Lily

@lilywrites

Managing Editor at @episodesnewsletter.bsky.social. Words in @racketmn.com, @reactorsff.bsky.social, others. Ex-MFA person. She/her. All views my own!

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Lily@lilywrites· 29d

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Lily@lilywrites· Jul 10

Read for my takes on TADC and (more importantly) why worldbuilding is important for writers/filmmakers/showrunners/etc. in ALL genres!!

For most of my 20s, I thought of worldbuilding as something close to a dirty word. It was a symbol of an approach to writing — one fixated on lists of proper nouns and convoluted magic systems — that I had little interest in. But that's not all worldbuilding can be. I was lucky enough during my time in the University of Minnesota's MFA program to study under Megan Giddings, who's a phenomenal speculative fiction writer and an equally talented teacher. In her workshops, she frequently talked about just how important good worldbuilding was to any kind of story, speculative or not. Inevitably, when you write fiction, you are writing for someone who is not your protagonist; thus, it's your responsibility to describe the internal logic of the world your protagonist is moving through. This doesn't have to be in the form of long paragraphs of exposition or a detailed map in your book's front matter. It can take the form of implication or subtext or vague atmospherics. What matters most is that it is thoughtful, consistent, and centered on character. The question good worldbuilding should always seek to answer is: What does it feel like to exist in this place and time?

In this model, so many characterization questions are, under the hood, also worldbuilding questions. What does your character want? That's going to be influenced by the society they exist within and their place in that society. The same can be said of who they love, who they wish they could be, and what they are reacting against. Worldbuilding, in this way, is also stakes-building, as what you stand to lose or gain depends on the context of your society, time period, and body. Sci-fi aliens like Jadzia Dax or Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are often at their best-written when faced with challenges a human (or another sort of alien, for that matter) would never have to deal with. In the same way, the most intriguing character-level stakes on Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms come from …

Lily@lilywrites· Jul 9

most of these look pretty good but if I had to see the "dubai whoopie pie" that looks like a turd then you all have to, too

Lily@lilywrites· Jul 7

Here's one reason that I think may have been THE special sauce behind this show. Subscribe to read the rest!!

3. Excavate the inner conflict

The Ser Duncan the Tall we meet in The Hedge Knight is by no means a flat character, but neither is he someone with the psychological depth of the Dunk we see on screen in Knight of Seven Kingdoms. The Dunk of Martin's novella certainly shares many qualities with Parker's Dunk. He's self-flagellating, frequently calling himself Dunk the lunk, and his manner of speaking is quite direct. At the same time, he's missing the anxious humility that characterizes Claffey's performance. Novella-Dunk is, at least near the book's start, anything but humble, certain in his ability to win the tourney from the outset. He's not nearly as tender toward Egg as he is in the show. If he wants anything, it's to survive his current moment and to keep his adventures going. He is, in other words, a fairly standard high fantasy protagonist, at least in his psychology. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, of course, especially in a novella that's often content to spend ten pages following a joust beat by beat. But a TV show — especially one that, like Knight of Seven Kingdoms, is insistent on spending long stretches of time just sitting with the emotions of its characters — demands a bit more depth.

That's where the work of adaptation comes in. Parker, et al.'s smartest choice with Dunk was to take his self-punishing instincts, largely rendered in thought and interiority in the novella, and push them outward. Dunk on screen often ruminates about his self-doubt and tendency to agonize; in fact, he confides in Lyonel Baratheon about it in the show's very first episode. Claffey uses that anxiety as the character's middle C, returning to it in his face acting whenever Dunk's at rest in a moment of stress.

Lily@lilywrites· Jul 4

I worry people aren't reading this past the headline, which is a shame. Her theory of the afterlife becomes even more fascinating in the article itself

After hearing her theory about past lives, Partridge asked Brown to share her thoughts on what happens when we die. “You go to heaven,” she said. “That’s what I believe.”

Lily@lilywrites· Jul 4

congratulations to mr taylor swift

tweet from Travis Kelce.

"I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy"

Lily@lilywrites· Jul 2

I've loved getting to write these reviews! Here's a little preview; subscribe for the rest!

There's a scene in Ferida Lennon's darkly comic 2024 novel Glorious Exploits that I kept thinking about as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' freshman season came to a close. In it, Gelon, an unemployed and profoundly melancholy theater director in ancient Greece, asks a local soothsayer what might become of his chronically ill son Helios. The soothsayer takes Gelon's money, stares at some entrails, then asks to meet Gelon at a local pub. There, he tells the truth: He can't see into the beyond. "The boy [Helios] looked sick, very sick," Lennon writes, "but in the end he didn't know, as there was no future, only what happened next." The soothsayer tells people stories to comfort them, but that's all he can do. It's not enough — it can't be enough. He does it anyway, as does Gelon with his own theatrical productions, as does the book's narrator Lampo in dictating the novel to us at home. Storytelling is a desperate, insufficient attempt to make sense of a senseless world. It may be the most human thing we do.

And it's central to the knightly code of one Ser Duncan the Tall. In the one flashback we get in "The Morrow," we see Arlan lying next to a tree that looks suspiciously like the one by which he died in the show's pilot. He's telling a long, rambling story about the origins of his name: a tree where knights of the realm would nail a penny when setting out on a quest. Over the years, the tree would fill with glimmering copper, and then— Arlan trails off. He looks, to Dunk and to us, dead. Dunk, trembling, asks Arlan why he never made Dunk a knight. He begins to sob. And then, with a gasp, Arlan rises from the dead. "A true knight," he says, "always finishes a story."

Lily@lilywrites· Jul 1

I sense a discourse a brewin so here's a post from the archives

dril tweet. "koko the talking ape.. has been living high on the hog, wasting our tax dollars on high capacity diapers. No more. i will suplex that beast," edited to change koko to "The gender bread man"

Lily@lilywrites· Jun 30

ok final post about The News today: would appreciate if people on here could stop framing this as a nationwide ban on trans girls in girls' sports. SCOTUS ONLY allowed already-passed red state bans on trans girls in sports to go into effect. don't cede this ground prematurely!

Tuesday’s decision does not address the legality of rules in other states such as California, where transgender girls have had the right to compete in girls’ events since 2013. The court called that a “debated policy question.”

Lily@lilywrites· Jun 16

I felt like I was supposed to love this episode rather than merely like it (it's got a 9.5 on IMDb!!), but idk I think women deserve interiority!

And yet that's not the main issue I have with "Seven." A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set in a violently patriarchal world where ideals of chivalry govern the way even the most generous men see women. Of course the male characters are going to be somewhat dismissive of her ability to make her own choices. The bigger problem, as I see it, is with the boundary between what the characters believe and what the framing of the show seems to believe. We're given no space to see around the knightly insistence that Tanselle is a meek innocent woman in need of manly protection. In fact, Tanselle herself doesn't even appear in this episode, which is all about defending her honor. I'm not ruling out some sort of twist here, but this is no longer the small quibble I raised with the show a few episodes back. The stakes have gone up massively. Dunk is going to fight a sort of battle not seen in a hundred years for Tanselle's honor. If the object of that honor isn't going to get any sort of dimension or interiority... well, that's just bad storytelling.

Lily@lilywrites· Jun 15

galaxy brain meme. levels are "drum kit" (relatively normal thing for a kid to want), "pet mouse" (slightly odder), "dumpling" (huh?), and fabric (hell yes)

Lily@lilywrites· Jun 6

rip to this person whose name got truncated by the delta upgrade list in maybe the worst way possible

first person on the delta comfort upgrade list has a last name beginning in FAR and a first name that starts with T. something like Thea Farrier or Thomas Faraday or something. anyway the point is it truncates as "FAR/T"

Lily@lilywrites· Jun 5

Widow's Bay is the best horror-comedy in forever and also it's kind of about AMERICA?? little preview here — subscribe for the full thing!!

Being a permanent townie in Widow's Bay — someone infected by the eternal curse of Richard Warren — is, of course, comically horrible. You have to watch out for slimy women slithering out of the bay and for a special zombifying fog that can catch you unawares. But, mostly, the curse of Widow's Bay just seems really, really boring to the townies. Eventually, the eldritch abominations just stop being that interesting. The local teens drive around all night getting stoned, daring each other to go into cursed houses and complaining about how there's nothing to do on the island. Their parents, local fishers and innkeepers, trudge down the street to drink at the same bar their parents drank at, the same bar their kids will drink at someday. Life, in all its mind-numbing drudgery, goes on, psycho clown attacks notwithstanding.

Tom can't understand why anyone would live like this, but I can. You can, too, at least if you're an American who's had to work and eat and sleep over the last handful of years. The morning after Trump won re-election in November 2024, I was near-catatonic to the point I nearly missed an editorial meeting for the academic journal where I was working, only to log onto the Zoom call and find that my boss had also almost missed it. We spent half an hour talking about how scared we were, both for ourselves and the people we loved whom we knew would be at greater risk. Both of us had read the reporting on Project 2025; we tried in vain to figure out what parts of it would actually be achievable and what parts were just the idle daydreams of people more monstrous than we could imagine. We lamented, most of all, that life just had to go on after something this catastrophic.

Lily@lilywrites· Jun 2

i will defend my perfect son Ser Duncan the Tall with my life

Thanks in large part to Peter Claffey's performance, Dunk's severe anxiety is never not funny. It's also, I think, more thematically meaningful, both to Dunk and to the world of Westeros at large, than the bathroom jokes that have opened these first few episodes. For Dunk's whole life, he's been told (mostly by Ser Arlen) that he's dimwitted and largely useless for anything but his size. But, like, he's obviously not? He's emotionally intelligent, a quick and efficient problem solver, and painfully aware of his own demeanor and presentation. He is, in our modern parlance, a completely recognizable Type of Guy, someone we might call absentminded rather than dim. The problem, of course, is that the world in which he lives puts little value on the ways in which he's a quick study. His anxiety is not the same thing as stupidity, but in a profession as violent as knighthood, it might as well be. That's a more damning statement about Westeros than any knight in shining armor asking where he can take a dump would ever be.

Lily@lilywrites· May 30

why would you call them that

raspberry plant at a garden. it is called "himbo top raspberry"

Lily@lilywrites· May 29

I loved Margo's Got Money Troubles (the book), but wondered how the show would deal with Jinx and Margo's relationship. Turns out, I liked that too! You can see my thesis for free, but you've gotta subscribe for the rest :)

A few days prior, Margo admitted to Jinx that she was working as an OnlyFans model to make ends meet. Jinx's reaction — denial, then a surge of anger — wounded Margo deeply. How dare a man who abandoned her as an infant treat her with contempt for how she provides for her own child? How can someone whose own income came from a pretty famously disreputable industry be scandalized by a family member doing relatively tame sex work? The two of them have been angry at each other ever since.

But here, in the quiet of the tent, Jinx is reflective. "I was so wrong to judge you before," he tells Margo, taking her hand in his enormous one. He let his protective feelings get the best of him, much to his chagrin. "But what you're doing... we're all just putting on a show. Entertaining." He asks her for her stage name (Hungry Ghost), putting it right next to his own wrestling moniker in a sentence, drawing a direct line between his own work and Margo's. He promises that he's never going to leave her again, that he's "gonna be there by your side, no matter what." Margo sniffles a bit; I'm not too proud to admit that I did, too. Jinx has come to accept his child's career as not just acceptable but in line with his own, and he wants to make sure she has the support in raising her son that he never offered Margo's mother in raising baby Margo.

It is, in short, the perfect ending to a Millennial parental apology fantasy of the kind Emily theorized at Vox back in 2022. Well, except for one thing: It's not even close to the show's ending.

Lily@lilywrites· May 28

i really like this show

I'll begin with a pretty sad admission for a cultural critic in the 2020s: I have, somehow, never watched Game of Thrones. The bulk of it aired while I was in undergrad, without an HBO login, and at a university where a friend of mine had gotten threatened with expulsion for torrenting a Star Trek episode on the school wi-fi network. By the time I had the space to watch the show, the final season was getting mixed reviews from critics and bitter takedowns from fans, which didn't exactly make me want to dive in. Besides, my instinctive, perhaps irrational distaste for media where a grim, gritty tone is used as a signifier of Grown-Up Entertainment didn't help matters.

I mention all of this because A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a Westeros-set George R.R. Martin adaptation that's been discussed almost universally in its role as a Game of Thrones spin-off, seems to be very consciously written against the cultural footprint of its parent franchise. In its high fantasy stylings, of course, it's clearly the descendant of GoT. But it's resolutely small in scale, with little that seems mythic in its world or characters. It resists, in form and function, the glamour of power. It is built on the comedy and tragedy of the bumbling, fragile, entirely material human body.

By which I mean to say: It opens with a guy taking an enormous shit.

Lily@lilywrites· May 27

literary criticism? in THIS economy?? anyway, for a fun change of pace, here is my CONCLUSION as a little teaser! want to read the rest? great news: this piece is free for everyone, so dive in!!

So, yes, suffice it to say that I don't agree with DeWitt's interpretation of her best-known novel. And yet, at the same time, I find it somewhat beautiful that DeWitt has such a reductive read of her own book. I don’t doubt the extreme amounts of effort and talent that went into producing something like this. But I also have reason to suspect that it gets at its themes in the same way that it came to be written with such a strange story-shape and in so distinctive a voice: through the subconscious mystery of the creative brain.

In an age of AI slop winning literary awards, it's refreshing to be reminded of the decidedly organic capacity to find transcendence beyond that which we can articulate or categorize. There's nothing more human than creating a work so massive that even you can't quite wrap your arms around it; in fact, that may be my definition of genius.

Lily@lilywrites· May 19

Breaking my Bluesky fast to repost this essay! Not sure why social share cards aren't working on Bluesky right now (love 2 use the Normal Webiste That Works Great), so have a few paragraphs from the piece as compensation!

To fight that, creators often use loneliness less as a subject and more as an inciting incident, something to be overcome in a moment of catharsis. A character can only ever be lonely so that another character can help them form new social bonds. This is how a certain strain of modern science fiction in particular tends to approach social isolation. Star Trek's recent live-action series, for instance, are fixated on this idea of loneliness as an opportunity for growth. You'd be hard-pressed to find an episode of Discovery's final season or Strange New Worlds's third that doesn't feature a character telling another to "make a connection" as a way to solve a deep-seated personal issue, usually one resulting from a recent unprocessed trauma. In the view of these series, a lonely person is an exemplar, a problem to be solved. It's an approach to writing about loneliness on TV that many of these shows' biggest fans adore.

And it's one I can't stand. In turning lonely feelings into grist for feel-good storytelling, I find that these shows are willing to sacrifice anything approaching emotional realism to get a happy ending. Loneliness, at least the sort I've felt, isn't quite so easily explainable or solvable. It's an abstract entity, a quantum superposition, a ghost whose cold hand you feel on your back at moments when you thought you'd finally escaped its grasp. You can feel desperately alone in your own skin in a crowded room or a coffee chat with someone you'd convinced yourself was an old friend. You can know perfectly well why you've become socially avoidant without that knowledge solving anything. If there's an endpoint, it's often not one you notice in the moment, and it's certainly nothing you celebrate with drinks at the starship's lounge after work.

All of which is why Pluribus felt like such a revelation to me. It's very emphatically a show about loneliness, not as a means to get to some humanistic point about community but as an end in itself. It cares abou…

Lily@lilywrites· May 5

what will become of Carol when she meets Manousos?? Find out below!! Little preview attached!

This insistence on nuanced characters — on refusing to treat people as stand-ins for abstract concepts or reduce them to diametrically opposed ideals — is, ultimately, what separates Pluribus from so much other sci-fi. It's not interested in the speculative simply as a one-to-one metaphor for some particular part of human existence or an omnipresent force meant to drive characters to extremes. The Joined are a massively powerful entity — a party, an ideology, a nation — that are nonetheless not entirely comprehensible, not easily reduced to a single idea or metaphorical stand-in; it only follows that characters who have to react to the Joined will be forced to confront the thorny contradictions that lie dormant in their own hearts. It's like a Tarkovsky film about someone who writes romantasy, like a Le Guin novel about a woman who gets most of her calories from vodka.

Pluribus is an imperfect show — in this episode, for instance, I would have liked to think a little bit more about racial and gender dynamics between Manousos and Carol! — but it's one that uses metaphor without reducing everything down to it. There is room for imperfection, for change, for nuance, for the very human experience of holding two things together at once even as they contradict. That is rare and meaningful and something to be cherished as we wait (and wait, and wait) for the show's second season to get a premiere date.

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 28

a review of a Pluribus ep that's also kind of about how I see the artistic temperament! little preview below!

If there's one thing writers love, it's melancholy. Not too much, mind you. But just enough to remind them of the sadness underlying all things. Just enough to keep their artistic temperament. "Charm Offensive" is an episode of Pluribus in which Carol Sturka quite literally goes through the writing process of a novel chapter, and yet nothing in it feels quite so writerly as when she tells Zosia why she's always loved the noise of a train horn. "It is," she says, "the loneliest sound in the world."

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 24

proud of this one! you, my beloved followers, get my thesis paragraphs for free :)

It's of course in no way unusual for a popular science fiction movie to be a love story. Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, just about universally regarded as one of the 20th century's great films, is so much about love that Stanislaw Lem, the author of the novel on which Solaris was based, held a grudge against Tarkovsky over it for decades. Robert Zemeckis' Contact is one of the great Movies About Having A Dad of all time. And Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, which is so about Being A Dad that it was the subject of relentless mockery from Nolan's traditional audience when it came out (ask me how I know!), has undergone a serious critical reevaluation in the decade since its release.

More than anything, though, Project Hail Mary lives in the shadow of Denis Villeneuve's 2017 film Arrival, perhaps the ur-"sci-fi movie about love!" of the twenty-first century. It completely apes Arrival's structure and has themes that are obviously indebted to Villeneuve's film. And it does all this to great effect, using the devices of that great 2010s sci-fi weepy to surprise you with a profound message about love and connection. Project Hail Mary is in no way an Arrival ripoff — its themes invert those of Arrival in a really intriguing way, giving a bleakly comic turn to the notion of embracing love in spite of the inevitability of death — but it's so deeply indebted to Villeneuve's picture that it's hard to imagine the former existing without the latter.

So why is Arrival seen as a triumph of grounded, humanist sci-fi while Project Hail Mary gets the competence-porn treatment? Bluntly: gender. Arrival and Project Hail Mary differ in whom they center, whom those protagonists love, and how they love them, and that difference makes it too easy for a casual audience to dismiss Project Hail Mary's love story.

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 21

proud of this one! here's a lil amuse-bouche!

I'm very skeptical of literary foils.

Don't get me wrong: There's truth in the idea of a foil — a character who exists to contrast sharply in meaningful ways with the protagonist, a character whose entire place in their story is to be an opposite. It's just not truth on the abstract level of writing "Jenny is Sophie's foil" in your story outline. Being a foil for someone else is a psychological phenomenon, not an objective one. It happens in a character's brain when, like anyone, they latch onto a person they assume is their inverse in some way and turn that person into an object of pure envy or simmering hatred. Outside the constraints of the pattern-matching human brain, though, people are just too complex to reduce down to opposites. Anyone you choose as your foil is inevitably going to be just like you in many other ways, alien to you in ways that don't correspond to black-and-white thinking in many more. We are all one another's foils and one another's parallel selves at once.

I mention all this because "The Gap" is an episode about foils. As Manousos begins his rules-bound journey north to save the world alongside the only human left alive who agrees that the Joined must be overthrown, that other human is enjoying as decadent and unstructured a life as she can on the Joined's dime. They're living, in many very material ways, opposite lives that spring from opposite worldviews. But Pluribus is a smart enough show not to leave these characters' parallelism in such a simplistic place. Manousos and Carol are both foils and mirrors at once, and more importantly, they're not static. They bend toward one another's views, then bend away, driven just as much by circumstance as by their intrinsic beliefs.

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 17

I am sure everyone's been waiting with bated breath for my Buffy Big Bad rankings! Want to know what the footnotes go to? Pick up a subscription and find out!

Lily: I mostly agree with Emily's ranking above. But, one weird thing about Buffy Big Bads is that they are very stratified. A good Buffy Big Bad is very, very good; a bad one is often terrible. All of which is to say: I think this calls for a tier list!

Nearly Perfect

Glory*
The Mayor
Angel and his nightmare polycule

Good

No one. Literally no one! (Unless you're counting Dark Willow, I guess.)

Adequate

The Master
The Trio**

Poor

Adam (although: bonus points for his floppy disk drive!)

Abysmal

The First

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 14

Is the great joke of Pluribus at its audience's expense? I get into that a bit in this week's review! Little preview here!

Is that what Pluribus is doing in "HDP"? Maybe a little. Pluribus is a playful show — far more so than its reputation might suggest! — and it clearly doesn't mind fucking with its viewers' expectations. But I think this rug pull is about more than that: It's about making you feel very keenly Carol's paradoxical despair at the world she's found herself living in. The joke may be on you, but it's mostly on her. She was horrified on the basest level by the evidence of cannibalism she found in "Got Milk," and also finding that evidence and documenting it was the most active she'd been since Helen's death. Her monologue on the video in the warehouse was an invitation to the other immune to help her in overthrowing the Joined, a permission slip to them to say that yes, they'd been duped, but now they were on Team Carol. It was, in other words, a cry for company. The most terrible thing she could imagine the Joined doing was also the thing that, she imagined, might finally put her in community with the planet's remaining individual humans.

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 10

don't @ me about the syllable count here

TMNT font generator that says "Eric Adams is Albanian"

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 9

look AI is important for his efficiency!! if he didn't use AI on his promo images, how would he have the time to spend his workday getting mad at people who don't like that he uses AI on his promo images

instagram comment. someone has posted "I would've gave it a try if it wasn't for using AI slop." the owner of daisy's diner has responded "LOL" to this, twice

another instagram post. original poster: "how about make a real video of food and drink specials instead of using AI generated crap. If you'd only put the actual happy hour prices i would then come in." official verified daisy's dinner account: "lol"

and again! on the same post! original: "Daisys used to be a neighborhood staple but this AI slop is so unnecessary." verified daisy's account: "lol bro come on." a third person responds to daisy's with a simple "yikes"

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 7

feels weird to self-promo on a day like today but uh I sure do feel like Carol Sturka right now

There's a Lord of the Rings quote I see posted all over social media these days for reasons that I doubt need any explanation: "I wish it need not have happened in my time." Frodo, despairing that the fate of Middle-earth is now unwillingly in his hands, says it to Gandalf in a sort of pitiful appeal to the unfairness of it all. The full quote, Gandalf's thoughtful reply included, makes me think, yes, about the capital-H Horrors of the 2020s and what each of us can do to fight them.

But whenever I see the Frodo part of the quote in isolation, I immediately think of Carol Sturka, who spends most of her waking hours wishing it need not have happened in her time.

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 7

Trump is threatening genocide — and, possibly, the use of nuclear weapons — against Iran. I know it doesn't feel like much, but you've gotta call your reps. If you live in Minneapolis, here's a script for Omar, Smith, and Klobuchar. Check the next post in this thread for their numbers:

Hi there, my name is [name] and I’m a constituent from ZIP code [ZIP]. This morning, Donald Trump told the country that he intends to commit genocide against the people of Iran, saying, quote, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” This is a monstrous declaration, and you, I, and particularly the Senator/Representative will have the blood of, in his own words, a whole civilization on our hands if we do not do everything we can to stop this insane man. I am calling to ask the Senator/Representatitve to do everything in her power to see that Donald Trump is removed from office immediately.

Klobuchar: If she once again treats this moment as a petty political disagreement rather than a threat to hundreds of millions of lives, she will not receive my vote for any future office so long as I live. Thank you.

Smith: I have appreciated Senator Smith’s service for the past eight years, but the legacy she leaves to the people of Minnesota, and the world, may rest on what she does over the next twelve hours. I hope she has the courage to treat this moment with the seriousness it deserves. Thank you.

Omar: I appreciate that Rep. Omar has posted on social media in support of impeachment, but posting is not action. She is one of a tiny handful of Americans who actually have the power to attempt impeachment proceedings against Trump. I hope she has the courage to move past posting and toward actual change before it is too late for the people of Iran. Thank you.

Lily@lilywrites· Apr 3

went long on ToB today

$It's not difficult for me to understand why many ToB judges found The Passenger Seat and Flesh exceptional. Some judges, like Leon Hendrix in the tournament's finals, found István's depiction in Flesh relatable. Other judges and commenters were unnerved by how close to home The Passenger Seat's depiction of incel-adjacent masculine violence can feel in a society dominated by male chauvinist grifters. It probably didn't hurt for those particular judges that Flesh and The Passenger Seat are both written in styles that feel intentionally masculine: unornamented, straightforward, chronological, with little emphasis on physical description, emotion, or anything that might feel full or lush. Still, it does strike me that several nominated books that approached masculinity with the precise opposite stylistic tendency — books like Stephen Graham Jones's The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, a dense vampire gothic written largely in the register of the 19th-century American West, or Maria Reva's Endling, a metafictional kaleidoscope that repeatedly fractures its own story of the Russia-Ukraine war — saw little of the same praise from ToB judges for how they handled their male characters. These books, unlike Flesh and The Passenger Seat, had no interest in shying away from interiority or emotion. Rather, by allowing those lusher qualities into their prose, they are able to offer less romantic, and to my eye far more interesting, portraits of masculinity.$