#9: Favorite Video Essays, and What, Exactly, Is a Good Romantasy?

The cultural roundup, edition 9.

What a week, huh? I’m working part time at the moment, and trying to avoid becoming horribly depressed every single time I look at the news. It’s not going great at all. I’ve been calling my parents way more than usual, and we typically spend the entire time being pissed about whatever happened this week. (Really, really sorry to flex about having Dem parents on main.) How is everyone else doing? Please tell me something normalizing you’re doing at the moment.

Depression always, for me, means it’s video essay time. Also very excited to see the rest of the videos recommended by this Reddit thread. Here are a few of my historical favorites:

1. Jenny Nicholson’s Why Disney’s Star Wars Hotel failed, one of my all-time favorite videos;

2. The Hbomberguy classic Sherlock Is Garbage, And Here’s Why;

3. Sideways’s Why the Music in Les Misérables (2012) is Worse than you Thought;

4. Lindsay Ellis’s Hugo Award Nominated “The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy” series;

5. Not to duplicate her on this list, but since she got me into video essays, also two other Lindsay Ellis film essays: How Three-Act Screenplays Work, and Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire about N@zis;

6. Folding Ideas’s The Art of Editing and Suicide Squad — though the one I consider more required viewing may be his also-excellent A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of Grey;

7. The highly underrated CJ The X’s Skipping The First 5 Minutes of Tangled;

8. The very educational Nicole Rafiee’s chronically online girl explains Drake's creep lore;

9. Sarah Z’s internet drama videos are my favorite of her stuff, and I particularly love the absolutely insane The Author of My Immortal Emailed Me And Then It Got Worse;

10. Ashley Norton’s Rise and Fall of a Gaylor Theorist, which I really just like because I vividly recall this blogger from 2014 Tumblr, and it was very vindicating to find out she was no longer followed by half the Taylor Swift fandom;

11. Her significantly more academic video The Secret Society Behind #Bamarush, which genuinely did teach me much more than the documentary and should be required viewing for anyone who follows BamaRush;

12. User uncarley’s a deep dive into the marauders fandom, a video that genuinely haunts me because it is so crazy (what is going on in there??);

13. My other favorite crazy Harry Potter related video, David M’s classic I read Cassandra Clare's fanfiction and now I have to yap about it (highlights include that it was published before book five came out, and so she has Sirius Black and Narcissa Malfoy get married, which is SO funny — glad she even got to engage her incest kink on accident!);

14. StrangeAeons’s incredibly hilarious dramatic reading of The Emo Roommate Coven Haunting Tumblr;

15. And finally, Lexi NewlyNova’s i read that awful tiktok stepfamily romance so you don't have to, and a thorough roast of beautiful disaster (2011), which are easily the two funniest videos on YouTube to me. One of my favorite hobbies is actually getting intoxicated and forcing people to watch one of these with me for the first time. You should try it.

I put something I really, really stand by on my 2025 ‘Outs’ list: Recommending romantasy when someone asked for fantasy. When I ask what your favorite fantasy book is, I fear I do not want to hear about how much you love ACOTAR. No one has thus far understood the assignment, which is very unfortunate.

You could probably fairly assume from this paragraph that I am a romantasy hater, which I promise I’m not… mostly. Here’s my romantasy hot take — it’s good, when it knows it’s both a romance book, and a fantasy book.

I’m not typically a romance girl, but when I’m in the right mood, a good romantasy is often what I’d want to reach for. Why? It’s easier to raise the stakes. When I read a modern-day romance, the stakes are not mortal danger — and if they are, I fear I typically struggle to take it seriously. (Sorry to contemporary dark romance enjoyers, but I may never understand you.)

I’d posit that one of the best early romantasy books, long before we considered romantasy its own genre, is Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince series. Holly Black is a great writer for many reasons — I have an intricate defense of this as an enemies to lovers dynamic prepared at any moment — but what works about this as a romantasy is that it puts the main couple into stakes that could not exist without fantasy. For a section of book two, one character is physically in control of the other; how can they find any common ground with each other, when one has the other on a leash?

Similar stakes are present in Alistair Reeves’s Hex For Hunger, with one character controlling the other via the same spell that the witch-king he worked for once did. The romance is then able to work through themes of finding agency in the aftermath of an abusive relationship… via magic. The fantasy aspect is integral to the romance.

C.L. Polk’s Witchmark trilogy, which began publishing before this was considered a genre and wrapped when romantasy had just begun to rise, remains maybe some of the best romantasy ever written. A fantasy world rife with oppression is the main backdrop and driver of each of the three romances in this trilogy, and is key to understanding all three dynamics.

We could mention more excellent examples in both new and old romantasy. It could be argued that Laini Taylor’s excellent Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy transitions to straight fantasy over time, but its first book uses angel and devil mythology to create a high-stakes romance between the leads. The stakes of Marie Rutkoski’s early-2010s The Winner’s Curse (the latter books of which are infinitely superior to book one in themes and content) use geopolitical tensions to drive the conflict between the lead characters.

But frequently, when I read romantasy, it’s simply romance where the characters are fairies. Which is fine, I suppose, but since I’m really a fantasy girl at heart… well, I fear it’s nothing to me. I’m not above trash (quote from girl who five starred two out of three books of Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices, which is also good romantasy, do not @ me) but I think even trash can have good characters and a compelling romance.

Also, I’m going to say it: Why are the men always so dominant? Maybe this is just that I’m gay, but this is both boring and sexually repulsive. It’s 2025. Let the women top. Right now I can only find this content on ao3.

And related, here’s my favorite Substack post of the week:

Several news stories I want to highlight this week. Israel killed another 404 Palestinians in the space of one day. A contractor for ICE named ShadowDragon has created a tool to pull and map out data and relationships from more than 200 sites at once. The Dem’s favorability has hit a record low, dating back to 1992, of 29%. Pope Francis is out of the hospital. Trump thinks some judges are just bad, but is happy to take some bribes to be convinced otherwise. Elon Musk continues to tweet his support for dictators — this time, Hitler and Stalin weren’t responsible for the genocide, just their minions. (Has anyone checked on the ADL recently?) DOGE’s crackdown continues. And Jack Schlossberg is straight.

M. Gessen, who as any dedicated reader of this blog knows is my best friend, wrote an incredible column about trans exclusion in the U.S.:

“A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place…

The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.”

We need to talk about some of the news coming out of Africa:

1. War is on the horizon between Ethiopia and Eritrea. A dissident force in Tigray — created by the 2024 split of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), and supported by Eritrea — has seized control of the town of Adigrat, formerly administered by the other half of TPLF (under consent of the Ethiopian government).

2. Civil war is brewing once more in South Sudan. In 2020, the two main adversaries of the previous 2013-2018 civil war — Dinkas, represented by president Salva Kiir, and Nuers, represented by vice-president Riek Machar — formed a unity government. But due in part to the war north of its border, in Muslim-majority Sudan, South Sudan’s economy is under dire threat, and it has been unable to export about 2/3 of its oil over the past year. An eruption of violence in Nasir, near the Sudanese border, has set off increased tensions.

   

   A map of the South Sudanese conflict.

3. Washington is failing to engage in the conflict, and Trump’s administration has failed to tap people for several key roles in creating Africa policy.

4. The U.S. has banned the South African ambassador from the country for the great crime of pointing to Elon Musk’s right-wing outreach in Europe.

5. As USAID closes down, people are already dying — an estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment. The cost of first-line H.I.V. medications to keep a person alive is less than 12 cents a day.

6. As Africa reels from the effects, a new fight is beginning for African strategic autonomy. Patrick Smith argues that as the US has “all but quit” the World Trade Organization, trade power is now shifting to the EU, China, and India — which could help African economies “push their specific demands up the agenda.”

Perhaps most concerningly, the U.S. and Israel are attempting to create a plan to forcibly migrate Palestinians from Gaza to Sudan, Somalia, and Somiland. While it’s unlikely any of these three governments would agree, it just needs to be made clear that this is definitionally ethnic cleansing by virtue of being systematic forced removal.

I absolutely adored this piece from CN Traveler on taking a monthlong solo vacation from a marriage. I feel very lucky to be dating a partner who I’m aligned with on this — in order for human beings to truly depend on each other and trust each other, many of us also need to find times to live separate lives! (Hilariously, though, when I sent her this article she immediately noticed that she previously read and hated the mentioned memoir. Oops.) This one also reminded us of a really great article in The Purse a while back by a couple who took a solo hotel night each once a month. Isn’t it wonderful to take time for yourself, and miss each other while you’re gone?

A website called “DOGEQUEST” claims to identify the name and location of every Tesla owner in the United States. Does anyone else think this is just kind of like, institutionalized doxxing? Most people who own Teslas bought them when Elon Musk was a Dem — which, for the record, was in 2021. Cars don’t go bad that quickly. (Well, actually, they do — all two people I know who have owned Teslas had awful luck trying to get repairs for them, because Elon Musk is bad at making cars along with everything else.) Doxxing doge employees I can get behind, but doxxing random rich people does absolutely nothing for the world. I’m genuinely so glad I’m not running a revolution with any of you, because I think it would be a nightmare.

Another common Wikipedia W: Photographers are on a mission to fix Wikipedia's famously bad celebrity portraits.

Max Read wrote more about Open AI’s story-generating model and its new story. For the record, I read the story — and I struggled to forget that it was written by an actual machine, trying to convince us of its humanity. This almost strikes me as sad for both us, and for the AI.

Jill Filipovic wrote about the death of valuing women in power: Should we have mourned the girlboss a bit more?

“The girlboss was never going to solve gender inequality. She was never going to save womankind from all that ails us. But she didn’t promise to do any of that! A woman at the table doesn’t fix sexism, not for that woman, and definitely not for all women. But it’s visibly worse when the women are mocked or nitpicked out, and the table is all men—and there’s no longer even an inkling that maybe women should have a seat too.”

Amanda Hoover wrote about Taliban tourism to Afghanistan for Business Insider, a piece with a surprising level of nuance about the… let’s just say morally mixed field of adventure tourism in general:

“[Jaggard] says that while he was apprehensive, he found the Taliban members to be shockingly friendly. "They're outwardly very kind — that's how they gain your trust," he tells me. But he didn't want to highlight too much of the Taliban in his videos; he says he focused on meeting citizens, whom he described as among the most hospitable people he's encountered in the dozens of countries he has traveled to. He says it's a reminder that "a government and its people are two different things."”

And Delia Cai wrote about Gen Z as the rejected generation for Business Insider, and coincidentally interviewed a student from my college:

“From education to careers to romance, never before have young adults had this much access to prospective yeses. And, in turn, never before have young adults been told no so frequently.

“… Natalie Buchwald, the founder and clinical director of Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, says she sees a distinction between healthy resilience and the blasé, noncommittal attitude she sees many Gen Zers deploy to cope with rejection. "I'm finding there's more of a pervasive numbness that looks like resilience," she says. "But that's not resilience; that's disconnect."”

I wrote a nerdy post this week and it took me about six hours, so I’m directing you there instead.

Environment nerds, you should read this brilliant article by Lindsey Liles on the fight to save the red wolf. Did you know that since reintroduction, there have been only eleven documented instances of red wolf livestock predation? You should also read about the rise of Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, elk, moose, and reindeer.

History nerds, you should spend some time on this article about a woman’s discovery that her grandfather fought for Italy in their fascist takeover of Libya:

“Italy looked at Libya as the ‘fourth shore,’ an extension of Italy, much like the French treated Algeria,” Libyan author and professor Ali Abdullatif Ahmida argues in his book “Genocide in Libya.” His research has revealed that Italy’s colonial goal was to settle between 500,000 and 1 million Italians in the fertile Green Mountain areas in the east of the country, especially landless peasants from central and southern Italy, like my ancestors…

In his research, Ahmida uncovered that Italian settlers built several concentration camps in the desert of Sirte where about 100,000 Libyans were confined… About two-thirds of imprisoned Libyans died in concentration camps.

I’ve tried several new restaurants since 2025 started here in DC, and I figured it would be a good time to wrap them all up. The one the most worth mentioning is Centrolina, but there were several good finds here. I’ve ranked them below:

→ Centrolina, Penn Quarter ★★★★★
Really delicious – and love the soda cocktails, those are delightful and not overpriced – but food portions were NOT big enough for the price. The food was so good, though, that it’s very difficult. The tagliolini oyster cacio e pepe was to die for.

→ El Secreto De Rosita, U Street ★★★★☆
Solid and even excellent food – but I think this place suffers from being not as good as either Pisco Y Nazca or China Chilcano (and not at all cheaper, either). I do think this is easily one of the prettiest restaurants I’ve been to recently! Apparently there’s a fantastic place next door called Lavita (?) run by his wife, which is worth my time.

→ Purple Patch, Columbia Heights ★★★★☆
Went here once for brunch and didn’t like it at all; went here a second time for dinner and had a wonderful time. Good food and excellent company; really great cocktails.

→ Maketto, H Street ★★★½☆
I liked this place but was potentially not quite as taken with it as Caroline – we had some deeply mediocre fried rice. The absolutely incredible scallop curry made up for it!

→ Beau Thai, Shaw ★★★½☆
An excellent cheap thai place with incredible appetizers. The best pad thai in the city remains Som Tam in Union Market, but this was a great place to spend time with a friend.

→ Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, Penn Quarter ★★★☆☆
The novelty of rotating sushi bar is good and $3.90/plate is not awful, but I’ve absolutely had better.

But I’ve also been thinking about my current sadness around DC — or rather, around what I’m scared of DC becoming. Alec MacGillis of ProPublica wrote an excellent piece this week, in collaboration with the NYT, about DC as a company town:

“In the week ending Feb. 22, unemployment claims in the District of Columbia rose 25 percent from the week before and were four times as high as one year earlier — and that’s only the beginning. The district’s chief financial officer has predicted that the city, where the federal government accounts for roughly a quarter of wages, could lose as many as 40,000 jobs over the next few years, more than a fifth of its total, which he estimates would cost the city more than $1 billion in revenue…

All of this raises a question that was unfathomable until recently: Is the nation’s capital, so long blessed by being the government’s company town, at risk of a fate resembling that of so many other company towns through the years? And if it is, why aren’t people beyond metro Washington more concerned about it? When Detroit was in free fall, Mr. Obama intervened to bail out the auto industry, deciding a great American city needed help. But now the administration in power is itself driving the fateful blow to a major city.”

It’s really ruining my future plans. Which is, well… actually, beyond sad. I almost don’t know how to articulate the degree of mourning I’m experiencing right now.