june 2025 wrap up
a trip to niagara falls and the return of a beloved show
i began the month by embarking on a short trip with two friends. first, we went to their alma mater in ithaca, and i was delighted to be shown the town and college where they had spent four long years. cornell is a vast, vast campus, the sort of campus that feels like it’s eating up the town in which it is located, or rather, the campus that begins to itself feel more like its own town. when i was in high school and touring college campuses, i was partial to ones that felt compact and enclosed (my first choice was vassar, and alas, i did not get in).
after that we continued onward to niagara falls, which i had never been to, despite the local astoria mosque sponsoring yearly trips. what surprised me most was how dead the town of niagara itself was; i had expected a town vibrant and charming, something built to appeal to tourists, with cutesy shops and curated streets made for instagram shots, but instead niagara was…kind of depressing, actually. it’s a town of casinos, strip malls, and subpar diners.
when we first went to the falls, i felt extremely underwhelmed. they were Nice, certainly, but i didn’t really understand the hype. but then we went on two “experiences”: journey behind the falls and maid of the mist. the first took you below the falls themselves, getting you so close to the water it’s impossible not to get wet. that was where you could really feel the intensity and strength of the falls. maid of the mist is a boat ride that takes you right to the falls, and it was exhilarating to the point of being anxiety-inducing lol; i was getting so much water and wind in my face i felt like i was drowning. but i loved it, 10/10 would do again. i loooove being on the water (in a boat, that is) and the whole trip was so intense that i feel like it’s going to turn into a core memory lol.
the whole experience reminded me just how much i love travel. i haven’t traveled properly in a while — perhaps since scotland in 2024? i love the discovery, the adventure, the satisfaction of coordinating events and experiences. i also really enjoy being amongst other tourists, generally — there’s a kind of infectious joy at sharing a delightful experience. it’s very sweet to watch people happily taking pictures and selfies and being silly together.
i also got to see a knicks game — THE knicks game, in fact — at a sports bar in buffalo. i have nearly zero interest in sports of any kind but even i could not help but get sucked into some of the hype surrounding the knicks this season. this was the first basketball game i’ve watched in my life and what an experience to watch amongst knicks fans as the knicks won for the first time in decades. ideally i would have been in nyc when it happened, but even in buffalo this was an incredible experience.
anime and tv;
witch hat atelier;
witch hat atelier is a testament to the power of great (astounding! stunning! sublime!) animation. it’s not that the characters and story aren’t amazing (they are), but the animation quality here is unreal. the animators really looked at the manga’s gorgeous art deco style and thought, yeah, we are fully doing justice to this. every single scene is a delight. the colors, the details, you can absolutely see the effort put into this. episode 5 reportedly utilized 20,000 drawings (as opposed to the 3-5k drawings used for most episodes) to render a particularly intense battle scene, and, yeah, you can tell. just stunning beyond words. i’m always on the verge of tears just from the sheer intensity of the visuals and music.
i don’t usually enjoy shows focusing on children, but i’m not having that issue here at all; i think coco is a delightful lead and i got truly emotional watching her level up. i love all our main girls and their dynamics with one another.
and qifrey, whew, i love a morally grey lead, especially when he appears to have such radically different sides to him. because qifrey is kind, qifrey is sweet, qifrey is a good sensei, but qifrey is also single-minded, scarily intense, intimidating, and all-too willing to encroach on others’ boundaries and freedoms to get what he wants. so far we don’t know anything about why he is the way he is, but i suspect it has something to do with what he hides behind his eyeglass? maybe? anyway, i’m obsessed with him, and so is the rest of the fandom:
marriagetoxin;
i was SO excited for this anime, but turns out it’s extremely goofy, and not in a good way, unfortunately. i started this thinking it was gonna be a BL. the premise is that in order to save his lesbian sister from getting married to carry on the family name, a “poison master” (gero) hires a cross-dressing marriage swindler (kinosaki) to find him a wife. so, i thought that there would be more queer themes than there are, and i assumed there would at least be a multitude of scenes between gero and kinosaki that would develop their relationship. instead i think i’m ending up with a very heterosexual harem anime, complete with a female character whose boobs defy gravity. it doesn’t help that the show takes itself so seriously, but it does, and then it starts to drag, and fail at emotional beats, and feel repetitive (it’s always: gero finds a potential wife candidate, has to help her get out of trouble for a few eps, rinse and repeat). there are attempts to give side characters depth and interiority, but since we don’t spend enough time with them, it ultimately falls flat.
even so this is an anime clearly has some production power behind it; the animation and character designs are beautiful, the show is full of bright color and some great fight scenes, and the music is hype. every time i tune into an episode i desperately want to love it, but there’s no real stakes, no proper plot progression. it’s just gero and kinosaki going through the motions, doing the same thing over and over again. apparently the second season is going to air this january, which baffles me with how fast it is, and i don’t think i’ll tune in unless i hear something drastically different about the plot.
rivals s2;
i watched the first season twice and got my best friend into it. i’m absolutely obsessed with this show and i didn’t think season 2 would top season 1 but it’s just as high-octane, full of wild drama and shenanigans. it’s very silly but fully leans into that and just goes full ham. i did have some issues/things i thought about this season which will definitely be MAJOR SPOILERS so be warned:
cameron: she doesn’t have very much to do this season and feels very much like a character in other people’s stories. she’s there for rupert to feel guilty about, for declan to almost sleep with so he can realize how much he loves his wife, for rupert’s children to dislike so that she can be compared with taggie who is great with the kids (not a great look btw, the optics are unpleasant when you’re pitting the formidable black woman against the uwu white girl, like it’s genuinely giving racism).
taggie: i didn’t mind taggie’s ingenue persona in the first season because i hoped she would grow out of it but they’re really laying it on thick here. there’s this one scene where she struggles to pronounce apocalyptic in front of rupert and it’s so absurdly infantalizing. listen, i love a good rake/ingenue ship as much as the next girl, but you can have an ingenue character that isn’t written to be a child.
monica: monica had a much bigger storyline this season that sees her finally confront tony’s habitual infidelity and come into her own. i’ve always liked her character’s quiet strength and dignity, and i got really excited when this season began heavily hinting that monica is actually a lesbian. it seemed to be nearly confirmed when she finally told tony she was going to divorce him, and i got so excited because in the books monica does in fact go off and live happily with her girlfriend, and people in the community respect her so much they accept her. but in the show…they kill monica off. it’s yet another in a very long list of media killing off lesbians but it feels especially egregious in 2026 and in a show that also devotes some decent storytime to a gay male couple. some fans are speculating that monica is faking her death to get away from tony, but i just don’t buy it, after she stood up to him the way she did, and the way the showrunners are talking about it is making it seem like this was an active decision to “break” tony (i.e. fridging) and make things more interesting but i absolutely think monica publicly divorcing tony while moving in with her girlfriend would have shook tony up even more than her death. anyway that’s my rant and i really hate this for us but sadly this show has me in a chokehold so i will absolutely be watching the remainder of this season when it comes back in the fall.
widow’s bay;
i binged this in a couple of days with my best friend cause we were looking for something gripping, and we both enjoy a good horror comedy, and i LOVE matthew rhys, i will watch him in literally anything. anyway, widow’s bay is basically parks & rec meets midnight mass with some of the narrative tricks of evil. matthew rhys is the mayor of a tiny island that’s economically struggling and he’s trying to revitalize the tourism industry but he’s up against some of the superstitious locals who are convinced the island is under a curse. it’s way funnier than i expected and the humor mostly works well alongside the horror!
widow’s bay utilizes an interesting technique with matthew rhys’ character tom loftis. outwardly, he’s a skeptic and thinks the islanders’ superstitions are ridiculous, the beliefs of “dumb hicks” as he angrily shouts in a heated moment. but, on the other hand, he’s never taken his teenage son off the island, because there’s a belief that anyone born on the island can never leave it or they’ll die. so clearly tom isn’t entirely disbelieving of the island superstitions, and as the show goes on he grows into more and more of a believer, but he never actually tells us, the viewer, this, in so many words; in this particular instance widow’s bay lacks that grating netflix-type exposition that forces characters to soliloquy their entire character arc.
this works well enough with tom’s character, but i found that it actually didn’t mesh well with other narrative parts of the show. the writers seem to want to avoid any kind of exposition, including debriefs between characters, which meant that sometimes, from episode to episode, i couldn’t help but feeling like i’d missed out on something vital, or like i was catching up. it’s odd, for characters who are actively investigating, not to have one or two scenes where they debrief everything they’ve discovered. these scenes are not in and of themselves indicators of bad writing; it’s all in how the scenes themselves are written. this is not to say that the show is incomprehensible but it did leave me with a few questions that bugged me because they were things that our characters over the course of the show discovered but never mentioned, so i left with the feeling that i was missing scenes.
i thought this was a one-shot so i was surprised when we ended on a little bit of a cliffhanger! but i’ll tune in for season 2. i don’t think i love this as much as the wider world seems to but it was an enjoyable way to spend a sunday (and oh, matthew rhys, the actor you are).
books;
where no shadow stays by sara hashem
the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin
she’s always hungry by eliza clark
films;
backrooms (4/5): loses itself a little in the second half and i don’t love the attempt at metaphor but i’m obsessed with the visual storytelling and how unsettled this made me feel. i felt so much tension watching; this is atmosphere done right.
get out (4.5/5): a rewatch for me since i’d forgotten much of this movie and saw some commentary about how obsession is inspired by it. still a banger. nothing i can say that hasn’t already been said.
obsession (4/5): i’m of two minds about obsession because i can fully understand the critique of it being derivative and pointless but i also loved it. i loved how bleak it was, i loved the retro feel of it, i loved the escalating tension, i loved how the film baits you into feeling sympathy for the main guy only to slowly peel back his layers and show you how awful he is, and i loved how often this genuinely shocked me.
exit 8 (2/5): this was boring and extremely repetitive and ended up somehow feeling like pro-life propaganda. probably should have stayed a game.
other bits & bobs;
why naruto does a terrible job at its own politics (very true, naruto loses the thread of its own themes quite rapidly)
cheers,
hadeer
Thanks for the shoutout!