a long time ago, we used to be friends...

The worst part of the new Veronica Mars movie is getting the damn theme song stuck in your head for like 24 hours. Other than that, really enjoyed it! I'm new to the show - gnine showed it to us last year to prepare for the movie, and we didn't actually watch s3 as she said (repeatedly) that it was not worth it. And I didn't have any trouble getting the movie despite that. It felt a lot like the first season, decent mystery, good character beats, great lines, some h/c. Not enough Weevil (or Weevil and Logan) but otherwise a good time! And they definitely knew the audience they were playing to, without feeling entirely gratuitously fan-service-y .


(Not that there is anything wrong with gratuitous fan-service, such is what made the new Gintama movie one of the best based-on-an-anime movies I've ever seen...!)

Then there was the latest ep of WTNV, which judging by Tumblr and AO3, I think I speak for the whole fandom when I say AHHHHH KHOSHEKH STREX HOW COULD YOU?!!!?? Okay, you're an evil megacorp but still, here is a line, and it happens to lie before hurting an innocent spine-ridged venomous floating kitty cat. The show is often at its best when Cecil shows genuine feeling, and for all his building frustration with Strex we've maybe never heard him this angry before. I still am not sure where the Strex storyline is going (given the nature and style of WTNV I will not be surprised if the majority of it is resolved off-the-air and in passing) but the slow way they're building the tension - mostly background mentions but increasingly more often brought to the forefront - has been really effective so far. (All the more impressive because objectively speaking, Strex/Desert Bluffs is arguably no worse than Night Vale itself - that is, Strex is absolutely horrifying; but Night Vale might have an even higher mortality rate! But Night Vale and Cecil are the devil we know and have come to love, while as Kevin is just terrifying and wrong, and we want to see Strex go down as much as Cecil does...)

Then there's the question of what happened to Khoshekh. During the confrontation, the first sound is pretty clearly Khoshekh's growl that we've heard before, but then there are what sound like normal cat meows and it's hard to tell whether that's Khoshekh or the Strex-pet. Did removing Khoshekh from his fixed position also remove some of his more unusual attributes, render him more like a normal feline? And was this deliberate, Strex, bringing the bizarre and the unique down to a baseline, perfect normal, as they will try to do with all of Night Vale...

Naturally I had to write up some of these thoughts into an episode tag (me and half the fandom!) Mine is: Displacement, in which Carlos comes to Cecil, and to some realizations.