The Uncanny Valley

Elizabeth Bridges - Writer, Professor, Reviewer

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Buffy at 20 – or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Slayer

Buffy series finale, “Chosen,” S7E22

It’s funny to think of Buffy as 20 years old, since it isn’t for me, not exactly. I mean, I became aware of the show at its outset. I had seen the lackluster 1992 movie of the same title a few years before, which had followed in the wake of some pretty hilarious teen satires like The Brady Bunch Movie (Sure, Jan!) and the darkly comedic apotheosis of all 80s teen fare, Heathers. The trailers and the title certainly set it in that light, so my friends and I had high hopes. Unfortunately, the story meandered, and the humor kept its fangs retracted, despite a potentially great cast in Kristy Swanson, Luke Perry, Donald Sutherland, and even Rutger Hauer for god’s sake. We even got a very young Hilary Swank. When I heard this property had been turned into a show, I merely rolled my eyes. Continue reading

Star Trek Fandom and Queerness: A Voyage Home

star_trek_ivMy first date was with a boy – the kind of pseudo-date where your mom drops you off at the movies. I was 13, in the 7th grade, and we went to see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. You know – the funny one, the one with the whales. That movie was both my gateway to Star Trek fandom and my gateway to attempted heterosexuality. I’m still a Trek fan. The other thing not so much. Continue reading

The Perils of Childhood – Stranger Things, Season 1

Note: This review is spoiler-free.

netflix stranger things posterStranger Things (2016) is an 8-part Netflix series by Matt and Ross Duffer, aka the Duffer Brothers, whose previous credits include some episodes of Wayward Pines and assorted films and shorts featuring tales of the macabre and the uncanny. It’s hard to name the genre that Stranger Things falls into. I see it as an onscreen carryover from the speculative fiction subcategory known as “weird fiction,” which blends elements of plot-twisty sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and the supernatural – the genre of Lovecraft, Poe, Serling, and contemporary author Jeff Vandermeer. Continue reading

Her Name in the Sky by Kelly Quindlen – WLW YA Book Review

Since this is the first in a series of posts, I’ll give a little background. Most of my recent pieces have been about TV’s The 100, specifically with regard to the unfortunate turn it took in Season 3 with the death of favorite lesbian character Lexa, and the conversation that has started about the problematic depiction of WLWs (women who love women) on TV in general.

Having been trained in a near-Pavlovian manner to expect heartbreak any time I see a woman show any romantic interest in another woman onscreen, I decided to seek elsewhere for better representation. One of my first stops was Amazon’s kindle store. I mean, if you can find dinosaur-themed erotica and “uniporn*” for kindle, why can’t you also find a quaint little lesbian teen love story or two? Well, it turns out you can. I had to look around for a bit and weed through the smut – because the kindle store delivers that in spades to be sure – but indeed there are several good stories out there for young women who find themselves in love with the girl next door.
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