Mile Wide Club

What does a horror movie series from the aughts have to say about dealing with the inevitability of death.... and teens? Can death itself shoot you with a gun? What makes a horror movie funny? Jacob deNobel returns to the MWC to discuss all that, and some 'relatability', too.

MWC takes another trip to Nostalgia City with the premier card collecting anime of your youth! Shel discusses Clamp tropes, romantic destiny as queer fatalism, the magical girl as a trans experience, and, of course, how the original version is superior to the American rebroadcast.

From caricature of Kant to their present, well, omnipresence, the Moomins are an exemplar of unsaccharine familial love. This MWC covers all things Moominvalley, including Grace's deft takes on children's agency, Tove Janssons' love life, FST's lingering Snufkin-

related attachment issues, #FullMoominCommunism, and how winter is a mistake no matter where you are.

What do you do with a synthpop album that doesn't get gender quite right? How do you determine if an artist 'communicated' clearly, poorly, or not at all? Thomas articulates a creator-focussed metric for trying to understand ambitious work, and FST proposes that everything is a text, including people.

TWs apply for discussion of genitals, crude language around genitals, discussion of (what is imo) transphobia in a song, mild PoMo bullshit

Season 2 of MWC starts with more of a Babadook vibe. Mary Houston, of Masters and Movies, "where social worker meets film critic" (mastersandmovies.com), and I talk about mental illness and parenting in movies, and most especially in everybody's favorite movie about a bad man with a tophat.

What's the deal with parenting? What's the deal with Connecticut? What's the deal with infantilizing women as a romantic gesture in media, specifically in media which otherwise sells itself as empowering to women? Charlie takes me, and you, on a guided tour through the awful world of Star's Hollow, via a very personal account of growing up watching Connecticut's Worst Women.

Anemone, Gina, and Aurora joined me to talk about a melancholy, sparsely orchestrated western.... digimon movie? It's true! Hear about how it's kinda like the end of Evangelion (really) and other less memeable musings on childhood, liminality, what tropes a bunch of American kids associate with children's anime, and more.

It's another manga! This time, we look at memory, mediocrity, misery, and massive robots in Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys. This comic is potentially fascinating as a document about a particular turn-of-the-century imagining of the past and the future in Japan, but we don't know anything about that, so we talk about robots and being disappointed with capitalism.

Paradise Kiss is a shojou manga about growing up, love, the patriarchy, fashion, disappointments, and, on occasion, disappointing fashion. Love and the patriarchy are always disappointing. This one is extra long, because 1. I could not stand to cut out Juliet's anecdotes about her grandmother's 'sexy picture of Colin Firth' and 2. I am infinitely fallible. Enjoy Juliet's insights on women in comics!

Jon and I talk about 'representation in media,' identifying with characters like and unlike ourselves, 'queersploitation', crystal gems controversies, and more. What does it mean for queer people to be 'safe' in a story?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We tried our best.