Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Elsa made me queer.
I know, I know. Every queer person has a version of this story, or something like it; or so it seemed, in the years after “Let It Go” became an earworm.
Pretty much the only thing about my queer awakening story that makes it even marginally different from all the other ones about Elsa making people queer is that, for me, it happened with Frozen II, not Frozen I; with “Show Yourself,” not “Let It Go.”
This is because I am Weird and also Special. I think about that screening in the fall of 2019 with a couple Disney-obsessed pals from work and all the things that came after it, and I realize that this season is some kind of anniversary, even though I had come out as queer before then, and didn’t come out as bigender till long after.
Still, some sort of questing began that Saturday afternoon at the — of all the god damn places in the world — Cineplex Yonge & Dundas, and it continued in the days and months that followed, which also contained a pandemic, and a lot of wintery walking around listening to “Show Yourself” extremely loudly on ear buds that were, at the time, still connected to my phone by a wire.
“Show Yourself” asked questions of me that suddenly needed answers, questions like what is the “something is familiar like a dream I can reach but not quite hold;” who is the “I can sense you there like a friend I’ve always known;” and the answer that’s right in the song itself, though it takes two voices to achieve it: “You/I am the one you/I’ve been waiting for all of your/my life.”
Maybe that was when “she” (you can call her Lia) started kicking at the door.
Meanwhile, on Valo
I’ll tell you another thing, though: I’ve been reading Star Wars middle-grade novels, mostly because I want to write one someday, and these are, beyond question, the most unfussily queer stories in Star Wars right now, and possibly in any Disney brand in the world.
The specifics aren’t (for my purposes here) important, other than to note a matter-of-factness about gender and sexuality in the (usually tween) characters in these novels. It was this matter-of-factness that made me realize, over the weekend and quite gratefully, that this is just the nature of gen-Alpha’s world, now. I happened to see an 11-year-old on that selfsame weekend, and some of the things she said about school and her class underlined the point. This thing, that seems like a big fight in the political sphere and in the media, about pronouns and bodies and everything else? That’s for the grown-ups. The kids couldn’t care less.
The past month, in particular, has been painful; for a lot of people, as far as I’m aware, but certainly for queer folk watching the walls close in (and certainly including young people, and especially trans young people). Nothing in a Star Wars novel made me feel any better about the fact that in the short term (i.e., probably over the next ten or so years), we’re going to watch a lot of awful, abusive, violent and restrictive behaviour being levelled against extremely vulnerable persons who do not, in any way, deserve to be the political punching bag they’ve been forced to become. That will still hurt, and will cause lasting, generational harm, and that’s awful.
What I feel like expressing, though, is the idea that for all intents and purposes, the race is already run, because: the position of acceptance with respect to queer identities (and a lot of other things besides) is in a radically different place for Gen-A and Gen-Z than it’s ever been for the hoary old monsters in the Boomer / Gen-X class who are (currently) making all of this hateful policy.
Again: those policies will do real harm and damage; but they also kind of don’t matter, because over a middle-term timescale, they’re still going to fail. The bell of liberation can’t be un-rung. There is more language around the understanding of the queer self now than there ever has been; and there will continue to be more, and more, and more, until no one is left alive who remembers why it was so important that there should have been less. That’s my bit of hope for the new year.
Tone-transitioning paragraph block
It gets quotidian from here; please make yourself another cup of tea.
Buying physical media
Disney continues to dribble out 4K UHDs of their marquee streaming series, and last week it was Ahsoka and Loki Season 2 (along with Hawkeye and season 3 of The Mandalorian). Loki is Top Five Marvel for me, so I grabbed that steelbook pretty quickly — and I was so astonished by the depth of the image (against the streaming version) that I went back to Bay Street Video and picked up Ahsoka as well.
On Loki, it’s the photographic quality of the imagery in Benson and Moorhead’s season that makes the discs stand out; there isn’t so much a grain structure (if there is, it’s a digital fake) as a patina to the images that can be quite breathtaking in some scenes, almost as though the directors and their cinematographers have found a modern means of “fogging” the (definitely-not-film) they shot the series on.
Of course, Loki is also the best-designed anything Marvel Studios has done; its art direction, production design, sets and costuming are so far above the rest of the “house style” that I’m pretty sure the show could be flatly lit with a bank of klieg lights and still come out looking spectacular.
I was therefore even more interested in seeing how Ahsoka bore up. On Disney+, it was certainly the best-looking of the Filoni/Favreau series, but when the competition is The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, that’s a low bar. Still — and particularly in UHD, where the colour depth and black levels are significantly more nuanced than they are on streaming — Ahsoka does an appreciably better job at integrating everybody’s least-favourite tech gizmo of the last five years (at least, until A.I.): the LED video wall.
The LED video wall was and is a great idea, but its utilization has been across-the-board poor since about The Mandalorian‘s third episode. Series like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (and, for that matter, the new Star Wars series, Skeleton Crew) have learned that the wall works best when out of focus, way in the background of any given shot, as a means of deeply expanding the Z-axis of the frame or a set. It’s like using mirrors (which they used to do!) to make hallways look longer.
Mando and Boba (and, for that matter, Obi-Wan Kenobi) made the mistake of thinking that the LED wall effectively replaced the need for mid-ground set design and characters; that you could put your principals five feet away from the video wall, throw a bunch of hot light on them (and on the wall), and it would turn out fine.
That strategy is at play in Ahsoka, too, but at least in Ahsoka, Filoni has cottoned to the other basic fact of the wall: it generally works better for low-light and twilight environments than anything meant to be bright or daylight. So in response, Filoni designed a lot of his series that way. The planet Seatos, with its stormy seas and blood-red trees, works best; shots in episodes 3 and 4 look almost like proper visual effects instead of the LED wall.
Peridea, in the back half of the season, is slightly less successful, but still integrates better on UHD than it ever did on Disney+. And UHD has another thing going for it, especially now that Disney Home Video has started employing Dolby Vision HDR again: it makes lightsabre fights look sickkkkkk.
A small update re: A.I.
There were a couple of things I wanted to say about this article that are too long for me to simply include in a regular link bracket today; here they are.
From the title on down — “The Phony Comforts of A.I. Skepticism” — this piece by Casey Newton is speaking my language. On social media particularly, it’s become fashionable to dunk on generative A.I. on a daily and even hourly basis (no seriously; some accounts I follow, particularly on ever-pious Bluesky, are doing this).
This is fine and good, and I’m sure it makes people feel momentarily better to laugh and point at all the stupid shit the various LLMs have faceplanted their way into in 2024. The trouble, of course, is in the confirmation-biasy-ness of it all; I’m a person who broadly prefers to look at a situation as clearly as possible, even if it feels yucky.
I attended a conference last month (I know, yucky) where A.I. was on the periphery of a lot of the conversations; and it convinced me of two things:
- There are applications for this technology that (at least, in theory) have the potential to do extremely important things, things that will transform the nature of the world;
- This shit is not going away, regardless.
I emphasized the second point because I think it’s the really important one. There’s a real “if we just hold our breath long enough the monster will go away” vibe to people, particularly in the creative communities, grappling with A.I. Those people are now turning purple.
As a bonus, I’ll throw in the most salient/terrifying factoid that came out of that conference: those massive, transformative aspects of A.I. that I mentioned in point 1., above? They’ll be here before 2030. Like, this is not even (for humans, and our pitiably short senses of time) a long-term problem. It’s here right now, and its effects are arriving in the short-to-mid-term.
This is why the overall thrust of Casey’s argument is important: without a lot of more intelligent and ethical thought by the very people who are doing their best to hold their breath through the crisis, A.I. could cause an unimaginable quantity of harm.
We need policy, regulation, and safeguards immediately, not ten years from now. Advocacy around A.I. needs to immediately shift from “this is bad and people shouldn’t use it,” to “what’s the positive use case for this?” and “where should we require rigorous guardrails?” Because I’ll tell ya one thing: the corporations that are building all this shit couldn’t care less about either premise. They’re just going to keep building it.
Linkblot
- I’ve been dumpster-diving my video archives recently and I decided to post the video of my turn at Star Trek: The Experience at Universal Studios Hollywood all the way back in 1993. I bet someone will flag this for copyright at some point. (Giant Green Space Hand)
- Look on the bright side: I bet we’re in for a golden age of “what America is actually like” posts. (Popehat)
- Lest you think I’m being unfair, here’s a good one on what Toronto is actually like. (Misha’s Substack)
- On that subject, does anyone else fondly remember that squat tenement-house looking plaza at Yonge and Broadway in the ’90s? Just me? Turns out a Substacker I follow designed it. Housed the first Silver Snail I visited, among other fine things. (CBC)
- “Get a time machine and go back to 1995 when you’re seven years old and just piss away all your time on the internet getting into arguments on message boards, then do that for ten years straight. You will develop prison muscles and you’ll be a good thief,” and 15 other notes on writing. (Kaleb Horton)