Personal Canons: Dragon Ball

There have been numerous conversations about Science Fiction and Fantasy canon this year. Can works age out of the canon? Is the gatekeeping essential to canons necessarily racist and xenophobic? Is a single objective canon possible? How do canons help us?

Amid this, Sarah Gailey has run a great series of essays by various critics and authors on what works they feel belong in a greater canon. I've enjoyed reading them, and I'm pleased today to see my entry published.

I'd like to talk to you about Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball. Both the manga and anime were massive breakout hits for Japanese SFF writers abroad, including in the US where I live. The anarchic weirdness of that series was as enchanting and formative for me as any work of Tolkien.

Please come join me for the conversation. You can read my piece for free by clicking right here.

Consumed Episode 7: Legend of Korra, Diablo 3

Consumed Episode 7 is up today. It features the full crew of Nat Sylva, Max Cantor and myself, covering two primary topics and some new experiments in media.

The first big topic is a season round-up of Nickelodeon’s The Legend of Korra. We scratched our heads over the ending, but have to praise an excellent piece of animation. Or at least, two of us did. One of us may have ditched out in the first episode.

The second topic is Diablo 3 and its dreaded Battle.net. Having experienced so many ridiculous errors and played so many hours of a fun game, I have a lot to say on it. We got into my favorite underlying topic as well: if Diablo 3 is a great game, or just a competent execution on a genre that is always fun when done competently.

Korra and Diablo sandwich our experiments: each of the hosts brought something they deeply want our audience to watch, and each of us got sixty seconds to convince you. I won't spoil mine, but I will promise that it allowed me to discuss Goku Vs. The Terminator. Please vote in the Comments on which thing (or things) you were actually swayed to check out.

You can get Consumed Episode 7 for free right here.