Movies & TV Watchlist Here Are All the Genre TV Premieres Airing in February! Not many TV premieres in the second month of the year, but we’re excited about the return of Monarch… By Petrana Radulovic | Published on January 27, 2026 Credit: Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Apple TV There is a lot of entertainment out there these days, and a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror titles to parse through. So we’re rounding up the genre shows coming out each month.  This month is incredibly light on television releases in general, but there are two speculative titles on that list.  Paradise — Hulu (February 23)  Three years after a post-apocalyptic doomsday event, thousands of people hunker down in an underground Colorado bunker. A secret service agent investigates the mysterious murder of the President of United States—but eventually, he becomes one of the prime suspects in the killing. Unsure of who he can trust, he dives deeper into the investigation only to uncover some shocking secrets.  Monarch: Legacy of Monsters — Apple TV (February 27) (Season 2) Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is the television sequel series to 2014’s Godzilla. Two half-siblings investigate their missing father’s connection to the covert organization that monitors Godzilla and the other giant Godzilla-like monsters. The show jumps around in time, following the siblings in 2015 and various monster-related incidents through the years.[end-mark] The post Here Are All the Genre TV Premieres Airing in February! appeared first on Reactor.

Books The Wheel of Time Reading The Wheel of Time: Mat, Perrin, and Faile Contemplate Marriage and Duty in The Gathering Storm (Part 14) Sylas analyzes some introspective, transitional chapters this week. By Sylas K Barrett | Published on January 27, 2026 Comment 6 Share New Share Mat and the Band, along with their entourage of Aes Sedai and captured sul’dam, make their way down an ancient and broken road, one that must have been built before the Breaking, as Vanin tries to pin down their position on one of Master Roidelle’s maps. Mat complains about women to Talmanes, riding beside him, using a dice game as an increasingly intense and winding metaphor for women’s behavior. Talmanes responds blandly, and occasionally teasingly. When Mat had first realized what his marriage to Tuon meant, he’d laughed, but it had been the laughter of incredulous pain. And men called him lucky. Well why couldn’t his luck have helped him avoid this fate! Bloody Prince of the Ravens? What did that mean? Mat tries to turn his attention back to the needs of his men, considering how they will make it out of Altara safely and whether or not the Seanchan will send an army to pursue them. But this only leads him back to worrying about Tuon, and he finds himself asking Talmanes if he made the right decision, letting her go. Talmanes points out that Mat did promise to do just that, and there would have been trouble if he refused. He also tells Mat that he is being “downright husbandly,” and suggests Mat is mooning after his new wife.  When Vanin returns from scouting ahead, he is able to report their exact location and that there is a village a little way ahead. This report catches the attention of the Aes Sedai. Led by Joline, they begin to question Vanin about the village and how far they are from Caemlyn. The Aes Sedai are unsatisfied with the slow pace of the Band. Mat refuses to leave them, but tells the Aes Sedai they are more than welcome to go ahead. However, as discussion of what the sisters would need to complete the journey continues, Mat is frustrated and curt with the sisters’ desires for multiple mounts, food and money, and soldiers to accompany them. The resources he offers in return will not allow the Aes Sedai to travel much faster than the band already is, so they decline his offer. Mat is both curt and rude during this conversation, and he notices the Aes Sedai, Teslyn in particular, looking disappointed in him. When they are gone, Talmanes remarks that Mat’s behavior was odd, and points out that what the Aes Sedai asked for would be worth giving, to be rid of them. Mat responds that he won’t be pushed around, and if Joline wants something from him she can ask politely. Talmanes, a little struck, observes that Mat really does miss Tuon, and that the worry has him on edge. They discuss their poor supplies, and how difficult it is to find anything to eat even in the villages, these days; the village up ahead might not have enough extra to want to sell to the Band, no matter how much coin they are offered. Mat begins to form a plan to take himself and Talmanes into the village to enjoy themselves at a tavern, and resupply in the process—without paying at all, if his luck is with him. If Egwene or Nynaeve had been there, they’d have boxed his ears and told him he was going to do no such thing. Tuon probably would have looked at him curiously and then said something that made him feel his shame right down into his boots. Perrin awakens in the wolf dream to find himself hanging hundreds of feet in the air. Hopper flies past him and lands on the ground, urging him to jump down. Perrin is frightened, but after a moment convinces himself to imagine jumping down and finds him landing on his feet in the field below. He notices that the sky, usually changeable here in the Dream, is full of dark storm clouds and lightning. Hopper tells him that the Last Hunt is coming. Hopper suggests they run together, then teases Perrin for choosing to run as he is, on two legs. Perrin tries to explain his fear of losing control, of giving in to the wolf. Hopper doesn’t understand, even when Perrin suggests that he doesn’t want to hunt with Hopper. The wolf urges him, still, to run, and to forget these confused thoughts, but Perrin is insistent. He asks Hopper how to use the Dream, and how to control it. Men, Hopper thought, Sending the smells of dismissiveness and anger. Control. Always control.“I want you to teach me,” Perrin said, turning back to the wolf. “I want to master this place. Will you show me how?” When Hopper continues to be uncooperative, Perrin declares that he will find other wolves to teach him. This prompts Hopper to question why he would look for wolves, if he doesn’t want to run. Perrin tries leaping great distances and succeeds, and yet somehow Hopper is always there in front of him—not leaping, but transferring from one place to another. Feeling other wolves, or something like other wolves, in the distance, Perrin pushes himself farther, while Hopper warns him that what he is doing is dangerous. He throws Perrin out of the Dream, instructing him to return when he isn’t “determined to poke [his] snout into a fireasp’s den.” In the waking world, Faile is waiting for Perrin to settle down into a deeper sleep; unfortunately, he is quite restless. She reflects how good it has been to be back together, though she has noticed a sadness about him that wasn’t there before her kidnapping. He had grown haunted while they were apart. She could understand that. She had a few ghosts of her own. One could not expect everything to remain the same, and she could tell that he still loved her—loved her fiercely. That was enough, and so she didn’t worry on it further. Perrin wakes suddenly, pulling her closer into his arms, and declares abruptly that he didn’t sleep with Berelain. She assures him that she believes him, but Perrin worries when he smells jealousy on her. She explains to him, not for the first time, that a husband needs to know his wife is jealous so that he will know she cares for him. Attempting to get Perrin to go back to sleep, Faile closes her eyes and thinks about Malden, and how it was there that she truly learned what it means to be a lady. There she was needed more desperately than she ever had before, and there was no room for games, or mistakes. Being a noblewoman meant going first. It meant being beaten so others were not. It meant sacrificing, risking death, to protect those who depended upon you. Perrin tells her that he doesn’t care what she had to do to survive. He tries to forgive her for potentially having had to sleep with her captors, and Faile, annoyed, tells him off for assuming she couldn’t take care of herself. Eventually Perrin drifts off, muttering about Rand’s hand and hunting. Once he starts snoring, Faile slips away. Joined by Arrela and Lacile, and later by Alliandre, Faile travels into the wood, where they meet Bain and Chiad. Both women are gai’shain to Gaul now after he killed the Shaido they were gai’shain to before. They give Faile a bundle, inside which they each find an item belonging to an Aiel who protected them while they were captives. “Four people are dead,” Faile said, mouth suddenly dry. She spoke formally, for that was the best way to keep the emotion from her voice. “They protected us, even cared for us. Though they were the enemy, we mourn them. Remember, though, that they were Aiel. For an Aiel, there are far worse ends than death in combat.” But it is not so easy for Faile and Lacile. Lacile killed Jhoradin, a man she cared for, maybe loved. Faile killed Kinhuin, who was a friend, though she isn’t sure whether or not she distracted Rolan intentionally, so that Perrin could kill him. Faile knows there is nothing else they could have done, and now she understands a lesson her father once tried to teach her, about how you sometimes have to kill people you like simply because they are on the wrong side of the battlefield. But that only makes the situation more tragic. They burn the items one by one. They discuss the honor these Brotherless and the one Maiden showed, and how they owe the dead toh that can never be repaid, but can be remembered. Each of them speaks about something beautiful or valuable about the person who died, and then they return to camp. Perrin has awakened to find Faile gone. He is thinking over Hopper’s words to him in the dream, over his own determination to ride to the Last Battle and the decisions he has to make to get there. Sometimes when I think about Mat I imagine everyone who knows him singing that song from the beginning of The Sound of Music. You know, the one the nuns sing about how Maria is fun but also a disaster and they call her a flibbertijibbet and a clown? Yeah. That’s kind of how everyone feels about Mat, I think.  As annoying as he is in this chapter (shout out to the long-suffering Talmanes), I suppose I can’t blame Mat for being thrown off by his rather sudden marriage. After all, he didn’t know what he was starting when he accidentally performed his half of the marriage ceremony, and that left him in a position where he had no agency over his own fate. Even with his foreknowledge of what that fate would be, the passivity of his position—waiting for the axe to fall, so to speak—must have grated on Mat. In this section, Mat brings up the fact that he doesn’t like fighting, that he never chooses to fight unless he has to. I imagine this doesn’t ring as truth to Talmanes, or anyone else Mat has said it to, because from the outside it does look like Mat is seeking these things out. We the readers have been inside Mat’s head and seen the way the Pattern has pushed him into positions to do what needs to be done, but it won’t necessarily look like his hand is being forced by anyone or anything other than his own desires. Rand isn’t the only one who is more trapped by the Pattern than the average man. All three ta’veren are agents of the Wheel, and as much as they affect the weave around them, they are also beholden to the weave, which created them (or at least this power within them) for a specific purpose. Mat doesn’t look at things from the same cosmic perspective that Rand has taken, but when you really dig down into it, his complaints are very similar to Rand’s. He is aware that his own desires are not what controls the situations in which he finds himself, and that he is employing skills that aren’t even his through normal means. He is an agent of fate, both catalyst and prisoner of the weave, and I can’t blame him for itching under that strain.  Of course, Mat also has a strong moral streak; for all he keeps thinking that he is going to leave the next Aes Sedai or captured woman “weeping in her bonds,” we all know that’s just talk. Mat is a good person, and doesn’t turn his back on the right thing to do, even when he wishes he could take the easier and safer course. From Mat’s perspective, I think this also feels like his hand being forced—but in reality, he is making a choice based on his own moral compass and his strong sense of compassion for other people. Mat is a very kind person, when it comes right down to it—he just forgets this sometimes. Other people can forget it, too, since he also has a bit of a selfish streak, and because he is impulsive and mischievous.  It’s also clear that Mat is focusing on little things and little worries, like whether or not being a husband means he can’t go out drinking or gambling anymore (plenty of married men in this world do both, I am quite confident, even in the Two Rivers) because focusing on the big worries, like the fact that he may end up having duties and responsibilities to the Seanchan Empire, seems like too much to face right now. We even see it directly in the text, in the moment when Mat suddenly remembers that he is a nobleman now, then immediately tells himself not to think about it. Talmanes is clearly aware of what’s going on with Mat and is content to humor him, for the most part, and occasionally tease him about it. But when Mat is ruder and more hostile towards the Aes Sedai than usual, Talmanes realizes that Mat is also genuinely concerned about Tuon, worried enough that it has exacerbated his usual rough tongue and animosity towards the Aes Sedai into something, as Talmanes puts it “outright rude” and “intentionally insulting.” To be honest, I didn’t see Mat’s response to the Aes Sedai as being as rude or insulting as the Aes Sedai and Talmanes saw it to be. Mat is always rude to the Aes Sedai. And really, the Aes Sedai’s demands for so much in a time of limited resources, after Mat and his men rescued them and helped them escape, did seem rather unreasonable to me. Sure, Mat was rude, and it would have made him look better to have the discussion in a polite, measured manner. But the Aes Sedai were being rude first! And they think they should just get things from Mat, horses and men and resources, just because they’re Aes Sedai. I’m honestly kind of on Mat’s side here. Though I don’t think being rude to the Aes Sedai was a smart idea. There’s not much more to say about chapter 20 really, since it’s a traveling chapter and not much happens. I’m curious about Mat’s plan to get supplies without paying, and I find myself wondering how he will manage it without taking advantage of a village that might not have much to spare. I also noticed that Mat has picked up a little of Tuon’s tendency to look for signs and portents, despite his best efforts. This plays into the things I was talking about in last week’s post, the way a new culture and new beliefs can seem silly at first, but might come to make sense to us in time. Mat knows Tuon is smart and capable, and it is perhaps not so easy to dismiss her beliefs as a foolish, knowing that. Also, his momentary reflection that he hasn’t seen sunlight in as long as he has seen Tuon and the impulse to connect the two was impossibly sweet.  Meanwhile, we have Perrin and Faile, who are much farther along in their relationship and doing a very different version of getting to know (or rather, re-getting to know) each other after their time apart. I really respected Faile’s perspective in chapter 21. She is a very wise person, and her observations that it is good for people to change struck me as particularly important, especially since she and Perrin are the most established long-term relationship amongst our young heroes. I am not a therapist or a relationship counselor, but I’ve always felt that one of the reasons relationships, especially long ones like marriages, eventually fall apart is because it can be difficult to understand and remember that people change. We will be very different people five years after our marriage started, never mind ten, or twenty, or thirty. Both people in the relationship will grow and change and evolve, and if we aren’t paying attention, we might not notice how different our partner has become. Or perhaps we have grown and changed in different directions, or aren’t compatible the way we once were. Faile’s awareness of the necessity of change, and her approval of it, will serve her well as a partner, I think. She’ll be able to weather the experiences she and Perrin go through in life, as she is weathering this time apart and the trauma they both went through while she was a captive. Expecting change, and knowing that it is a good and necessary part of life, will help her appreciate her husband as he evolves and grows, and help her navigate the changes he may suffer due to his fated condition as a ta’veren who is intimately connected to the Dragon Reborn. I’m so curious to see if Perrin will ever tell Faile about being a wolf brother. I feel like he has to, eventually—it is too big a piece of himself to hide from someone he is so close to. And if he does eventually share this part of himself with her, I have a feeling that Faile might be useful in helping him navigate it. Not because she understands wolves or wolf brothers, but because she understands people. I’m having one of those moments, as I do from time to time, where I can’t remember what I’ve already covered of a particular subject or theme in The Wheel of Time and what I’ve only thought about, so I apologize if we’re retreading some old ground. But Perrin’s conversation with Hopper and his thoughts at the end of the chapter have me thinking, again, about how he misunderstands his own capacity for anger and violence. The violence of man is different from that of nature. Wolves don’t make war, or kill out of hatred. They kill when it is necessary, for food or to protect themselves or their pack. Men are the ones who make war, who crave dominance over others or strike out because of hatred, or covetousness, or a love of violence for violence’s sake. And yet Perrin has decided that the part of him that desire violence—the part that would cut off a man’s hand to get information to save Faile, the part that is filled with rage at the thought of her being hurt, or the thought of other innocents suffering—is the wolf part, not the man. He goes into the Wolf Dream with the desire to learn how to collar the wolf side of himself, to put it on a leash and direct it. He also wants to control Tel’aran’rhiod, to learn how to manipulate and use the Dream to his advantage. But Hopper is confused by these desires, either not understanding them at all (Perrin’s fear of his own impulses) or identifying what Perrin is talking about as a thing of men, not of wolves (when Perrin says he needs to learn how to control the Dream.) It really feels like Perrin isn’t listening to Hopper at all in this scene, like he is talking at him, not to him, and is ignoring Hopper’s sendings in reply. And I’m curious how much of this is Perrin just being stuck in his own thoughts, and how much is an error of translation. We are reminded periodically that the “words” we get from the wolves are translations Perrin is making out of the images and scents and feelings the wolves send each other in order to communicate. One assumes it works the same way in reverse, that Perrin’s words must be translated into image and feeling in order for the wolves to understand him. What would the words “I frighten myself when I lose control,” translate to, for Hopper. How would he understand what Perrin means? Is it even possible for a wolf to comprehend such an idea? And on the other side, we have Perrin’s desire to be taught about the Dream World. Hopper is dismissive of the idea of controlling it, but his offer to run with Perrin might very well be an offer to show Perrin the Dream and how to navigate it. What could Perrin learn from the wolf simply by traversing Tel’aran’rhiod with him? What could Perrin learn about understanding himself, and the wolf side of himself, if he were willing to explore it, here in the Dream, with the wolf that gave his life to protect Perrin’s? I have a lot of empathy for Perrin’s predicament. I, too, am someone who spent a lot of my life not trusting my own emotions. I felt like they needed to be controlled, and that control mostly meant suppression. It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that suppressing your emotions, trying to make them small or put them in a box, actually makes you less able to handle them, less aware of when they are controlling you. Feeling and understanding your emotions is actually where it’s at. But Perrin is terrified of this part of himself, is terrified of the emotions he associates with violence, like anger, fear, and selfishness. The more he tries to control them, to put them on a leash, the less understanding he has of his own nature. He may have thrown the axe away, and he may be aware of the need to make better choices, but I don’t think he understands, really, how to make those choices—how to let his emotions inform him without overwhelming him, how to mitigate his emotional overwhelm with good sense. You know, all the things Faile appears to be very good at. We see this throughout the series, but it’s particularly evident in the funeral scene, where Faile allows herself to feel the grief and regret and even guilt that she feels over the death of their Aiel protectors, and particularly over Rolan. She acknowledges her part in the deaths, and allows herself to feel regret while also acknowledging the fact that what happened really was unavoidable. She grieves, but she also lets go, and what’s more, she helps the other women do the same. She acknowledges their losses and their grief, never telling them not to feel (the way she forebears pointing out to Lacile that she would never have gone with Jhoradin even if things had been different is a particularly clear example of this) but also makes a point of reminding them of the Aiel cultural beliefs around death, and particularly death in combat. This is why taking a moment to have the little ceremony is so important. There is a moment in the text in which we learn that Bain and Chiad told Faile that there was no dishonor in leaving the bodies behind, which is good because it means that the women don’t have to carry any cultural shame along with the toh they owe to their protectors. But funerals aren’t for the dead, who aren’t there anymore to appreciate them. Funerals are about the living. They are there to give an opportunity to mourn, to experience and even display emotion, to allow it freely in our bodies and our outward expressions. This is how we find closure and peace on the other side of those emotions, even if those emotions also stay with us for a long time, or even for the rest of our lives. Faile is a good leader, even more so after her experience in Malden. She reflects in this section about the sacrifices required of a good leader, about how being a lady means going first, accepting suffering to spare others from that suffering. Reading it, I found myself wondering if Faile and Tuon would get along—not in every way, certainly, but in this way. Tuon might see in Faile someone who understands ruling the way she does, who is aware of, and capable of, making sacrifices for the good of her people and not seeing herself as above them, but rather as responsible for them. It’s an interesting distinction to make, and one that Faile reflects on indirectly when she considers how she used to bully people to get her way. It’s also an interesting distinction for me to consider, given my personal dislike of the hierarchical nature of the Seanchan system. None of my other observations or objections to Seanchan culture are made relevant by this consideration, but if Tuon thinks of herself as being deserving of particular honors and respect because of the service she performs in her role as soon-to-be Empress, that does matter a lot, when it comes to understanding her morality as a person. Next week we will be covering chapters 22 and 23 of The Gathering Storm. I can’t preview what is going to happen for you, however, because I haven’t read them yet! But I do know Semirhage is up to no good. Which probably goes without saying. A final thought: There is an exchange between Perrin and Hopper in the Dream, in which Hopper tells Perrin that they will hunt together in the Last Hunt unless “Shadowkiller falls to the storm,” in which case they will all sleep forever. I assume that Shadowkiller is Rand, as the storm is clearly the Dark One and his forces (aka the Shadow), and what Hopper is calling sleeping forever is some kind of non-existence, one that will occur if the Dark One wins and destroys creation. It’s interesting to me that the wolves have a concept of this, given how much I have mused upon the idea that the Forsaken think they’ll get to rule the world once the Dark One is in control, when I think it’s much more likely that the Dark One will destroy everyone and everything. Souls exists outside of the world—they can be touched and controlled by the Dark One, and ostensibly by the Creator as well. They can be spun back into the Pattern, but does that mean that they can also exist somewhere outside the Pattern? If the Dark One was triumphant and did destroy the Pattern, would the souls of the world cease to exist? Or would the exist somewhere in a different state than life? When Hopper uses the word “sleep” or rather, sends an image that Perrin interprets as “sleep,” does he mean non-existence or something else? And as a wolf existing in Tel’aran’rhiod, does he know something that is true? Or is this merely a belief, like a religion for wolves? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but it is interesting to contemplate. Have a great week friends, and I hope those who experienced a lot of snow these past few days are staying safe and warm.[end-mark] The post Reading The Wheel of Time: Mat, Perrin, and Faile Contemplate Marriage and Duty in <i>The Gathering Storm</i> (Part 14) appeared first on Reactor.

News Daredevil: Born Again The Important Thing About This Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Teaser Is That It Features Jessica Jones And she’s not carrying Matty anywhere By Molly Templeton | Published on January 27, 2026 Photo: Marvel Television Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Marvel Television Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) is back, and her outfits haven’t changed (much). Daredevil: Born Again is also finally back, though a little later than expected: the second season of the Disney+ series now premieres on March 24. (Unless they move it again, as they are frequently wont to do.) And how are things in Hell’s Kitchen? Well. You know. Bloody, violent, sometimes confusing, scattered with brief scenes of all the characters you know and love or loathe. Also, Matthew Lillard is here as Mr. Charles, a character he’s said is “completely new to Hell’s Kitchen” who doesn’t wear “any lycra of any kind.” The teaser is set to Donald Glover’s song “Lithonia,” and there’s so little dialogue that it winds up feeling like one of those awkward music videos for a movie’s theme song. I hadn’t thought about Babylon A.D.’s RoboCop 2 tie-in song “The Kid Goes Wild” for a hundred years, but this teaser made me think of it. And the video. Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) and Matt (Charlie Cox) are either continuing their on-again, off-again dance, or he’s hallucinating about it; Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) appears for a brief moment, presumably in flashback; Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) is in a boxing ring; his Anti-Vigilante Task Force is still in action; and Foggy’s murderer Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) is smirking. The Punisher is not here at the moment, being otherwise occupied. The first season of Born Again, as Joe George wrote, was a much-needed correction to relentless copaganda. Will this season continue that theme, or crumple into something lesser? We’ll find out in two months. [end-mark] The post The Important Thing About This <i>Daredevil: Born Again</i> Season 2 Teaser Is That It Features Jessica Jones appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Heated Rivalry Heated Rivalry Is a Step Forward for Gay Asian Representation — But Also Highlights the Burgeoning Masculinity Crisis Shane Hollander is upending western pop culture stereotypes around Asian men By Kevin Ng | Published on January 27, 2026 Image credit: Sabrina Lantos/Crave Comment 6 Share New Share Image credit: Sabrina Lantos/Crave Come for the butts, stay for the exploration of queer Asian identity. When Heated Rivalry screencaps flooded my social media I didn’t think the show was for me—I’m not generally a romance fan and, despite growing up in Canada, have zero interest in hockey. But I caved, and there was a moment early in the first episode that captured my attention: the half-Asian protagonist Shane Hollander speaking to his mother and manager Yuna, the venerable Christina Chang, about the importance of being a role model to younger Asian kids.  That brief conversation about representation could serve as a meta-narrative about Heated Rivalry itself. In Canada where I’m from, people of Asian descent are the largest and fastest-growing visible minority group. We make up over 20% of Canada’s population in comparison to the US’s 7%—that percentage increases to over 25% in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver. But you would never realize that if you flipped through your typical gay magazine, circuit party, or gay Instagram feed. Images of gay life remain distinctly whitewashed, and there was nearly thirty years between Ang Lee’s 1993 Wedding Banquet and 2022’s Fire Island to provide any mainstream representation of gay Asian life.  Representation isn’t much better for our straight counterparts. It’s a phenomenon that shows the power that culture has over society. The “Yellow Peril” of the 1800s cast Asian men as servile, industrious, and peaceful while at the same time being beastly and uncivilized. For generations Asian men were portrayed in film as caricatures, from Christopher Lee’s Fu Manchu to Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  This pushback to this threat was a cultural emasculation of the Asian man. This reached a pinnacle in 1984’s Sixteen Candles, where the character of Long Duk Dong was portrayed as skinny and impotent. Even the kung fu boom of the 1990s, which brought Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Bruce Lee into the mainstream, wasn’t enough to subvert these stereotypes. Despite being amongst the most profitable and physically fit movie stars, they were never marketed as being romantically or sexually desirable. It took 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians to convince Hollywood that an Asian man could be a bankable romantic lead—and even then, Henry Golding’s career hasn’t taken off the way many predicted it would. There is, of course, Keanu Reeves, whose film career has encompassed everything from action to romantic comedy (and, arguably, the gayest possible sports film in Point Break), but his ability to pass as white likely is a contributing factor. Image: Sabrina Lantos/Crave Which is why it’s so gratifying to see a gay Asian character as a main character in one of the biggest hits of the year. Heated Rivalry is based on a book series by Canadian author Rachel Reid, who explicitly describes the character as half-Asian (in an apparent nod to current Montréal Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki). There is, of course, a long legacy of Asian and other ethnic minority characters being whitewashed—Scarlett Johansson’s casting in 2017’s Ghost in the Shell being a prime example—so there was no guarantee on how Shane would be cast.  The show’s creator and director Jacob Tierney not only doubles down on Shane’s Asianness, but expands upon the nuances of the character’s ethnicity beyond what is in Reid’s novel. “It was important to me because there are not a lot of people who are not white in the NHL, and there are not a lot of people who are not white as leads in romances either,” Tierney said in a Q&A after the Toronto premiere. “I think a lot about Shane’s personality is as an outsider, and to me Shane had to be Asian. It would just be monstrous to make him white.”  Tierney’s writing is effective because it is specific—the character of Shane is not meant to represent the totality of the Asian experience. There is a precision to the way Tierney writes about Yuna, who represents a very specific kind of East Asian mother; Shane’s overwhelming perfectionism and pressure to act as a role model for all Asians; the nerd-chic of the glasses; how his white last name provides him with some level of social capital; how he folds his clothes before sex. But the character of Shane also reveals the limits placed upon gay Asian men when it comes to masculinity. Hockey is, even within the world of professional sport, a hypermasculine space—the NHL is the one major men’s sports league with no out gay players in its history. The cultural emasculation of Asian men also extends into the gay world: the classic “no fats, no femmes, no Asians” may be less common on Grindr than it was a decade ago, but the stereotypes of Asian men as effeminate, submissive bottoms still persist.  Image: Sabrina Lantos/Crave These feminized stereotypes of gay Asian men are, in some ways, a twisted subversion of how Asian women have historically been portrayed in cinema. From Anna May Wong to Lucy Liu, Asian women have been portrayed either as sinister femme fatales or submissive innocents. Whether threatening or deferential, Asian men and women alike are often typecast into roles where their sexuality solely exists in relation to white masculinity. We can be fetishized or exoticized, these stereotypes seem to suggest, but we are no real threat: at the end of the day, order will be restored, the white man will end up with the white girl, and all will be right with the world. It’s no wonder, then, that gay Asian characters like Shane, or Joel Kim Booster and Conrad Ricamora’s characters in Fire Island conform to white gay standards of masculinity: the chiseled jawlines, the broad shoulders, the defined abs. A large part of this comes from the myth that representation is a zero-sum game. White, straight viewers, apparently, cannot possibly relate to characters who are not exactly like themselves; if shows about non-white characters are jockeying for screentime with shows about non-straight characters, the statistical likelihood of a gay Asian lead becomes vanishingly small.  But without our own role models for masculinity, are we fated to fall into white standards of masculinity?  It’s a particularly striking question when K-pop seems poised to take over American culture. KPop Demon Hunters was Netflix’s unexpected runaway success of 2025, offering an entirely different aesthetic of masculinity shaped by the open vulnerability and slim androgyny of BTS and Exo. Soon, Asian men will be caught between two wildly different masculine ideals, both culturally and aesthetically restrictive in their own ways—though two options are better than one. But in a predominantly white society the choice is clear: conforming to the aesthetic ideals of the dominant culture gives greater access to cultural and political capital. You can see this clearly walking down the streets of San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, or Toronto: the hordes of Asian tech and finance bros with their Patagonia vests and Equinox memberships, manifesting their version of the American Dream. Andrew Yang’s cryptocurrency-forward, Joe Rogan-adjacent political career epitomizes both the folly and tragedy of trying to conform to white standards of masculinity for widespread acceptance, whether on television or in real life. Shane Hollander is, of course, a top-ranked hockey player, and it would be ridiculous for him not to be muscular. But the construction of masculinity is so much more than physical appearance, even if the show’s marketing has been able to capitalize off the proliferation of thirsty screen grabs. Confidence, dominance, control: all of these are explored as facets of Shane’s personality and shapes how he manages (or doesn’t manage) his relationships.  Image: Sabrina Lantos/Crave To me it’s not surprising that he struggles, on account of not just his sexuality but his ethnicity, to navigate life off the rink within the white, hypermasculine world of competitive hockey. It’s equally unsurprising that Shane and Ilya, as cultural outsiders in their own ways, are not offered the whirlwind fairytale romance of Scott and Kip—and thank goodness for that. The emotional payoff of Shane and Ilya’s eventual happy ending is so much the more satisfying after seeing how each has struggled to define themself in relationship to their respective cultures. Shane’s ethnicity is brought up three times in the series: once with a hockey executive, once with his then-girlfriend Rose Landry, and in the final episode when Ilya asks about Shane’s parents. In all of these conversations there is an ambiguity—his ethnicity is at once a marketing boon and liability, one that automatically makes him a candidate to be bullied in his youth and then a role model in adulthood. Shane’s ethnicity is always explored in relation to others, whether it be his bosses, fans, sponsors, or peers. In each of these interactions, you see how his ethnicity comes with the weight of expectation, of fulfilling a particular role—and you see how that expectation prevents him from leading an authentic, free life. There’s satisfaction, too, in using hockey—the whitest major league sport—as a medium through which to explore queer Asian masculinity, as if subverting the decentering and desexualization of Asian men in the UFC world despite its origins in Asian martial arts. It’s notable that both Reid’s books and Tierney’s television series have been a hit amongst women, a fact that they attribute to the fact that many women crave seeing a world free of the patriarchal power dynamics of straight relationships. Yet what this relationship offers is an opportunity to explore the nuances of how hierarchies in power and dominance can be viewed through the synergistic or competing lenses of gender and race. These hierarchies are materialized in Shane and Ilya’s professional rivalry, which poses a further barrier to unmasculine displays of tenderness or intimacy beyond the masculine ideals of race, country, and career. We each embody a multitude of patriarchies. What Reid and Tierney understand is that the experience of an ethnic minority is similar in many ways to that of being queer. There’s a constant need to code-switch, to surveil one’s environment in order to understand which aspects of one’s identity are safe or advantageous to reveal, and a guilt in either conforming or subverting stereotypes. It’s doubly exhausting when both of these identities are at play, and when the expectations and stereotypes of both identities begin to intersect and deviate. Heated Rivalry succeeds because it serves as a meta-narrative about queer Asian identity itself: How much should it divulge about its sexuality versus its ethnicity? How does it conform to or subvert gender tropes? And how does its proximity to whiteness inform its success?[end-mark] The post <i>Heated Rivalry</i> Is a Step Forward for Gay Asian Representation — But Also Highlights the Burgeoning Masculinity Crisis appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story The Omnipotent Eye Versus the Neighborhood: James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State On the tricky science of improving (or failing to improve) the human condition… By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on January 27, 2026 Comment 4 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. It’s about what we lose when we try to make things measurable, regulatable, and optimizable—and why we try to do those things in the first place. It’s probably fair to call this book a foundational text for 21st-century social science fiction; it’s also full of ideas for making social scientists very nervous. What It’s About The history of the state is, in part, a centuries-long quest to be able to see—and therefore control—the activities that take place in their domains. Taxation, law, regulation, provision of services, maintenance and repair, can only happen where the state can measure and understand the resources to be taxed, the activities to be forbidden or required, the needs to be met, and the status of that water main. Scott calls this legibility. While the initial motivations were for the benefit of rulers, modern states also provide value to citizens—or at least, I personally like regular garbage pickup and sewage treatment. However, the quest for legibility comes with serious tradeoffs. Measurement requires quantification and simplification of systems that are, in many cases, healthier in their natural complex forms. It also requires glossing over the reality of complexity that can’t be reduced. This tradeoff was particularly unclear to 20th-century high modernists, drunk on the low-hanging fruit of early 20th-century technocratic organization. New forms of power generation were (and still are) resisted by industrialists profiting off the old; medical advances were (and still are) resisted by popular prejudices and purveyors of snake oil. High modernist overreach quickly led to failures, but was slow to acknowledge them. Le Corbusier demanded well-organized cities. He created the first building standards, but was also convinced that modern, legible communities required absolute separation of functions—pedestrian versus motorized travel, work versus home, all the foundations of modern zoning woes. If your neighborhood isn’t walkable, or your downtown is a desert of parking garages, you can probably blame him. “Many new capitals,” Scott says of Corbusier-planned cities, “seem intended as completed and self-contained objects. No subtraction, addition, or modification is contemplated—only admiration.” Imagine the Jetsons’ towers, and ask yourself what life would be like if flying cars were the only way to leave your house. High modernism gets worse the less room there is for pushback from those who have to live with it. Lenin argued for authoritarian imposition of organization and legibility, which he put into practice as soon as he could. Forced collectivization in the Soviet Union, and similar pushes for easily countable and measurable production (e.g., forced permanent settlement in Tanzania in the ’70s) all aim for standardization at the cost of long-term sustainability and resilience. This kind of centralization is the foundation for any sort of extractive imperialism or authoritarianism; it makes it easier to take resources from those who need them, but also reduces local ability to produce resources tailored to local needs. Long-term, this push for legibility leads to many of the environmental problems we face now. Scott describes how “the systematic, cyclopean shortsightedness of high-modernist agriculture that courts certain forms of failure… casts into relative obscurity all the outcomes lying outside the immediate relationship between farm inputs and yields.” Soil structure, water quality, land-tenure relations—all the things that Kimmerer celebrates about a working ecology are undermined by neat monocropped rows. The rows are easy to count, predict, and harvest with modern machinery. They also demand making all the land’s topography and geography as close to identical as possible, and lose all the advantages of a diverse, thriving ecosystem. It’s not only land and buildings that get simplified in the quest for legibility, but people. So many skills—farming, firefighting, medicine, artistic creation—require the “metis” practical knowledge that involves constant adaptation to situational variability. High modernism values transferability of skills over dependence on individual expertise (except where the expert serves the modernist organizational effort). Standardization allows for scaling and automation, and predictable factory outputs. It also reduces not only the advantages of metis, but recognition and appreciation of that kind of positive variability. Ultimately, what Scott recommends is humility. There are advantages of legibility that most of us would prefer not to give up—but top-down comprehensibility is not the ultimate societal good. It’s also not possible to the degree that 20th-century high modernists imagined. We need compromise systems that begin “from a premise of incomplete knowledge,” and that treat that uncertainty as something beyond a problem to be solved. Buy the Book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott Buy Book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I first heard of Seeing Like a State from Max Gladstone, who I’m pretty sure is the Patient Zero for its spread among modern SFF authors. Like 1491, it immediately reshaped my brain, giving me new tools for thinking about worldbuilding, local activism, and scientific research. As a cognitive psychologist, I was trained to design controlled lab studies with quantifiable outcomes, and make generalizable inferences about human behavior from them. Sometimes this works, but sometimes the lab turns out to be a poor substitute for the complexities of everyday interaction. This particularly becomes an issue when we’re trying to solve a real-world problem. Suddenly I found myself asking what we were simplifying out while trying to make thoughts and relationships legible—a frustrating but provoking question for me, and probably for my colleagues too. “How do we measure this?” is a hard enough question, even before you add in “Why do we measure this?” and “What aren’t we measuring?” It’s also an incredibly productive question for worldbuilding. What is this society trying to see? What do people want or need to do that’s in conflict with legibility efforts? Who gets to do the measurement and interpretation? When we make space for illegible activities, how do we handle the tradeoffs? The whole concept of legibility, ironically, falls into the “can’t unsee it” category, and makes many confusing problems make so much more sense. Most of the non-fiction books I’ve read since encountering Scott—and a good few of the novels—contain marginal notes on the topic. Data harvesting, privacy, labor rights, assholes freaking out about diversity… there are connections to everything. If you’re trying to decide whether a proposed new law is a good idea, legibility is a good place to start—what knowledge does it assume, what simplifications will be required, and what kinds of data will need to be collected by whom to make it work…all are important questions that often get glossed. Online age verification, for example, becomes more problematic when you realize that it only works by submitting your kids’ personal information to social media companies. But I also think that Scott understates the value of legibility, and the tradeoffs that we face when we dismiss that value. The overreaches of high modernism explain the overreaches of the more recent backlashes. If you think all regulation eventually leads to five-year plans with standardized Soviet collectives, then vaccine mandates must be a tool of tyranny. Limiting arsenic in drinking water puts you on the slippery slope to state-forced famine. There’s a point toward the end of the book where Scott celebrates the value of local, adaptive knowledge with Thomas Jefferson’s ideal “yeoman farmer.” My margins overflow with the extremity of my side-eye. Centralized tyrants are bad—but local ones are no better. The yeoman “farmer,” utterly dependent on slavery, is far worse than Le Corbusier. But Scott, like so many, gives more attention to state-level authoritarian failures than to all the other levels and types of institution that can demand conformity and destroy freedom. Scott’s concepts, though, apply just as well to these institutions. On this read, I suddenly realized that the “thin simplification” of metis expertise explains why AI companies try so hard to replace the most variable, rewarding types of human effort. AI art is more predictable than human artists in much the same way that a monocropped tree plantation is more predictable than a healthy forest. It would be very convenient to a lot of people, especially those who judge art by audience size, if our work could be easily directed and systematized. Legibility strikes again! I suspect that the best alternatives are found, not in Jefferson’s slaveholders, but in Kimmerer’s very human appreciation of the systems we work with, not as problems to be solved but as partners to collaborate with. She manages to combine modern botanical studies with asking permission for the harvest; it’s a model for seeing more without seeking impossible, destructive levels of quantified control. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Seeing Like a Surveillance State. Surveillance is a core part of most dystopias, and even of some sorta-positive futures. There’s a long inheritance from 1984, but I increasingly see stories imagining “transparent” societies where privacy is traded off for safety and social services. In real life, Orwell’s deliberately salient watchers are mirrored by institutions like China’s social credit system. In other places, we face instead pervasive corporate data collection, masked as convenience and the promise of more interesting ads. All of this opens questions for stories: what new kinds of surveillance might be developed in the future, by whom, and for what purpose? What types of control will they try to exert, with what tradeoffs? And is it possible to get luxury space communism without luxury space panopticons? New Kinds of Science. The history of the modern world—as Ada Palmer points out—is a history of changing methods for gathering and understanding knowledge. And yet, science fiction about new kinds of science is surprisingly rare. Current research wrestles with the dichotomy between quantitative data—legible, standardizable, analyzable via statistics and algorithms—and qualitative data. Qualitative studies capture nuance and local complexity—but then what? Perhaps in the future we’ll develop more systematic methods for handling qualitative information, or perhaps we’ll learn how to glean more and better applications without systematizing everything. Either way, there’s drama to be found amid both the development of those methods, and the researchers trying to navigate them. Invisible Revolutions. The flip side of surveillance is the resistance to that surveillance, and to the control that it enables. As attempts at legibility become more sophisticated, how do we find—or make—cracks to hide in? More subtly, how do we preserve and exercise metis in a world trying to automate it away? The artists’ collectives, guerrilla gardens, and makerspaces of the present will have descendants in every century. These cracks aren’t only the seeds of revolution during dystopia, but of questioning and change in better times. New Growth: What Else to Read Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence is fundamentally an exploration of the tension between pre-modern and high modern societal structures, with the tradeoffs and legibility problems made plain in the form of old gods demanding sacrifice versus necromantic lawyers demanding… mostly different forms of sacrifice. Other books exploring the tension between legibility and privacy/flexibility include Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Unraveling. Cory Doctorow’s entire oeuvre plays with near-future hackers finding ways around surveillance and control. The recent We Will Rise Again anthology (edited by Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older) is full of excellent answers to the questions raised above under the Invisible Revolutions seed—if you’ve been wanting more stories with hackers and gardeners and new ideas for resistance, you want to read this one. Most of golden age science fiction reflects the optimistic assumptions of high modernism, but Foundation is particularly illustrative. I don’t actually recommend the book for people who enjoy things like character development; I do recommend the TV adaptation for a modern take. On the non-fiction side, Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine looks at how institutions handle complex problems, and asks both how they can do a better job while hitting fewer of Scott’s failure modes, and why said handling is so often designed to avoid blame rather than find real solutions. Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology comes at legibility from a different direction, contrasting tools designed for legibility and standardization with those designed for artisan expertise. And I’ve just started reading C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Nguyen asks why the effect of scoring in games is so different from the effect of quantified metrics in the larger society, and whether and how metrics can ever be made more functional than destructive. It all comes around again to the tradeoffs of legibility, and my margins are once again full of connections to Scott’s work. What are your favorite stories about surveillance, privacy, quantification, and resistance? Share in the comments![end-mark] The post The Omnipotent Eye Versus the Neighborhood: James C. Scott’s <i>Seeing Like a State</i> appeared first on Reactor.