Nevanna's Forest of Stories

These are five of the books or series that were foundational to my mind control obsession.

1. The Witch Herself (1978) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The subject line of this post is from a song that recurs throughout Naylor’s “Witch” books.

I discussed this series last year, during Spooky Season, but I chose to single out this particular book (the third out of six) because it’s the one in which protagonist Lynn’s best friend, Mouse, declares her intention to be a hypnotist. After minimal study, she can put people in trances, control their actions, and access repressed memories. She also communicates with Lynn’s internal shadow self; it’s suggested that everybody has one, and that some witches - as well as an amateur hypnotist, apparently - can control these aspects of their victims by learning their secret names. (That part was, for better or for worse, also tremendously fascinating to me as a young reader.)

Mouse’s hypnotism is not part of the latter three books, in a series that is generally very smart about continuity and callbacks. The possible Watsonian reason is that she’s understandably frightened of her own power, but to the best of my recollection, it’s never even mentioned again.

2. The Ghastly Glasses (1985) by Beatrice Gormley

A psychic researcher posing as an optometrist gives young Andrea a pair of glasses that allows her to change people’s personalities when she looks through them.

This book is the sequel to Mail-Order Wings, which I haven’t read, but works pretty well as a stand-alone. It has a solid “be careful what you wish for” message and a very funny ending that would probably please cat lovers. I remember stealing one of its plot threads (minus the glasses) for my own long-ago attempt at a Psychic Kid story, about which I can unfortunately remember very little now.

3. Animorphs (1996-2001) by K.A. Applegate

Most of my peers probably at least know the hook for this series (written by spouses Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, along with a team of ghostwriters): five kids are given the power to transform into animals in order to fight an invasion by parasitic mind-controlling aliens. Although I never actually finished reading all the books, they were overwhelmingly formative for me while I was following them, and the horror of Yeerk infestation – both from the inside, when it happens to the team leader at one point, and from the outside – was a huge part of the reason why.

4. Extreme Zone (1997-1998) by M.C. Sumner

When her father’s secret scientific research leads to his disappearance from the military base where they live, Harley teams up with Noah, a classmate suffering from nightmares of what might be an alien abduction, to investigate.

There are satisfying amounts of mind control in this series, but it also contains: conspiracies, astral projection, interdimensional travel, clairvoyant visions, cults, shapeshifting, genetic engineering and other forms of Weird Science, and lots of questions that – even though the story seems to come to some sort of conclusion in its eight-book run – are never really resolved. Given the time frame of its publication, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was partly inspired by The X-Files. And unlike Animorphs, which is a generation-defining phenomenon, I have never met another person who’s read Extreme Zone. It doesn’t fall into the category of “do I remember reading this or did I hallucinate it?” that happens sometimes with childhood favorites – you can find and buy copies online, and I held onto my own collection – but some elements of the story, which are both surreal and specific, as well as its relative obscurity and the fact that I was only ever able to find most of the books exclusively at one independent bookstore in upstate New York, make me feel like a lot of adults probably do when processing those half-formed memories of nostalgic media.

5. Daughters of the Moon (2000-2007) by Lynne Ewing

Four (later, five) teenage girls use their supernatural powers to fight a demon and its human (and not-quite-human) thralls.

As a teenager, I already recognized that these books were kind of awkwardly written, not to mention morally uneven when it came to excusable applications of mind control (it was okay when the good guys did it!), and I didn’t care. As I wrote on Tumblr some years ago, the series scratched my itch for sensual descriptions of psychic contact as well as an enemies-to-lovers romance with a tormented immortal bad boy. Even then, I knew what I liked.

Last June, I listed my top five bookstores in the Boston area (including Brookline Booksmith, which I had a great time visiting for Independent Bookstore Day). The ones on this list are a little bit (or a lot) more far-flung, but I have fond memories of all of them. At the time of writing, all five are still open for business.

1. Heartleaf Books (Providence, RI)

A new favorite with an amazing mission and an adorable resident feline!

2. Oblong Books (Millerton, NY)

Although Oblong opened a second branch in the Hudson Valley in 2001, the original store, located just a few minutes away from the house where I grew up, was one of my favorite places to hang out as a young person. Children’s and YA books (along with toys and games) were on the bottom floor, adult books were located upstairs (I hung out pretty much exclusively in the SFF section), and the music section was one floor above that. Although I used to bemoan the fact that the nearest large chain bookstore was at least an hour away from my hometown, I now recognize that Oblong might not have survived until the present day if a Barnes & Noble had opened anywhere nearby.

3. Shakespeare and Company (Paris, France)

I wrote an essay about Shakespeare and Company for a Travel Writing class in university, and I probably still have a copy somewhere. The store is a cultural institution, and from the first time I stepped inside, I was enthralled by its history, including the writers and wanderers who spent the night there in exchange for some assistance with the store’s operations and a contribution to its archive of personal stories.

4. Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore (Minneapolis, MN)

I only visited this store once, when I was living in the Twin Cities for a couple of months in 2006, but I’m glad that it and its counterpart, Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore, existed and still exist today. Perhaps someday I’ll go back.

5. TIED: The Bookloft and Yellow House Books (Great Barrington, MA)

These are two other favorites from my youth! Yellow House helped to feed my childhood Baby-Sitters Club obsession, and I found a copy of Yarrow - which became my favorite non-Newford Charles de Lint title - at The Bookloft.

I had a mostly pleasant, sometimes challenging, weekend with my family. At least once, as it often does, our conversation turned to shared formative media. This inspired the following list of movies that my sisters and I, and sometimes our parents, enjoyed together and often quoted when I was growing up.

1. Harvey (1950)

This black-and-white classic, in which Jimmy Stewart’s best friend is a giant white rabbit that almost nobody else can see, was an old favorite of my parents’; they showed it to my sisters and me when I was a young teenager, and it’s been a family viewing standard many times since. Every once in a while, something will prompt one of us to exclaim, “Doctor, that is not my mother!” or remark, “You can be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. For years, I was smart, and I recommend pleasant.”

2. The Hobbit (1977)

The Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit might have been one of the first movies that I ever watched, when I was a toddler and Older Sister was seven or eight. (Around the same time, I named one of my stuffed animals “Bilbo.”) Since then, she’s read the book to me, and I’ve read it on my own, and I still think the movie does an amazing job of bringing the characters and songs to life.

3. Unico in the Island of Magic (1983)

Recently, I summed up this one to my housemates as follows: “early anime adventure in which an adorable baby unicorn tries to stop an evil wizard from turning people and animals into living puppets.” Someone in my family almost certainly picked up the VHS at an independent video store in our hometown, and the genuinely terrifying villain obviously wasn’t a deal-breaker for me or my sisters.

4. The Princess Bride (1987)

You know it, you love it. The Princess Bride was another go-to viewing choice for my family, and remains one of the rare adaptations that I enjoy more than the source material. Although Goldman’s novel is clever and inventive, it’s tonally very different from the movie, which blends humor and sincerity in a way that I overwhelmingly prefer. I fully admit to having been the obnoxious kid who could – and often did – quote some of the scenes from memory. (Or sometimes I’d just let out a snarl when someone said, “Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.”)

5. Hackers (1995)

This is another one that means more to my sisters and me than to our parents, which is understandable, since it is so very ’90s. During one of our many viewings, as we watched colorfully dressed high school students (played by visibly older actors) rollerblade to secret gatherings where they pooled their “elite” computer knowledge, Older Sister said, “Wasn’t there a time when we thought this was what teenage life would be like, if only we could find it?” There absolutely was. Honestly, I could not tell you whether the technology makes any sense at all, and I’ve been known to forget the plot from one viewing to the next, but the characters and the humor and the aesthetics are, well, hard-coded into my memory.

I don’t like April Fool’s Day, but I do like stories about scams and hoaxes. Here are five of my… well, “favorite” is a loaded word when talking about some of this subject matter. People were definitely or very likely hurt in all of these cases. People died in connection with some of them. I am not trying to make light of those tragedies when I say that I am fascinated by these accounts… but then again, maybe that’s how all the True Crime Girlies excuse their obsessions.

Anyway. Here are five scams or hoaxes that I find myself thinking and talking about a lot.

1. Beatrice Sparks’s Teen Diary Empire

I already alluded, in a previous entry, to the intersection of books like Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal with the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic. I would still recommend Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice to anyone who’s interested in those topics, or remembers picking up the supposed “diaries” of “real anonymous teenagers” from their local bookstore or school library.

2. MsScribe’s Fandom Social Climbing

MsScribe was a fanfic writer and LiveJournal blogger in the Harry Potter fandom of the early 2000s, who employed sockpuppets, weaponized existing ship wars, and almost certainly embellished the truth about her personal life, to gain sympathy and favor from the “Inner Circle” of popular fangirls. Part of why her actions remain a compelling and enduring part of fandom history was the deftness with which she understood and manipulated the expectations, grudges, rivalries, and allegiances of her community. In addition to the Fanlore article and the archived version of Charlotte Lennox’s “Unauthorized Fandom Biography,” you can watch Strange Aeons’ video on the topic if the audiovisual format is your preferred one.

3. Thanfiction’s Hobbit and Wizard Cults… And Beyond

I think that there are two reasons why I closely followed the fandom exploits of Andy “Thanfiction” Blake (as recounted primarily by his former partner, Abbey, and by The Tea Blogger, who has spent years building a massive timeline of Blake’s online activity), and they’re only tangentially related to his phony celebrity connections or attempts to scam people out of their money (and it’s been speculated that financial benefit was never even his primary objective anyway). The first reason is that I understand, on a very personal level, how the narrative that he offered his closest followers – including his supposed ability to “channel” characters from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, as well as his own OCs – might have been appealing. I’ve talked about fictional characters and worlds in some of the same ways that he did, and so have a few of my friends, but none of us have ever started a cult about it.

Secondly, Blake’s years on Tumblr, in which he often posted about Supernatural and current events (and appeared to over-identify with fictional characters but didn’t necessarily “channel” any), offer another example of how a bad actor can manipulate the norms of a subculture – in his case, the trappings of social justice and the revisionist version of his own mental illness and trauma history – to gain attention and power over others. The use of Tumblr (and other online platforms) for activism or for bonding over shared experiences is not an inherently bad thing, but I’ve long been skeptical of the social expectations that can develop in those environments and their vulnerability to exploitation.

4. TIED: Amanda Riley’s and Belle Gibson’s Fake Cancer Diagnoses

As far as I know, these two cases are unconnected, but they’re similarly horrifying when one considers how brazenly each woman took advantage of a religious community (in Riley’s case) and the already problematic world of complementary medicine and “wellness” trends (in Gibson’s), benefiting both financially and emotionally from their lies, at least for a time. Riley’s crimes are covered in a podcast called Scamanda; my primary understanding of Gibson’s story comes from a recent Netflix dramatization, Apple Cider Vinegar, but it’s based on a nonfiction book that I’ve requested from the library and am looking forward to reading.

5. Lani Sarem’s Attempted Bestseller List Coup

Handbook for Mortals – an awkwardly written “urban fantasy, paranormal romance” complete with a love triangle – appeared at the top of the Young Adult New York Times bestseller list in August 2017 despite nobody in the YA writing and publishing community ever having heard of it or its author before. It remained there for less than a day while booksellers and journalists pieced together writer Lani Sarem’s plan to buy her way into fame (and hopefully the production of a movie franchise). Although this scheme didn’t arise in transformative fandom, it’s come up in fandom history conversations because of a brief rumor that Sarem was secretly the author of infamous badfic My Immortal. There’s no evidence that this was the case, and part of me hopes that that particular mystery is never solved.

Are there any scams or hoaxes – within or outside of fandom – that have captured your attention?

Inevitably, my friends’ and my fannish interests and participation don’t always line up completely. I like to think that we can still support and even vicariously enjoy some of each other’s fandom obsessions… or, at least, I try to offer them that support, to the best of my ability, because I’d like them to do the same for me, to the best of theirs. Here are five fandoms to which I would consider myself “adjacent” even though I’ve never created any fic for them (which is how I personally define participation, for these purposes, though that’s obviously not a universal metric).

1. Star Trek: Voyager

I’ve actually seen a scattering of Star Trek episodes, across several eras, because I know so many dedicated fans, though I’ve never sat down and watched any series from the beginning. And, of course, I love any and all stories about the franchise’s place in overall fandom history. But one of my closest friends in college was especially fond of Voyager and showed some of our social circle a sampling of episodes; we shared an appreciation for the episode “Meld,” and I fangirled intensely over the descriptions of telepathic contact in the fic that she wrote as a result. Although that experience was only one tiny facet of a very long friendship that incorporated several fannish obsessions – shared and otherwise – it was an early sign that we interacted with stories in very similar ways, and when she confessed that Brad Dourif’s character was “eating her brain,” I understood exactly what she meant.

If anybody is wondering whether she also showed me and our other friends “Threshold,” she absolutely did.

2. Kingdom Hearts

I am not a video game person and never have been. I heard enough about Kingdom Hearts, from my two best friends at the time (one of whom was the Voyager fan that I mentioned above) to recognize the parts of the story that would likely appeal to me (possession! hidden memories! dual identities! an elaborate media crossover not unlike the ones that I scribbled on every available scrap of paper as a young teenager!). If it had been in any other format, I might have been right there with them. I did read some of the manga, just to gain some understanding of what they were talking about, and could probably pick out Sora, Riku, Kari, and Axel from a lineup, although I am led to understand that at least one of them has a metaphysical doppelganger. Or three.

3. Les Miserables

My high school choir practiced a medley from Les Mis when I was a freshman (I don’t remember whether or not we actually performed it), and the theater department at my summer camp staged the musical during my last year, but there were probably a few years in between when I had no idea what the story was about, beyond the general historical setting. If that.

Around the time that the 2012 movie was released, my then-housemate showed me a recording of the 25th Anniversary stage production and read me enough passages from the original novel to convince me of Enjolras and Grantaire’s tragic love. I enjoy reading what other people have to say about all of the characters – but especially those two – even if I have yet to tackle the book or develop any particular desire to write about them myself.

4. Glee

I’ve seen the first season and part of the second, I’ve liked some of the songs, and I’ve watched Mic the Snare’s outstanding video essay more than once. My impression of Glee is that it offered compelling characters who were often frustratingly underserved by the plot, which created plenty of space for transformative fanworks, including crossovers. Thus, about a decade ago, I spent a lot of time talking with my friend D – who was more invested in the show than I was – about AUs in which Kurt Hummel was (variously! not all at once!) a vampire, a magic user, and a mutant with psychic empathy powers.

5. Supernatural

It’s difficult to be involved in modern fandom and be entirely ignorant of this show, and I’ve enjoyed fanfic and meta about it despite only having seen a relatively small number of episodes, many of which I experienced alongside my dear friend Elle (who gave me permission to identify her in this post). I’ve happily beta read some of her fic, and since the final seasons of SPN and The Magnus Archives happened at roughly the same time, we shared some of the joys and frustrations and worries that came from witnessing the end of an ongoing, episodic story in real time. I might never commit to watching all or even most of SPN from the beginning, and I’ll probably never adore it like she does, but I love her love for it. Anyone who thinks it’s a cool and fun hobby to sneer at fans of the Winchester brothers can take it somewhere else.

Here are my top five heroines from the fantasy books of my youth. Some of the stories in question contain noticeable "Not Like Other Girls" messaging, at least up to a point, because that is what appealed to me when I first read them.

1. Eilonwy from the Chronicles of Prydain (1964-1968) by Lloyd Alexander

My mom read these books aloud to my sister and me when we were little, and I loved how outspoken and determined Eilonwy was, how she told off our hero Taran whenever he dismissed her or took himself too seriously, and how she chose to go on adventures even when instructed to stay behind. As an adult, I can look more critically at the third book in the series, in which she spent most of the story kidnapped and mind-controlled, as well as her decision to give up her magical powers in order to marry Taran at the end of the series. However, for a female character written by a male author in the 1960s, Eilonwy still had impressive amounts of agency and personality, and set undeniable standards for me as a young reader of the genre.

2. Alanna of Trebond from the Song of the Lioness Quartet (1983-1988) by Tamora Pierce

Pierce’s first fantasy series is also her most uneven: the pacing of the first two books (each of which speeds through four years) is disorienting, and the white-savior themes of the third installment are deeply uncomfortable from a twenty-first-century perspective. There’s still a lot to love and admire about Alanna and her adventures, including how hard she had to work in order to become both a skilled fighter and a skilled healer, and her commitment to trusting her instincts when nobody else at the royal court realized that Duke Roger was dangerous. Although Alanna was gifted with magical powers and the favor of the gods (and a talking cat, and a mystical sword, and a divinely created necklace, and…), many of her limitations and her aspirational traits (including her stubbornness, which was both!) were very human. I also love that she turned up in later Tortall series, showing that her story didn’t end when she defeated the Big Bad and found true love.

3. Cimorene from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (1985-1993) by Patricia C. Wrede

Like Eilonwy and Alanna, Princess Cimorene chafed against the expectations of her family and society… but she also rebelled against the expectations of her narrative role – an idea that I hadn’t yet seen another story explore when I first entered the fractured fairy-tale world of Dealing With Dragons – and found a new home with a community that recognized and appreciated her intelligence, curiosity, and cooking abilities.

4. Lyra Belacqua from The Golden Compass (1995) by Philip Pullman

I only named the first book in the trilogy because it’s the one I’ve reread the most and for which I have the fondest feelings. I will always be here for Lyra’s scrappy ingenuity and her ability to find and fight for unlikely friends and allies.

5. Ella of Frell from Ella Enchanted (1997) by Gail Carson Levine

Ella’s struggle to navigate and ultimately undo her lifelong “gift” of obedience, as she realized how profoundly it threatened to destroy everything she loved, has remained funny, heartbreaking, inventive, and uplifting no matter how many times I’ve revisited it. The plot beats of a familiar fairy tale provide an enjoyable foundation, but Levine’s own additions (Ella’s skill with languages, the various magical beings that she met on her road trip, her correspondence with Prince Charmont, and the horrifying ease with which her free will was compromised) make the story truly memorable. I had a very snobby “the book was better” reaction to the movie upon my first and only viewing, and I don’t think I’ll ever completely reverse my opinion, but I did appreciate Laura Crone’s attempt at a nuanced analysis in her video essay from a couple of years ago.

If you grew up reading fantasy, who were some of your favorite characters?

In recognition of Black History Month, here are five of my favorite Black characters from Western animation (some of whom I am including even though I recognize that they're from fantasy worlds that don’t recognize race in the same way that our world does). Also, I’m just one white fangirl and I am speaking for my own – and exclusively my own – preferences and tastes.

1. Amanda Sefton (X-Men: Evolution)

Amanda has very little screen time or characterization outside of being Nightcrawler’s Girlfriend, but I’ve always appreciated how she fits into the show even in that context, especially as the tensions between mutants and baseline humans became more central to the story. I like that she was already interested in Kurt before she knew that he was a mutant; that she wanted what was best for him even when she didn’t always know what that was; that she tried to keep the peace between him and her parents but defied their wishes when they told her not to see him again.

2. Kaldur’ahm/Aqualad (Young Justice)

I love Kaldur’s leadership abilities and willingness to make difficult choices for his team, but I’m also grateful that Season 4 (which I’m currently rewatching for the first time in quite a while) acknowledges the ways that his family and mentor treated him as an adult before he was probably ready to be one. Also, he’s the first YJ character that we see in a happy queer relationship.

3. Darius Bowman (Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous)

Camp Cretaceous is an ensemble show in many ways, but Darius is the first character that we meet, the one whose backstory and motivations are explored through (heartbreaking) flashbacks, and the one who Tells Us The Point Of The Story through the monologues that wrap up the first and last seasons. He’s brave and smart and tries to be a good friend, and although (arguably) Ben and Kenji have the most visibly dramatic character development, there’s also a lot to love about Darius’s growing recognition of how his “dino nerd” knowledge will and won’t be useful in a real-life survival situation.

4. Raine Whispers (The Owl House)

Dashing middle-aged nonbinary bard with divided loyalties and excellent fashion sense! I’ve been watching The Owl House with some new viewers, and Raine is one of the characters whom I’m most excited for them to meet.

5. TIED: Ekko and Mel Medarda (Arcane: League of Legends)

I love what both of these characters bring to the world of Arcane: ( some of which is mildly spoilery )

I still don't have enough brain for a substantive post, so here are some of my favorite mug cake flavors.

1. Chocolate caramel

2. Peanut butter and jelly

3. Cookies and cream (variants might include cookies and Nutella, cookies and peanut butter, etc.)

4. Spicy chocolate (cinnamon and cayenne)

5. Lemon blueberry

flo_nelja asked about my top five nonfiction books. I admit that I read a lot more fiction than nonfiction, and most of my recent favorites in the latter category are either a) analyses of literature or pop culture, or b) memoirs by survivors of cults or cult-like environments. Here are some examples from the past few years.

1. Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Teen Fiction by Gabrielle Moss (2018)

I’m grateful for a text that recognizes mass-market series as having equal cultural importance to Newbery Medal winners, while also acknowledging some of the long-standing biases inherent to writing and publishing for young people. The book is beautifully laid out and packaged, too.

2. Slonim Woods 9 by Daniel Barban Levin (2021)

Levin’s recollection of how a friend’s father manipulated his reality, and that of several other college students, is bizarre and horrifying, but allows the reader to understand how a charismatic authority figure can build a cult that is just as dangerous as a group with the scope and resources of a Peoples Temple or a Scientology. (I can’t remember whether or not I first heard this story from one of the bloggers who covered Andy Blake’s activities, but there are some similarities between the two.)

3. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Impostor Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson (2022)

To jump from true accounts to accounts of the questionably true…

Go Ask Alice, first published in 1971 and marketed as the writing of a real teenager who lost her life to drugs, was the first in a long line of sensationalist “diaries” of at-risk youth. By 2022, it was no secret that Beatrice Sparks, who supposedly discovered and edited these diaries, actually fabricated them all, either partially or entirely. Emerson’s book, which examines the culture that allowed titles like Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal to gain popularity and influence, combines several of my interests: hoaxes, moral panics, and trends in young adult literature. It’s a remarkably engaging read, if an occasionally upsetting one. (Although most of the events in Jay's Journal were very likely Sparks' own creation, the central figure actually is based on a real teenager who took his own life, and while I think that Emerson's descriptions of that tragedy and its aftermath are tasteful, they are also intimate and emotionally harrowing.)

4. Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing by Emily Lynn Paulson (2023)

Multilevel marketing schemes fascinate me for a lot of the same reasons that cults do. Paulson’s reflection on her ascendancy through the ranks of Rejuvinat (the name that she invented for the real MLM company that employed her) exposes the predatory nature of an industry whose promises of success, self-fulfilment, and belonging seem too good to be true because they actually are.

5. Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me by Aisha Harris (2023)

“Ebony and Ivory” (which unpacks the “Black Friend” archetype in media) and “This Is The IP That Never Ends” (which is about Hollywood’s obsession with sequels, remakes, and reboots) are my favorite essays in this collection, but all of them are funny and insightful.

Honorable Mention: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (2000)

I haven’t revisited this writing guide in years, and I don’t know if I’d recommend it now, but it meant a lot to me as a teenage writer who couldn’t get enough of King’s fiction. I liked seeing one of my favorite authors (at the time) break down his process, and the line “What writing is… telepathy, of course” tickled me so much that I used it as a summer camp yearbook quote.

flo_nelja asked me to list my top five anime, but my experience with this medium is actually a lot more limited than it might appear, and is primarily a result of my college besties sitting me down in front of their favorite series: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Vision of Escaflowne, Neon Genesis Evangelion, X, Death Note, Sekirei, Yona of the Dawn, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Izetta the Last Witch, and maybe a couple of others. (I’ve also seen parts of Fullmetal Alchemist and Sailor Moon.) Although I had a good time while I was watching, most of them didn’t make a lasting impression on me.

Instead of trying to tease a Top Five list out of that history, I’ve decided to talk about some of the common elements of the anime series that I did enjoy, in full or in part.

1. Relationship-driven storytelling. This is a must in pretty much all of the media that I enjoy, but I have very little interest in shows in which the question of “who would win in a fight?” is the sole focus of every episode, and prefer that characterization is front and center even when characters are regularly attacking each other with swords and/or magic.

2. Strong ensemble casts. Most of the series that I listed above have obvious protagonists, but the supporting characters still have recognizable motivations, challenges, and growth arcs of their own. If there’s room for characters who’ve never met on screen to meet in fanfic and have an interesting conversation (and/or a reason to kiss each other), then I consider that a narrative success.

3. A willingness to complicate and unpack the central premise of the story. Utena’s progression from a relatively lighthearted high school fantasy, to an examination of abuse, gender, and agency, is the most obvious example.

4. Memorable fantasy or science fiction world-building. I’m sure that excellent mundane slice-of-life series exist; I just haven’t gravitated toward them yet.

5. I can appreciate an ending that is neither straightforwardly happy nor excessively grim, although some of the series that I’ve enjoyed lean in one direction or another.