Lady Business

Here’s another Media Roundup after not months and months! Hopefully I’ll be reading and watching things other than fic a bit more often and thus post these media roundups more often than I was.

I seem to have gotten into the habit of reading a lot of graphic novels in December and January. I currently have a big pile out from the library – and I’ve read a few of them, and hopefully will get around to even more of the pile.

Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology by Angela Hsieh— A very charming graphic novel about two girls on an adventure. Featuring charming art and very cute geo fauna! (As a Mandarin learner I did find the almost but not quite hanzi characters a little bit frustrating)

The Pale Queenby Ethan M. Aldridge—Another YA graphic novel, this one featuring an f/f romance. I really liked the fae in this book – they were a good mix of beautiful and scary. The art is also lovely!

Crush of Music— I’m still watching this very slowly, the subtitles have mostly been better for the last few episodes –so that’s nice. I’m enjoying seeing Liu Yuning and Zhou Shen interact in this – at one point they played the kazoo together!

Various Batman ect comic—So I mentioned in my 2025 media review post that I accidentally acquired a new fandom, that fandom is batfam. This is embarrassing for me because for years I've been prone to what R calls “the Batman rant” where I complain that punching people in the face is a dumb way to reduce crime rates. Plus I just feel like superhero comics are a space that's pretty hostile to me and my values. But apparently if you give me fic about a family of 3-8 adopted siblings finding each other/bonding and don't make me think too hard about the moral foundations of the universe then I'm willing to suspend my moral disbelief.

Anyways I got sucked in enough to be curious about the source material and have been reading stuff on hoopla. I'm fairly impressed with their comic reading interface too, it has a nice flow. (It doesn’t play well with my RSI issues but then neither does turning pages) The actual stories vary in quality, but some of them are surprisingly good. Even the not very good ones are surprisingly more-ish. I’m bringing a lot of emotional investment in these characters from my fic reading which also helps make the comics more engaging.

The Cross-Dressed Union—I thought that if my media theme at the moment is comfort that I should really start a new crossdressing girl drama since that's a big comfort trope of mine, So I asked around for recs and started this drama about an arranged marriage between a crossdressing woman and crossdressing man. It sounded fun but so far I’m pretty meh about it. I think my biggest problem is that the ML is the main character, and for these kinds of stories I prefer more focus on the FL. Also it's not doing enough with gender