also wanted to get Link’s pov in there so reduced my ambition somewhat (I did wonder about putting Link’s weapons in and adding Dark Link but it all got a bit complicated, plus canon is vaguely unhelpful over the rift behaviour prior to the game start and what the hell Ganon has to do with it this time - does the fact that there’s a copy of him mean he’s trapped in there somewhere as well?). I also had to decide how to deal with whether Link was speaking or not (in this canon he loses and regains his voice but there’s a lot of Mute Link in other games/the fandom) and for pairings for this game I like Zelda/Dohna, the Gerudo captain, so snuck a hint of that in. And got most of it sorted by the deadline, with just some ending tweaking to go.

Dress Up (1493 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Characters: Zelda (Legend of Zelda), Link (Legend of Zelda)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Cosplay, Cats, Video Game Mechanics
Summary:

It's not what you wear, it's who you are. Or is it the other way round? Zelda considers her options.

china_shop on her first Yuletide EVER was super productive, and asked me if I was interested in listening to a John Finnmore audio play in order to beta one of her treats; I have previously been a no on podcasts, audiobooks, audioplays etc but spent much of this year listening to the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobook versions and have revised my opinion somewhat, so I said I’d give it a go. I listened to English for Pony Lovers while driving into work, liked it, and then idly considered what I’d do if I had to write fanfic for it. The canon has a German woman (Elke), meeting an English woman (Lorna) for an English lesson; Elke is particularly keen on getting translations for some words used, it turns out, in the My Little Pony fanfic that her teenage daughter Claudia is writing (Elke has befriended Claudia online, pretending to be a fellow fan and teenage girl in Bogota, because her relationship with Claudia IRL has fallen apart and obviously this will totally fix things). Lorna is also concealing some fairly major secrets. It occurred to me that it would be fun to write a fic made up of Claudia’s fanfics, dealing with the fallout of Elke's reveal.

I scribbled a few notes and then beta’d china’s fic, which was excellent and fortunately did not include any fanfic summaries. I wrote a few more notes, sent china an apologetic “actually now I want to write a treat too” email, and then sent her a more panicked one once I realised that a) I am terrible at tagging b) I don’t know how to format fics to look like summaries c) I had made both of these things essential for my story. China very kindly found me a workskin, I drafted the fic - turns out writing tags and summaries for works I have not actually written is easier than doing it for the ones I have - and then spent an evening wrestling with workskins and html to produce:

[AO3] Pferdeäpfel posted a new work (675 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: John Finnemore's Double Acts
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Claudia, Elke
Additional Tags: telling stories in tags, never piss off a teenager in fandom, AO3 Tags - Freeform, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Esperanza's Elke's inbox

When not being waylaid by unexpected canons I had really wanted to write something for Dungeon Crawler Carl, which I offered but didn’t match on. I loved luthien’s fic about Elle, Transformation, and her prompts were great. I’d been tinkering with ideas about Donut, particularly her life prior to the dungeon, but wasn’t quite sure I’d got her voice right and the segments weren’t gelling. However, while I was sifting through AO3 workskins and how they work, I’d found a number of chat/text workskins. It’s unclear how chat looks in DCC and probably it’s closer to Discord or WhatsApp, but I wanted to focus on Donut in 1:1 chats so went with a basic iPhone style, loaded the workskin, copied over the relevant html, and typed HI ZEV, all of which finally got the story to work.

You Know You Love Me (1122 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeon Crawler Carl Series - Matt Dinniman
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Princess Donut, Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Katia, Zev, Loita, Bea
Additional Tags: Chatlog, Plotting, Fandom, ALL CAPS, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

A small but crucial part of Crawler #4119 Princess Donut's chatlog during the events of level 5 of the current crawl, colloquially referred to as The Gate of the Feral Gods. This chatlog has been subject to seizure by the Borant Corporation due to their suspicions of interference -

 

SYSTEM AI: Nice try, bitches, but you're not getting this one.

It’s always interesting seeing how my relationship to a work can shift when I write fanfic for it. Often it makes me like the canon more (every time I write in Stardew Valley I realise how much I love all those pixels) but sometimes it’s less (writing for Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog got me deeply annoyed with all Willis’ anachronisms). Doing this DCC fic made me realise just how unbelievably tight all Dinniman’s plots are - I set this fic specifically in The Gate of the Feral Gods, which means during these text interactions Zev is removed as social media manager, Loita is murdered, and Zev & Donut decide that they will conspire to overthrow the Borant system, which they can’t say out loud as their texts are being monitored - this is why the Gossip Girl fic they are discussing sounds slightly odd!

(While this was mostly a great Yuletide with lots of firsts, it’s also been the first time I’ve had my assigned recipient fail to comment on my story, which is a bit sad - they also haven’t commented on their treat. It made the lovely comments I got from my treat recipients even more special)

I have written up half the gaming but I can't find the file so here, books from October. Best of the month were Katherine Arden's Small Spaces series, perfectly seasonal middle grade horror.

Our wild farming life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer
Divinity 36, Gail Carriger
Gate of the feral gods, Matt Dinniman, audiobook
The rest of us just live here, Patrick Ness
The striker and the clock, Georgia Cloepfil
Delay of game, Ari Baran
The girl who couldn’t lie, Radhika Sanghani
The school on the moor, Dorita Fairlie Bruce
By honour bound, Bessie Marchant
The new prefect, Dorothea Moore
Pas de don’t, Chloe Angyal
A soundtrack for falling in love, Arden Powell
Mark cooper versus America, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Brandon Mills versus the V Card, JA Rock & Lisa Henry
Small spaces, Katherine Arden
Dead voices, Katherine Arden
Dark waters, Katherine Arden
Empty smiles, Katherine Arden

( Cut for length. )

Dear Yuletide writer,

I love Yuletide, as a challenge, a community and a tradition. I am thrilled to see what you come up with and I hope you enjoy creating it.

What I like hasn't changed much from previous years (including this sentence, its time come round again, slouching towards AO3 etc). I like humour that cares about the characters. I like characters who are outsiders in some way, but (even despite themselves!) become part of something larger - a relationship, a cause, a community. I like food as a way of showing character or worldbuilding (and for eating!). I like bittersweet endings. I like justified angst, pining, weirdness, and invention. I like pretty much any style of writing - epistolary, experimental, Dickensian - and even second person, if it works for the story. In a previous year I got IF for one story and that was fantastic. Artwise, I like quiet moments, possibly with tea or food, and prefer stylised to photorealistic. I am definitely open to treats.

I have no problem with sexual content as long as it fits with the characters, although pages of explicit anatomical detail are unlikely to be my thing. I like stories that make me remember why I love the original inspiration as well as stories that make me think about it differently (and both! both is great). And I do like the canons themselves. I like these characters being part of their worlds, even when they struggle against them.

With my noms this year I am happy with crossovers (with other noms or any fandoms I've written). I have also spent the year obsessed with Final Fantasy VII (totally not yuletide eligible! But Easter eggs appreciated). For AUs see specific fandoms.

DNWs: child or animal harm &/or death as a major plot point (outside of canon). If you’re looking back through old letters I have previously excluded earthquakes but it’s been over ten years and now I’m okay with them but would like them tagged. No noncanonical trans characters, please.

Worrals series - WE Johns

Joan "Worrals" Worralson
Becky "Frecks" Lovell

So fantastic! So action-filled, with so many sudden reversals - and Worrals & Frecks are great, competent and brave, but never over-confident or perfect. I would love more adventures and I would also love femslash, h/c, spies, plane dogfights/crashes, coping with being in some form of wilderness after a plane crash, space AUs, or even just a quiet moment between the two of them in-between adventures. I like spies and betrayal and working with the Resistance, if you're looking for WWII themes; I would prefer the Nazis to not be massively emphasised and obviously I know that horrible things happened to British agents in reality but would prefer the narrow escapes and last-minute dashes of these books.

I’ve read the first few non WWII ones (which unfortunately do have some terrible racial bits). I do have a slight preference for keeping the war setting BUT I am also totally up for leaping forward 10 years or more to see what the two of them are like. More spying? Test piloting? Involvement in the space program? Go for it. AUs of any kind fine as long as it's still them and there's danger and determination in bucketloads.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Carl
Princess Donut
Katia
Mordecai

I totally love this series, the world and the characters (I have read all six books and the chapters of the seventh posted on Patreon, as well as listening to the audiobooks). Such a great concept, carried through with ruthless elan and with unexpected depths of feeling and insight. I love Carl, who is trying so hard despite everything being so stacked against him, and how he teeters between his goals and their costs. I love Princess Donut, who is very much a cat despite everything, and Katia, who has grown so much (ha!) during her time in the dungeon. I love the gamelit/RPG tropes (loot boxes! stat increases!) and the horror tropes and the pokes at reality TV. I love that everyone has their own agenda (even Donut - her line to Zev in the latest book totally cracked me up) and I really, really love the way that Carl, even as he blows everything up and gets increasingly unstable, can listen to others, respect their opinions, and give them chances to make their own paths.

Prompts - go wild. Carl or Katia’s past, before they go into the dungeon? (Or Donut’s - what was she like as a kitten? What was her take on Carl when he first showed up?) A bit from Mordecai’s crawl? An outsider pov from a fan, an NPC, or another top ten crawler? An AU - feel free to design your own floor!! - or an outtake? What if, when they’d ended up in the Ghosts of Earth section, they’d been in a different area, or they’d lost their memories and thought they were back? What if they find themselves (apparently) outside the dungeon?

I do not ship any of the nominated characters - one of the things I like about DCC is that Carl hasn't had any sexual relationships since entering the dungeon. Canonical relationships (Katia/Bautista and I SUPPOSE Donut/Gravy Boat) are fine but I don't really want them to be the focus.

Feel free to play with formats. Please don't permanently kill any of the requested characters but otherwise darkness consistent with canon is fine. I am fine with gore. AUs - tbh you could probably do a terrifying coffee shop AU with this group and I would love it, as long as I still recognise the characters, so go wild, but no high school ones, please.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Zelda (Echoes)

Link (Echoes)

Gosh this was fun to play. Finally being Zelda! The Link’s Awakening remake aesthetic! A cute companion, creepy rifts, and a game that encourages wild invention to solve problems, while still having the beat-dungeon-gain-new-cool-ability style of the pre BOTW era, AND you can talk to cats. Fantastic. I loved it a lot. I think there’s a lot of scope here for fic, whether that’s exploring Zelda’s feelings as she progresses through the game (entering a rift the first time must have been super creepy!) or filling in gaps (how did she get captured? What happens afterwards? Does Zelda look at other forms of magic, after her experience with the staff? ). I loved the two different Zora groups and the Gerudo and would cheerfully read any adventures or quiet moments set with either, and I also loved Zelda’s horse.

Having Link not be a knight in this and be damaged by his time in the rifts was fascinating. I’m not sure how I feel about his recovery at the end and would be happy to gloss over that. I’d love to see him spending more time with Zelda – maybe she gets to show him around Hyrule? How does he feel about Evil Link – does he share any memories with him? The Echoes don’t do people but the rift copies do – how does that work?How did he get out of the rift the first time? What does he do after the end of the game? Does he also like making dubious smoothies?

For reference I have played Link’s Awakening, BOTW, most of TotK (next gaming project is finishing this) and all of Skyward Sword except the end battle because I was doing it with motion controllers and nearly sprained something, plus then moving house etc but I really should go back. I do not want setting AUs in this fandom but am happy with AUs of events BUT I do not want a version in which Link does Zelda’s role. I am not particularly shippy about Link and Zelda generally but I actually think it would work well for me in this game (I would also cheerfully read Zelda/Dohna, but I do realise she’s not in the tagset!). I would also especially love it if Zelda got to wear her cat costume for at least some of the story (or Link could wear it! I am not fussy).

One of us knows, Alyssa Cole
The decagon house murders, Yukito Ajatsuji
Invisible Emmie, Terri Libenson
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
Outofshapeworthlessloser, Gracie Gold
Running a love story, Dom Harvey
The duke at hazard, KJ Charles
Dungeon crawler Carl (audio)
The night war, Kimberley Brubaker Bradley

One of Us Knows, Alyssa Coles. Although she’s still doing romances she is also now doing thrillers - this is the first of them I’ve read. Kenetria Nash, who has DID and a life she’s managed to effectively wreck, finds herself taking a job as caretaker to an historic home on an island, a decision made by an alter who is now absent. The house seems to be triggering memories, and then people from Ken’s past show up, bringing new dangers with them. The thing I liked most about this was that it is explicitly set during the pandemic; otherwise it’s a little predictable. Readable, though, and I will look out for her other thrillers.

The Decagon House Murders, Yukito Ayatsuji. A university detective club (all using the names of famous writers) travel to a remote island with a ten-sided house and a bloody past. Overnight, someone puts out nameplates - First Victim, Second Victim, Detective, Murderer, etc - and then the bodies, obligingly, arrive soon after. This does have a good mystery and the one-line reveal is very nice, but balanced against that is a near complete lack of personality in all the characters. It made me think about Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which also has a great text-based reveal, but Levin is much stronger in character and tension (which interact anyway in this sort of murder mystery; you want to be worried about who will be killed next rather than being a little unsure who they were). Interestingly one of the indistinguishable two women is called Orczy (the other is Christie) - I hadn’t been aware she’d done detective stories and will have to have a look.

Invisible Emmie, Terri Libenson. Middle school graphic novel. Quiet shy Emmie and outgoing athletic Katie meet up when Emmie accidentally drops an embarrassing note that is found by unsympathetic classmates. There are some nice bits in this but the twist doesn’t really come off and overall it’s just okay.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship, not knowing why he’s there or what he’s supposed to do; gradually he works it out, makes first contact with an alien race, and saves humanity. This reminded me of being in my teens and reading sf for the cool high concept ideas, when I would probably have enjoyed this more. The main character - a high school science teacher whose brilliant ideas about alien life were rejected by the mainstream science community, who have been forced to come crawling back to him for help - is pretty irritating, and his big character reveal - that he did not volunteer for the mission but was press-ganged into it - does not actually have any effect by the time it arrives. I did like the alien.

Outofshapeworthlessloser, Gracie Gold. Gold won multiple medals and championships as a figure skater, including Olympic bronze; she did this despite (or perhaps because of) severe mental health issues, abusive coaches, and a sport with destructive expectations of perfection and femininity. It’s very strong on mental health and self-knowledge; it is also candid in admitting she doesn’t have the answers, and everything is a work in progress. (TW: Gold is raped by a fellow skater; she is also friends with another skater who is very helpful with her recovery and return to the sport, and then kills himself the day after being suspended by US Figure Skating after multiple accusations of sexual assault, and the book covers her confusion and shock at this double revelation).

Running: a love story , Dom Harvey. Dom is a radio DJ who ran as a kid, then took it up again as an out-of-condition adult and became obsessed with trying to beat the 3 hour mark for the marathon in one of the World Majors. This book finishes with his attempt in Berlin, where he gets a PB but fails to break 3 hours; subsequently he does break that time in Tokyo (there’s a later edition of this book that adds a chapter to include this, which definitely works better as an ending). It is not great writing, is obviously intended for the radio fans market, and it’s not that helpful about running, but it did make me interested in Dom’s mum, a longtime marathon runner (the whole family runs), who fitted her runs in around everybody else when the kids were young, and is still running marathons in her 70s.

The Duke at Hazard, KJ Charles. Unassuming Cassian, the Duke of Severn, loses his heirloom ring to a strange man in a secret liaison; he then takes a bet from his cousin that he couldn’t survive as an ordinary person in the hope of getting it back without anyone finding out (and also in the hope of getting his relatives to actually see him as a person). He meets Daizell, disgraced and excluded from society by his father’s crimes, eking out a living as a cutter out of shadow portraits, and hires him to help, but Daizell doesn’t know who Cass really is… This was perfectly enjoyable but I do prefer my KJ Charleses with a bit more bite to them (also, England appears to be populated by about a dozen people, given how frequently everyone bumps into each other). I did like the bit where Daizell demonstrates to Cass exactly how prone to misinterpretation the description of a coat as “mulberry” is and the card game exposure is great.

The night war, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. I really liked her The War that Saved my Life duology. This is also WWII, where 12 year old Miriam escapes the round-up in Paris that takes her entire Jewish neighbourhood, to end up in a convent school in a small French village near the border with the free French zone. She is desperate to leave, but also determined to find her Paris neighbour’s young child, given to her to protect but taken away by the nuns to give to a local childless family. This story makes the bold and unexpected decision to add the ghost of Catherine de Medici as a major character, who is only visible to Miri (her chosen gardener) and I don’t think it works. I spent the second half of the book getting increasingly irked by this and it was not helped by an epilogue that had a surprising number of people survive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman, audiobook by Jeff Hays. I do not usually listen to audiobook (except with the kids) but I love this series and the audiobooks are meant to be good, so I plunged in. It’s great. Hays somehow manages all the voices (there are various effects, eg on the AI’s voice and when the characters are speaking in chat - Donut always chats in all caps and Jeff conveys this expertly) and the YouTube cold reads I’ve seen of him swapping between characters aare amazing. The slower pace also makes me think about bits of the story a bit more and appreciate the world building. I think there is a full cast version of this out now as well but I’m now in the third audiobook and I feel I am incapable of dealing with new versions of the voices.