character saturday: florid friend

For reasons that should be apparent to anybody with access to.... I was gunna say the internet, but, really, the world, this week... I needed a bard.

Because we lost Dolly Parton this week (and then Tim Curry and then the voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen... fuck this week). And I don't generally get overly emotional about celeb deaths, it's very much "awww, that's very sad..." and then I move on. But just the huge outpouring of emotion from people everywhere about Dolly's death really hit me directly in the feels.

I mean it makes sense. Dolly was just kindness and love personified. Dolly wrote so many songs that you just know without really knowing how you know them. Dolly's Sand Dollar production company produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dolly donated a million dollars to help fund the creation of a vaccine during the pandemic. Dolly's Imagination Library has given away over 330 million books to kids.

So, yeah... I needed a bard for today's DnD Character Colouring Book.

Sure, I could have whipped up a Dolly-themed bard, but it made more sense to dip into my existing characters. And Harland Honeypot just felt the closest to that idea. This is very much a post-campaign Harland. Back in Waterdeep writing smut. Having bought the festhall his mother works at.

I love Harland generally, but he's also a character that really came into being inside of a blog post. Definitely interesting looking back on that post and seeing the character that actually came to be slowly coming into focus.

Anyway...

Was this week Cheesy Potato and Bacon Soup or was it Flavoured Wallpaper Paste? The jury is still out. Was it terrible or inedible? No. Was it entirely too thick? Yes.

Mini Media Reviews for this week might not be so mini...

There's definitely a lot of them.

Pillion. I have some very serious issues with the structure and choices made in Pillion. Because if you're trying to make a movie, albeit a black comedy, about a dom/sub relationship where the dom is legitimately an abuser and a toxic human, you can't also give him a group of friends who are also in the same BDSM community, who don't also seem to be toxic abusers. It just fundamentally fails. They would absolutely not allow that kind of bullshit. Especially since they seem to be of the "oh that's just how he is". No. Just no.

You also can't really that when you have a plot line where we never actually see any of the communication between the dom and the sub. I mean, fuck it, even fucking Fifty Shades got that bit kind of right. Plus we don't see the conversation about shaving the sub's head or locking him with a padlock. Those things aren't actually given any weight or meaning within the story, when they should absolutely have been corner stones of what happens between them.

Part of the problem is that the book this is based on is set in the 1970's. If this had been set in the 70's, a lot of my issues kind of go away, because we're not in the present day where consent within these kinds of relationships should be key.

I will also say that the things that are the cringiest aren't the relationship between the two lead characters. It's literally every scene involving the parents of our main character. That whole situation seems completely untethered to reality, other than the scene where the mother tells the dom he's an asshole. Yeah, lady, we been knowing that, we're completely with you on that.

I very nearly wrote a whole review about Pillion (and yes, this kind of ended up being that anyway, but I could have written more, trust me). It swirled around in my head for a couple of days before other things this week really swept it to the side. The performances from Skarsgard and Melling are outstanding, a lot of the visuals are great. I just have fundamental issues with many of director Harry Lighton's choices. It also makes sense to me that Lighton has only really directed short films up until this point. I think this could work better as a short film. You'd remove all the unnecessary details and kind of distil it down to it's rawest form.

In the end it's just kinda sad and cringy. It's not particularly joyful or sexy. Which is disappointing. I didn't expect a lot, but I kind of expected better than we got.

Streets of Fire. I fully blame Fluffy for this one. While he never said it was good, he did seem to enjoy it for reasons that I absolutely do not understand. Because this is A Bad Movie. The performances are bad. The script is bad. The music is bad. The costumes are... mostly questionable. The editing is bad. The sets... both bad and also mostly just grey. It's bad. And somehow many of the people in this actually went on to have/continued to have careers. Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, Willem Dafoe, Bill Paxton... even Ed Begley Jr shows up for about 11 seconds until an unrecognisable layer of filth.

Thankfully this was my Sunday afternoon movie and I mostly crocheted through the entire thing. Because it was bad.

The Vampire Lestat. I mainlined the whole season over two nights. Because the first two seasons, Interview With The Vampire was pretty much the best thing I watched in 2025. This is just as good. Even if it does very much leave things on a massive cliffhanger, but that's also what the book does. So I fully expected it here. It's just such good fucking storytelling.

I will fully admit that I remember much less of the books that this season is (and the next season will be) based on. I mostly remember the somewhat terrible Queen of the Damned movie from the early 2000's. And they already messed around with the storyline. So I honestly couldn't tell you what they actually changed up vs what was originally in the book. And some of the end of the season gets a little confusing. I assume at least some of that will be straightened out by the next season.

But it's still exceptionally good.

No. 6. I think I want spelunking, as I am wont to do on occasion, on lists of "queer anime". And one of those trips led me to No. 6. Which is slightly more gay than other anime thanks to two kisses that are chalked up to "goodbye kisses" within the narrative, everything else is very "between the lines".

As general storytelling though, it's not bad. Yes, it's a little bit histrionic. Because it's anime. And the end of the series/season is a little rushed, but I quite enjoyed it overall.

The Last Kingdom. Or at least the first three episodes of the first season of the same. If you'd said to me before I got on this TV show download spree that I was very much into historical drama, I would have asked you how high you were currently. Because of course I don't care about historical drama.

Newsflash. Romulus, Paris Police 1900 and 1905, Black Sails, Vienna Blood, The Alienist, Murdoch Mysteries (just the one season), The Musketeers, Gentleman Jack, Crossbones, The Knick, Leonardo, The Serpent Queen, Versailles and This Is Not A Murder Mystery would appear to prove me wrong. And that's without including the shows with some kind of supernatural edge like The Nevers or Penny Dreadful.

And The Vikings is on my To Watch list. Also maybe Medici at some point.

So, yeah, I watched a lot of stuff this week.

Friday Night DnD was... well, it was yet another grey dungeon, because the map designers for this part of the adventure are allergic to anything that isn't a straight line. Or a circle.

I will also say that transitioning over to my girl Molly was absolutely the right call. Because now I can just pick up the weird flesh ball and feed it pocket bacon... and get in the glowing green bathtub and get a hotline to an elder brain... and stick my face in a device meant for a beholder eyestalk and very nearly get subjected to the Feeblemind spell, which would have been very bad. I could potentially have gotten to the same place with Whisper, but it would have felt like trying to push him uphill the whole time.

Anyway...

Ma called me this morning, which never bodes especially well, to say she was a little "wobbly" this morning and would I come up to her place. And look, based on how the world had been going up until that point in the week, yeah, sure, not a problem.

So not really much to report. I went, we shopped, I unpacked and repacked, I came home.