What Whitney's Watching

*sighs* How are we doing guys?... Look, I know what the answer is but I'm just being nice by asking. This winter sucks. It sucks and it's bad and if you're like me, you're holding yourself together by a thread. This Winter so far has been brutal and harsh, filled with controversy, tragedy, and honestly very little to celebrate. I'm so miserable, I haven't even thought of any puns for this opening! However, despite how genuinely lame it's been lately, we need to persist and move forward and the best way to do that, is to look forward to the zaddies we can expect to see during the remainder of the season. So grab some hot cocoa and turn the heat up, it's time to talk zaddies: Kai Chisaki (Overhaul) Kai Chisaki (better known as overhaul) is the menacingly sexy main villain of season 4 of the mega-hit anime Boku no Hero Academia. Featuring the sexy voice, unwavering determination, and provocative face mask that you would expect from ...

Before I begin, I want to preface by saying, I desperately wanted to like this movie. In fact, I was absolutely pressed to like this movie. After a long and disappointing year of terrible remakes, big-budget flop adaptations, and the complete destruction of what was once the greatest show on TV, I really realllyy needed this and ultimately... ya girl was not only let down but I left the theater feeling disrespected. What was advertised to me as the conclusion of a somewhat rocky but decent enough trilogy, was instead a 12-year-old boy's star wars fanfic with all of the plot-holes, universe inconsistencies, and poor decisions that you would expect from someone who has not yet entered high school. To put it bluntly, the Rise of Skywalker was an immature, unfinished mess and we have no one to thank but JJ Abrams. There is so much wrong with the Rise of Skywalker that I don't even know where to begin. As soon as I got out of the movie I called one of my best friends...

The best content is the kind of content that not only makes us think about the world around us but content that actively questions our societal foundations and makes us remark upon that questioning. It's not enough to point out the issues (police brutality, capitalism, the automation of everything, etc.) because anyone can say "Thing bad" but it takes real skill and dedication to commentary to force people to engage in commentary about your commentary itself yet, Psycho-Pass does this perfectly. The first season of Psycho-Pass is hands down some of the best action-thriller suspense content I've ever seen across any medium or genre. Every episode builds suspense in an increasingly intense way until the final episode of season 1 gives you the perfect catharsis needed after all of the buildup. However, as with all really good anime, the exploration of it's specific themes are what truly shines in this anime. Without spoiling it, Psycho-pass is mostly an explorat...

Popular Black Cinema is now black trauma porn cosplaying as post-BLM, well-meaning white liberal fan-fiction and I hate it. I just hate it. There's no way around it, no nice and fluffy way of saying it but I hate it and to be honest, I saw this coming but wow am I still disappointed that we actually got here. To be fair, A lot popular black cinema, or at least movies that actually allowed black people to speak, from my own childhood were no better. The 2000's were full of feel-good, white savior movies in which the entire goal was to portray racism as a series of misunderstandings between good white people, their docile and noticeably silent black friends, and completely monstrous, mustache-twirlingly evil white people. These movies that *oh yeah* almost never take place in the present day because real racism ended in 1982 with the release of the smash hit "Ebony and Ivory", typically follow the same formula. A good white person (preferably in the 50's or 60...

I love to write. While I'm clearly not trained or a professional (I've had mad typos and my blog is on blogspot sis), it has been a passion of mine for a very long time. When I was a kid, I used to write these dusty ass short plays about ballerina's escaping their home town, or little black girls becoming billionaires like "Artemis Fowl" and even though most of them we're unfinished and like...bad, just the joy of creating characters and imagining a world that those characters exist was enough to get me through my late adolescence in the barren wasteland that is Hagerstown, Maryland. However, I have always had the same problems with my writing. They plagued me then and they haunt my blog now. I frequently have writer's block and there are several factors that contribute to it. The most notable of these is that I spiral off-topic easily and when I finally realize what has happened, I'm so disappointed and disgusted with myself that I abandon the piec...

Alright y'all, we're finally having this conversation. Truthfully, I've been avoiding talking about this for quite some time and even as I'm writing this I'd still rather crab walk to work then talk about it. For one, I have an irrational fear of being doxxed by irate, 14-year-old Knets and losing my job, so that has kept me pretty far from any Kpop related topics. Second, I have always hated all of the fake, worship-y dialogue surrounding idols, their companies, and their fandoms and I find these discussions impossible to have without feeling like I'm slowly losing my mind. I'm also still reconciling my enjoyment of Kpop with the never-ending cultural appropriation but that's neither here nor there. With all of these in mind, it would be super easy for me to completely disengage and never weigh in on anything but, as you all know, that isn't me. I will never be that girl that just passively consumes content and as long as I'm putting my own p...

So, let's say you have a friend. Let's say this friend is close to you or at least close enough to you that if they recommended something to you, you'd check it out and vice versa. One day, your friend finally works up the courage to bring up that "anime stuff you're always watching" and you explain to them that anime is the most advanced medium of story-telling and that they are missing out on some of the best content ever written. They seem intrigued and they ask you that one question that EVERYONE who watches anime has been asked: "If I wanted to get into anime but like, I've never seen anime and I don't want to watch anything weird, what would you recommend?" What do you say? Well many people suggest the popular basics like Naruto or Dragon Ball Z or anything that has been on Toonami in the last 5 years which is fair and fine, but not necessarily the right answer. In fact (and yeah this is unpopular to say but if you had sense yo...