When last I updated this blog Donald Trump was still the President of the United States, and it would still be a little over half a year before COVID-19 significantly made its presence known in North America. Since then life has undergone drastic, almost unimaginable changes, and as I make my entirely unexpected return to Culture War Reporters I thought it would be fitting to provide updates on the half dozen posts I wrote back in 2019 to underscore the ways in which time has moved inexorably onwards.
Who Did It Better? Coming Out with J.K. Rowling and Overwatch Lead Writer Michael Chu – January 11, 2019
It’s laughable to look back on a post that explores J. K. Rowling’s take on representing the LGBTQ+ community given that the author has positioned herself as a bastion against what she views as the dangers of transgender men. How could I have known that at the tail end of the year she would tweet support for Maya Forstater, a British woman who was fired for her comments about that particular group of people? Since then Rowling has doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and so on, down on her stance, in many ways becoming a figurehead for the TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) movement. This has caused a rift in the Harry Potter fandom between those who would demonize the author and paint her entire body of work as being “bad” or “problematic” and others who would defend her writing to the point of adopting beliefs and stances that they might not otherwise.
Michael Chu, on the other hand, is no longer the head writer on Overwatch, and in fact no longer works for Blizzard Entertainment at all. He now acts as Narrative Director at 31st Union, a “San Fransisco Bay Area studio formed with a common purpose of crafting highly engaging entertainment and a commitment to putting fans first.” As far as his former employer, we’ll be digging into that oversized can of worms a little further down.
With the 89th Academy Awards coming in just a few short days I’m grateful for the opportunity to interview director Juanjo Giménez and pick his brain about Timecode, which has been nominated for Best Short Film.
An earnest, plaintive piano melody opens as desperate figures stare out into the middle distance. A woman drops in on an old flame, using some flimsy pretext neither of them believe for a moment. What follows is a terse, tense, and incredibly human exchange as our two protagonists verbally fence over decaf and destiny.
While eventually I’ll run out of ways to write this, the purpose of the third installment of the Evan Yeong Literary Awards is to shine a spotlight on an artistic medium that has taken a bit of a back seat as screen media becomes increasingly more prevalent, calling attention to a select handful of books I read these past 12 months. In 2015 every pick was objectively a winner, but given the rocky year following it’s no surprise that these awards have their ups and downs.
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