Originally published on SMA News Today, on 24/11/2021. For someone who has watched many a sex scene in movies and television, the sounds were unmistakable, yet unsurprising. Netflix’s “The Witcher,” based on a fantasy book series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, pulls no punches when it comes to explicit imagery…

Let me illustrate this picture for you: The year is 2012, the month is October. Autumn is on its way, summer’s colour palette fading to make room for reds, yellows, oranges, and browns of every shade and hue. There’s a teenage girl somewhere who’s turning 14 in December. She hasn’t…

Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless was a cult hit in my social circles on Tumblr around four or five years ago. Nary a mutual didn’t praise it for its language and take on Slavic mythology. Naturally, peer pressure took hold. I picked it up and fell in love with it myself…

Originally published on SMA News Today, on 21/7/2021. I never planned on writing about video games for my column. But after three columns about four games by two different studios and counting, I thought it’d be fun to tell the origin story of how gaming became a big part of…

The first draft for the second part of my two-parter series on Mass Effect written for my column published on SMA News Today. As my intention was to show what I’d initially planned to do for the column and how messy first drafts can be, all 1.3K …

Originally published on SMA News Today, on 14/7/2021. “[The] universe demands diversity.” The quote above is from alien scientist Mordin Solus, who’s a character from Mass Effect, a sci-fi video game series by developer BioWare. It’s a simple yet profound phrase, powerful in its confrontation of our preconceptions and how…

Originally published on my personal Tumblr. EPITHETS & TITLES: VGS: Where do you see a character like Solas ending up? Patrick Weekes: [Sighs] Musical theatre. The above exchange is from an interview with Video Game Sophistry, where Patrick Weekes goes into detail about the creation of Solas and how we…

Originally published on my personal Tumblr. When talking about the song Why We Build The Wall and the inspiration behind it, Anaïs Mitchell has described the imagery of the wall itself as “archetypal,” “mythic,” and an “effective idea when people are feeling vulnerable.” Her descriptions, I think, show us how…

Originally published on SMA News Today, on 23/6/2021. I have never seen sci-fi media portray disabilities as casually as in the original trilogy of Mass Effect, a sci-fi video game series by game developer BioWare. For older fans of BioWare, the release of its remastered compilation on May 14 was…