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Marvel’s Queen in Black #4, written by Al Ewing, has Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, trading flirtatious lines with Nova, and coverage is already treating the exchange as another step in turning one of comics’ best-known ladies’ men bisexual. Marvel has not formally announced a change to Johnny’s orientation, and that is how it works: a wink in one issue, a headline the next, and a readership expected to accept the result as settled. It comes after Iceman, and Fandom Pulse’s view is that writers who find a flirty man with a taste for women uncomfortable are rewriting the characters who fit the description.

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What the Issue Shows

Queen in Black #4 is by Ewing, with art by Iban Coello, Paco Medina and Guru-eFX. In it the Fantastic Four defeat the symbiote Firelord, with Captain R’Gar and the Thing holding him down while Johnny and Nova combine their energy to blast him apart. Before they do, Johnny compliments Nova’s cologne, and Nova promises to buy him a bottle. Nova then says: “I need you as hot as it gets.” Johnny answers: “That’s every day of my life.”

Coverage has run ahead of the comic. One outlet declared it a confirmation that Johnny is interested in men, while the largest write-up of the scene says his orientation is still officially unannounced. The same write-up lists earlier moments read as hints: tension with Daken in Marjorie Liu’s Daken: Dark Wolverine, Johnny’s flirtatious relationship with Peter Parker, his casual admissions of attraction to non-binary alien species, and his text reply to Iceman coming out, “Flame on! Literally!” Fandom Pulse covered the 25th issue of Ryan North’s Fantastic Four run, which showed Johnny with a spiky alien in a scene the piece read as signaling pansexuality.

Johnny Storm Has Always Been the Ladies’ Man

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Johnny in The Fantastic Four #1 in November 1961 as the youngest member of the team, brash and impetuous next to his sister Sue. His romances run through Crystal, an Inhuman princess he dated in college, Frankie Raye, who left him to become Galactus’s herald, Namorita, Medusa and Rogue. He married Lyja, a Skrull spy who had disguised herself as Alicia Masters, and the marriage ended on bad terms when her deception came out. The same coverage describes him as the superhero community’s ultimate flamboyant playboy and womanizer, chasing fast cars and fleeting romances.

The screen versions followed that template. Chris Evans played him in 2005 and 2007 and returned in Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024, and his version is remembered as a charming, slightly sleazy hothead. Joseph Quinn took over in The Fantastic Four: First Steps in 2025. Ahead of its release he said in an interview that he wanted Johnny to move away from the old-school ladies’ man and skip the cheesy pickup lines.

The Iceman Playbook

They’ve done this before with Iceman. Bobby Drake spent decades as a founding X-Man written around girlfriends and jokes, and in 2015’s All-New X-Men #40, written by Brian Michael Bendis, the time-displaced teenage Bobby was told by Jean Grey that he is gay. The adult Iceman was confirmed gay soon after, and Marvel gave him a solo series. A change like that is permanent in a way a death or a marriage is not, because it cannot be undone without an editorial about retconning a gay character.

Star-Lord followed. Another charming rogue, he was written bisexual and polyamorous in Guardians of the Galaxy #9, and the coverage notes he was returned to his default state in later appearances. Johnny is the third in the line, and his rollout uses a method that deniability makes easy: hints and flirtation in small moments, with the confirmation left for a headline writer or a later issue. The writers get the headlines without announcing the change, and the readers who liked the character as written are told they are imagining it.

A Move That Does Not Play With Readers

The argument against the move is not about one scene. Flirtatious men who like women are a staple of superhero comics, and Johnny, Bobby and Peter Quill each carried one of the genre’s classic dynamics: the cocky younger brother, the class clown, the space rogue. Changing the orientation of each one in turn removes that dynamic from the page, and the pattern reads as writers who regard a ladies’ man as a problem to be corrected, not a character to be written well. Quinn’s remark that he wanted to retire the old-school ladies’ man points the same way, from the film side. The question for Marvel is the one it keeps declining to answer: who is asking for this, and who is paying for it?

If Iceman, Star-Lord and now Johnny Storm each lost the flirtatious ladies’ man at the center of the character, which classic Marvel rogue is next, and will any reader who wanted the original Johnny Storm be left a comic to buy?

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Catalyst Game Labs, publisher of the BattleTech and Shadowrun tabletop lines, has laid off editor-at-large Jennifer Brozek. Brozek announced the cut Wednesday on her website and on Bluesky.

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“Blog: Life Plot Twist. I’ve been laid off from CGL and I’m having complicated feelings around the situation,” she wrote on Bluesky. The post links to her website entry, which opens: “Here’s the lede: I’ve been laid off from Catalyst Game Labs as an Editor-at-large.”

Brozek has written for Catalyst since her 2014 BattleTech novel The Nellus Academy Incident, which won a Scribe Award. Her Rogue Academy trilogy followed, running from Iron Dawn in 2019 to Crimson Night in 2021. Her Shadowrun credits include the 2015 novella DocWagon 19, the 2021 novella See How She Runs, and the young-adult novel Auditions, which also won a Scribe Award. In a November 2024 podcast interview she described Augment, a Shadowrun magazine, and Shadowrun Through the Decades, an anthology marking the line’s 35th anniversary. Her footprint at Catalyst is larger in Shadowrun than in BattleTech.

Catalyst cut an editorial position, and that usually means the fiction line is shrinking. Publishers rarely lay off editors while sales are climbing, which points to trouble in Catalyst’s sales department. Fandom Pulse found no indication of other layoffs at Catalyst at this time and is monitoring the situation closely.

The layoff follows a run of decisions that cost the company goodwill with its audience. BattleTech author Blaine Pardoe says Catalyst suspended his new publications in July 2022 over online activity it said did not fit its publishing vision. In 2024 the company rereleased the anthology The Corps with an Amazon listing that named every contributor except Pardoe, though his story is printed in the book. This month a Catalyst “Mechtober” graphic listing BattleTech authors left him off again. Pardoe responded: “So, I guess I wasn’t a BattleTech writer? Thirty-plus years of content says otherwise.” Meanwhile Catalyst put out BattleTech Romance: Hungry Like Wolves by Christina F. York as a Valentine’s Day release. Fandom Pulse’s view is that Shadowrun has drifted the same direction as BattleTech under Catalyst.

It is of note that Brozek, like many other activist authors, moved to BlueSky from X to attempt to virtue signal that she’s not with the people over on X, who are the normal people in society.

Late last month, Brozek posted on Bluesky, unprompted to attack the author of this article: “Just loved being lumped into her “evil league of evil.” She’s now in the same category as JDA for me. All she wants is attention and she will attack people to do it.”

Belle is another activist woman who worked with the Gencon Writer’s Symposium befor getting unceremoniously removed. Ironically, it seems like Brozek here is invoking “JDA” as some kind of virtue signal on BlueSky for attention as she makes these comments, as many aspiring creators who don’t make enough money in this industry to survive do.

If Catalyst is cutting editors from its fiction department, what does that say about how its books are selling?

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

Yesterday, I reported on the rough customer service I received after a return of my Eye of the World leatherbound edition from Dragonsteel.

Last night, I made one more attempt to contact Dragonsteel after my dozens of attempts to contact them through their webstore form and emails that were met with no response. This time, I received a response.

By morning, I received another response, this time in the form of an email telling me my order has been shipped.

I still have questions, mainly why my return was marked as “rejected” and why none of my emails or tickets went through or got responded to, as well as why I’m blocked on the X platform. However, this is, as a customer, all I asked for, and Sanderson and his team have made this situation right, for which I have to give kudos to them.

I really appreciate whoever is on the end of the Facebook customer service who made this work. I certainly still have a lot of questions as to what happened the last 45 days, but we may never know.

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Avatar co-creator Bryan Konietzko told Teen Vogue that criticism of Korra comes from misogyny and homophobia, in the same week that Avatar: Seven Havens, the Paramount+ sequel he made with Michael Dante DiMartino, introduced Korra as the Avatar who ended the world. Fans who wanted to know how a show can blame its own heroine for an apocalypse and then accuse the audience of bigotry for noticing have found their answer in the interview.

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What Konietzko Told Teen Vogue

Konietzko said: “If people don’t like Korra as a character, they don’t like that series, that’s totally fine.” He went on: “I think there’s a lot of misogyny, I think there’s a lot of homophobia.” On the Air Nomads, he said: “Aang’s entire people were wiped out, but nobody holds that against Aang.” His point was that fans hold Korra to a different standard than they hold Aang.

The comparison has a flaw. Aang spent the genocide of his people frozen in an iceberg, and his critics have never been fans who think he should have stopped it from there. A viewer can criticize Korra’s choices without touching her gender or her romance with Asami, and fans have done so for twelve years.

DiMartino was not part of the misogyny and homophobia remarks. The only comment from him I could find was: “Watch the show… she’s one of my favorite characters. The Avatars are never perfect heroes.”

Their Own Show Blames Korra for the End of the World

Seven Havens premiered October 9 on Paramount+ and takes place after Korra’s death. It follows Pavi, a young Earthbender who learns she is the next Avatar, and her long-lost twin Nisha, who have to save the Seven Havens after an apocalyptic disaster. In the pilot the world holds Korra responsible for the Cataclysm. The official history blames her, a festival reenacts her supposed part in it, and children talk about her as a monster. The trailer in July had already included a line that “the Avatar let us down” over an image of Korra in the Avatar State.

Janet Varney, who voiced Korra for all four seasons, wrote on X: “I sobbed through this pilot episode. I was shattered. I cannot emphasize it enough.” She added: “I’m so worried about all the people that love Korra and already defend Korra.” Watching children talk about her this way, she said, “was heartbreaking. I mean, it really hurt.” She asked fans to keep the faith, since the story is not finished.

Fans reacted to the trailer before the premiere. One wrote: “They said the same s*** about Aang for 100 years I’m not moved Korra will be redeemed.” Another wrote: “Enough with the anti Korra propaganda.” Some critics also say the show has homogenized the Avatar world’s Asian-inspired cultures and washed out their regional identities. Paramount+ renewed Seven Havens for four seasons in the week it premiered.

Korra’s Rocky Road From Nickelodeon to Now

The Legend of Korra ran from 2012 to 2014 and began as a planned miniseries before it grew to 26 and then 52 episodes. In July 2014 Nickelodeon pulled it from the TV schedule and moved the last five Book 3 episodes online, starting August 1, a step so unusual that it surprised the creators. Fans blamed thin promotion and a poor timeslot. DiMartino wrote on Facebook that “this was a disappointing development for sure,” and said a fourth season was in production. The finale in December 2014 ended with Korra and Asami holding hands as a couple, and Konietzko confirmed the romance on his blog.

The show’s Netflix arrival in August 2020 sent a new audience through it and reopened the Aang-versus-Korra argument that has run since the first season.

A Franchise With a Long Fight Record

The 2010 film The Last Airbender drew a backlash for casting white actors in lead roles of an Asian-inspired world and for what fans saw as a mangled adaptation. Years later Netflix announced a live-action series, and in June 2020 Konietzko and DiMartino stepped down from it over creative differences. DiMartino’s open letter on August 12, 2020 said: “whatever version ends up on-screen, it will not be what Bryan and I had envisioned or intended to make.” He wrote that “even an Air Nomad knows when it’s time to cut their losses and move on.” Netflix replied that it had “complete respect and admiration for Michael and Bryan” and was “confident in the creative team and their adaptation.” The series came out in 2024.

The new series carries its own arguments. Fans have been divided over the Seven Havens art style, which the creators said was influenced by the artist Jean Giraud and 1990s Japanese anime. A thread of the criticism holds that the show strips out the regional identities that made the original world feel distinct. The Korra storyline is the biggest fight of the lot.

If Konietzko believes nobody holds the Air Nomads’ fate against Aang, why did he and DiMartino write a sequel in which a whole world holds the end of everything against Korra, and will the redemption fans are promised arrive before the audience tires of waiting for it?

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Kevin J. Anderson has broken his own crowdfunding record with a BackerKit campaign for The Complete Saga of Seven Suns, the space opera he has built over 25 years and 13 volumes. The campaign went live on October 14, and by the time of writing it had raised $164,413, more than double the $81,918 his previous best, the Terra Incognita Kickstarter, finished with. The complete limited set of 13 bespoke volumes sold out on the first day.

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A Record Broken in One Morning

Anderson announced the launch: “The Complete Saga of Seven Suns went live this morning and blew past ALL of my previous records! A huge thanks to all my supporters. As a special early-bird bonus, everyone who backs in the first 24 hours will receive a free ebook of my Nebula-nominated SF novel ASSEMBLERS OF INFINITY.”

The campaign on BackerKit, run through his WordFire Press, started with a $20,000 goal and runs until November 5. The set includes all 13 volumes, about 6,200 pages and two million words. Standard editions of the 13 books cost $400 in hardcover, $250 in trade paperback and $50 as ebooks, with the seven core novels offered for $225, $150 and $35. The Galaxy Set of the seven core novels is limited to 150 signed, hand-numbered copies at $400. A new novella, Roamer’s Wrath, is available on its own or in a Bonus Stars pack with Veiled Alliances and Whistling Past the Graveyard. Add-ons include a digital gallery of more than 90 paintings and a flash drive with 25 ebooks. Pledges above $200 can be paid in four monthly installments.

Of the campaign, Anderson wrote: “I have written nearly two hundred novels, but The Saga of Seven Suns is my magnum opus.”

What the Seven Suns Books Are

The Saga of Seven Suns is a space opera that Warner Aspect launched in hardcover on July 24, 2002 with Hidden Empire. Seven novels followed through 2008 from Aspect and later Orbit: Hidden Empire, A Forest of Stars, Horizon Storms, Scattered Suns, Of Fire and Night, Metal Swarm and The Ashes of Worlds.

The story begins when the Terran Hanseatic League, which governs humanity’s colonies in the Spiral Arm, uses a device left by the extinct Klikiss to ignite a gas giant into a small sun so that its moons can hold colonies. The planet was the home of the hydrogues, an unseen race, and they go to war with humanity. The Ildiran Empire, ancient and led by a Mage-Imperator, is the Hansa’s ally and gave humans faster-than-light technology. The Roamers are independent nomads who supply the stardrive fuel that both civilizations need. The green priests of Theroc use worldtrees to communicate across great distances. Other ancient elemental races, the verdani, the faeros and the wentals, are drawn into the conflict, and the Klikiss return later in the series to reclaim their worlds.

The saga grew beyond the seven novels. Veiled Alliances, a 96-page prequel graphic novel from WildStorm and DC Comics, appeared in early 2004 and shows human generation ships meeting the Ildirans. Tor Books published a sequel trilogy, The Saga of Shadows, with The Dark Between the Stars in June 2014, Blood of the Cosmos in 2015 and Eternity’s Mind in 2016. That trilogy is set twenty years after the elemental war, when the exiled Klikiss robots ally with the Shana Rei, a force of darkness that has awakened to destroy all sentient life. Whistling Past the Graveyard is the bridge novel between the two series.

Anderson says he spent years of wrangling to get the rights back and is now reissuing the Seven Suns library with new covers, new interiors and new paintings. He notes that some of the bonus books came from a small publisher that many fans of the series never saw. The campaign adds Roamer’s Wrath, a new novella about a mother’s search for justice after a tragedy the Hansa inflicted, with two standalone stories, “Feet of Clay” and “Hole in the Wall.”

How a Seven Suns Book Got a Hugo Nomination

The Dark Between the Stars, which opens the Saga of Shadows sequel trilogy, was a finalist for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Anderson announced it on his blog on April 10, 2015, writing that he had published more than 120 books and been nominated for the Nebula, the Bram Stoker and the Shamus, but never for a Hugo, an award he grew up admiring. He said he couldn’t be more pleased that this was the book chosen.

The Man Who Wrote Star Wars, Dune and The X-Files

For those who aren’t familiar, Anderson was born on March 27, 1962, in Racine, Wisconsin. He has more than 120 books to his name by the count on his own blog, with more than 23 million copies in print worldwide and more than 50 titles on bestseller lists.

He’s most famous for his work with Star Wars, where he wrote the Jedi Academy trilogy in 1994 and Darksaber in 1996. With his wife Rebecca Moesta he wrote the 14-volume Young Jedi Knights series from 1995 to 1998, and with Tom Veitch he co-wrote the Tales of the Jedi comics for Dark Horse. He co-writes the Dune prequels with Brian Herbert, a deal that began with Dune: House Atreides in 1999 and has grown to seventeen novels. His X-Files novels Ground Zero, Ruins and Antibodies ran from 1995 to 1997, and Ruins was the first X-Files novel to reach the New York Times bestseller list.

He and Moesta founded WordFire Press in 2011 to reissue out-of-print books, including unpublished Frank Herbert novels. In 2012 he was elected Grandmaster of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. His 1993 novel Assemblers of Infinity, written with Doug Beason, was nominated for a Nebula and a Locus Award, and it is the book he is giving away to early backers.

If a campaign with a $20,000 goal can pass $164,000 in its first day with its deluxe set already sold out, did he maybe not print enough of them? Even I have massive FOMO!

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Thank you, guys, so much for all the kind words on the Malfoid fantasy fiction, and hello again to another group of new subscribers today! This has been our fastest growth in a long time, and I’m glad chapter 2 went even better for you. I’ll be working on chapter 3 tonight. As an update to the Sanderson story, I finally got someone to respond via Facebook Messenger:

Let’s hope something good comes of it!

Fandom Pulse is a full-time job, and we provide the best pop culture news out there with more and more interesting content than pretty much every Substack! Please support us by grabbing a paid subscription!

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Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast told the union organizing the Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering tabletop teams on October 13 that they do not intend to voluntarily recognize it, which sends the workers to a National Labor Relations Board election. United Wizards of the Coast-CWA announced the decision on X the next morning. The organizers say the refusal puts years of work at risk and alienates longtime D&D fans, and original D&D designer Robert J. Kuntz answered them with a pointed question about who changed the game in the first place.

“It Doesn’t Intend to Voluntarily Recognize” the D&D or Studio X Units

The union’s post on X, timestamped 8:01 a.m. on October 14, read: “Yesterday, Wizards informed us that it doesn’t intend to voluntarily recognize the D&D or Studio X units of our union ahead of a vote. We remain committed to creating a workplace focused on wellness, transparency, and collaboration by winning our coming election.”

The organizers framed the decision as a threat to what they have built. They said: “We’ve worked very hard helping make D&D reflect our values. All we’re asking for is the job security necessary to make sure AI doesn’t change it back.”

The deadline for voluntary recognition was 5 p.m. PT on October 13. The workers had already filed an NLRB election petition, which they said they would withdraw if the company agreed to recognition. A union needs a majority of the votes cast, 50 percent plus one, to force Wizards to bargain in good faith. The union’s post is the only account of Wizards’ answer in what has been published so far, and Wizards has not issued its own wording.

How the Drive Began

On October 6 the D&D team, which includes D&D Beyond, and Studio X, the unit behind tabletop Magic and Duel Masters, told leadership they intended to unionize with the Communications Workers of America. Both groups joined United Wizards of the Coast-CWA, the union the Magic: The Gathering Arena developers formed in April. That unit has more than 100 workers and won its NLRB election in June, making it the first union at Wizards. The new teams said they had a public supermajority of employees behind them.

The D&D letter lists demands that include layoff protections, a ban on mandatory unpaid overtime, and an enforceable AI policy that keeps the games made by people. It also asks for a written remote work policy, wages that keep pace with inflation, healthcare changes, and access to financial information for the bargaining committee. The most unusual item is ownership of personal work. The D&D team wrote: “Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro can claim ownership.”

Senior D&D designer Joey Haeck said the team is organizing “because scared workers are neither happy nor productive.” Principal game designer James Wyatt posted: “this has been a long, long time coming!” The Studio X team wrote: “We are stewards of our games, nurturers of families and communities.”

Record Profits, Repeated Layoffs and a Fight Over AI

Wizards supplied almost half of Hasbro’s $4.7 billion in 2025 revenue and posted a record operating profit of more than $1 billion. Hasbro cut about 1,900 jobs across two rounds in 2023, including Wizards staff, and about 30 developers, roughly 90 percent of the team on the scrapped Sigil virtual tabletop, followed in March 2025. Another 150 or so jobs went three months later, D&D staff among them. John Hight left as Wizards president on September 1, and CEO Chris Cocks is overseeing the division directly.

AI is the issue the organizers keep returning to. In September 2024 Cocks said Hasbro was using AI “significantly and liberally internally.” In a March 2026 interview he said Wizards’ games do not use AI in their pipelines and that he sees AI “only making the quality of the creative we have better.” The union’s petition says: “Leadership has pushed for LLMs and generative AI usage, disregarding our team’s preferences.”

The Arena fight set the pattern. Wizards missed the union’s May 1 deadline for recognition, and the union says Wizards hired Fisher Phillips, a firm it describes as a union avoidance firm. Employees received daily emails and letters at home saying that under a union “all the benefits and perks you currently enjoy would be on the bargaining table” and that workers “could end up with more, the same or less.”

The game the organizers say they shaped has changed a great deal under Wizards’ watch. The 2023 OGL fight nearly cost Wizards the third-party community before Hasbro backed down. The company revised how it describes the game’s peoples and monsters starting in 2020, and the 2024 rulebooks replaced “race” with “species.”

Kuntz Fires Back

Robert J. Kuntz, an early D&D designer who worked alongside Gary Gygax, replied on X: “Are not these the same persons whom under WotC’s policies helped ruin D&D?”

He has been critical of the game’s direction for some time. In December 2024 he called its path “a fitful, tragic ride” and said he would discuss “the descent of D&D AND the gradual ostracizing of Gary and myself from the equation.”

On the ENWorld forum, members were resigned. One wrote, “Not surprised, but still disappointed.” Another wrote, “Not again, WotC.” Wizards also declined voluntary recognition of the Arena union in May.

If the organizers say they spent years remaking D&D and Kuntz says that remaking is what went wrong, can a union formed by the people who rewrote the game win over the fans it says it wants to protect, or does the vote only deepen the split between the staff and the players who left?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Netflix released the first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew on October 13, and a day later Jeff Sneider’s newsletter The InSneider claimed that test screenings of the film went badly. The trailer sets Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” over a story that opens in 1900, Meryl Streep voices Aslan, and the budget has been put at $280 million. Viewers who have only seen two minutes of footage are already saying it is not Narnia.

What the InSneider Says Is Wrong Behind the Scenes

Sneider’s October 14 post describes tension around the film at Netflix, where film executive Doug Belgrad, formerly of Sony’s movie studio, is out. According to the newsletter, some people at Netflix consider Narnia awful and a real problem for the company. A source who attended a summer test screening compared the film to Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time from 2018, which reportedly lost close to $100 million. Gerwig is said to have clashed with Netflix film chief Dan Lin, and she is said to have outside help in the editing room. Lin and chief content officer Bela Bajaria are rumored to be on thin ice as the streamer’s engagement numbers fall, and the post landed on a day Netflix had layoffs.

The budget in that post is $280 million, with some sources saying the true number is higher. That matches what cinematographer Seamus McGarvey said on the About Oscar podcast in August, when he put the cost at $280 million.

The test screening story is not new. In early August Sneider reported that screenings of an unfinished two-hour cut had underwhelmed Netflix executives and that reshoots had been set up. Netflix, not Gerwig, was said to be the one asking for the extra work. A source close to the production told NarniaWeb it was additional photography, not reshoots, and that the principal cast was not involved. None of the claims has been confirmed by Netflix.

“A Movie That Isn’t Narnia”

Reacher actor Matthew Marsden said: “Looks like a great trailer for a movie that isn’t Narnia.”

Pop culture commentator Jacob Airy said: “The trailer for Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew looks like it was made by people who have never read the book.”

YouTuber Matt Jarbo, who said he did not want to dog on the film before seeing it, put it this way: “Look, I don’t wanna dog on it before seeing the movie. It just feels so tonally weird. Having a Led Zeppelin song playing over visuals that were meant to take place during the early 1900’s is a choice, but I don’t think it was a good one. This doesn’t feel like the previous NARNIA films at all, and I get that this is Gerwig doing her BARBIE thing here. BUT I can’t help but feeling “whelmed” by it all.”

Other viewers sounded the same note. One wrote, “I am extremely unimpressed. This is not Narnia.” Another wrote, “Visually stunning trailer but nothing really jumped out to me indicating that this is a Narnia movie.” Some compared the look to Thor: Love and Thunder and Guardians of the Galaxy.

The trailer has its defenders. One viewer called it “hands down, the best trailer I’ve seen in years,” and another saw “a very faithful adaptation with a sort of rock opera twist.” Puck’s Matthew Belloni, on The Town podcast, said he liked it and trusts Gerwig, but warned Netflix about the marketing: “You cannot tell the audience that this is a franchise. The audience has to tell you that this is a franchise.”

The trailer had passed 10 million YouTube views at last count, with about 54,000 likes against 25,000 dislikes.

A Woman as Aslan and a Rock Opera in 1900

Streep was announced as the voice of Aslan in September. Gerwig told Empire she wanted someone with “a wisdom of experience” and “the capacity of fresh wonder.” Neither she nor Netflix has said whether Aslan will be female on screen, but the lion is Lewis’s figure for Christ, and critics took the casting as a sex swap of that figure. Political commentator Isabel Brown wrote on X: “CS Lewis literally intended Aslan to be the incarnation of Christ.” Movieguide founder Ted Baehr said: “Theologically this is a tremendous heresy and it’s a tremendous problem.” A Change.org petition with thousands of signatures asks that Gerwig be removed from future Narnia films.

The families of Lewis’s stepsons David and Douglas Gresham, who hold his estate rights, issued a statement through Netflix backing her: “we have personally witnessed her sincere passion for the Narnia series.”

The music is just as deliberate. Gerwig told Empire she wanted a rock opera, built from the origin story Lewis wrote, and said that she wondered how David Jones became David Bowie unless he went to Narnia. The film is not a musical, but British rock of the 1960s and 70s is its backbone, with Bowie, McCartney, Gilmour, Townshend, Page and Plant named as influences. The anachronism is intentional, in the manner of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. In the trailer, Aslan appears as an image that evokes a cosmic nebula, and Page and Plant had reportedly never licensed “Stairway to Heaven” for a film before.

What Is Riding on It

Netflix bought the Narnia rights from the Lewis estate in 2018 and signed Gerwig to write and direct, with the plan of building a franchise. The last big-screen run was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005, followed by Prince Caspian in 2008 and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010. The Magician’s Nephew is the prequel, and it was first slated for November 2026. Netflix moved it to February 12, 2027 in theaters and IMAX, with streaming following on April 2, and told the trades only that it “just wasn’t ready to hit that date.”

The cast includes Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, Emma Mackey and Ciarán Hinds, with Streep as Aslan and newcomers David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell as the children. At $280 million, it would be among the most expensive films Netflix has made, and it has to satisfy two audiences at once: viewers who grew up on Lewis and a streamer whose engagement numbers are falling.

With viewers saying “not Narnia” after two minutes of footage and sources saying the same after the whole film, will Netflix move the February 12 date again, or send a $280 million prequel into theaters as it stands?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

There’s a line in this week’s Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent that says more about the state of modern masculinity than the writers probably intended.

“You can’t push an entire generation of boys into the shadows and expect us to feel last century’s sun on our faces.”

It’s a hell of a line. Especially because it comes from “The Business of Boys,” an episode that treats the MANOSPHERE as something society should fear, ridicule, and ultimately despise.

The detectives sneer at its influencers, dismiss their ideas, and practically question whether free speech is worth the trouble.

But here are the questions the writers seem far less interested in asking:

WHY are so many boys looking for answers outside the institutions that raised them?

WHY are so many young men feeling unwanted and disposable in a culture that once celebrated their ambition?

And WHY does Hollywood portray the men reaching these boys as villains instead of asking what made their message appealing?

Because Hollywood has been taken over by angry, insane feminists who seem to believe the best way to empower women is to tear men down.

AND MALE HOLLYWOOD IS EMPOWERING THEM TO DO IT!

The Manosphere Didn’t Emerge From a Vacuum

The manosphere didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew in a world where WOMEN increasingly treat masculinity as a problem to be corrected - AKA ELIMINATED - rather than a force that can be directed toward something meaningful.

Traditional masculinity gets framed as toxic. Male ambition becomes a threat. A man who stands his ground is accused of being controlling, and a man who disagrees with a woman risks being branded a misogynist.

Eventually, boys notice.

They notice when the culture celebrates female strength but treats male strength with suspicion. They notice when women are encouraged to be unapologetically themselves while boys are told to suppress or apologize for the qualities that might help them become capable, confident men.

They notice when their concerns are dismissed, their frustrations mocked, and their desire for male role models treated as something sinister.

And then Hollywood wonders why they go looking elsewhere for guidance.

But let’s remember something THE GYNOSPHERE seems determined to forget.

WE MEN BUILT THE WORLD.

We fought wars, raised families, built industries, explored the world, developed technologies, and constructed much of the infrastructure that makes modern life possible.

For generations, men took risks, endured hardship, and sacrificed their lives to protect their families and communities.

And now, because men helped make modern life safer and more comfortable, ***THE GYNOSPHERE increasingly acts as though the very sex that helped create that security is an obstacle to its liberation.***

The message is no longer simply that women deserve equal opportunities.

**It’s that men, masculinity, and the institutions shaped by generations of men must be dismantled.**

It’s DEATH TO THE PATRIARCHY THAT HELD US BACK FOR SO LONG.

Hollywood demonizes the very men whose work helped build the world they now take for granted.

But the answer isn’t to eradicate masculinity. It’s to recognize its value, encourage its best qualities, and give boys a reason to believe they have a future worth fighting for.

Hollywood can keep sneering at the manosphere, or confront the culture that helped create it.

We’re not going to apologize for being men.

And we’re not going to stay in the shadows forever.

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Byl Holte

Tracking the self-immolation of Hollywood, one WOKENESS at a time, and happily exposing THE FEMOCRATS at their own game.

After months of problems with the bindings, foil stamping, and other defects, Brandon Sanderson’s Dragonsteel finally began shipping the new batches of its leather-bound edition of The Eye Of The World by Robert Jordan. Like many fans, I was excited to get my copy of one of my favorite series, hoping to get a full leather-bound collection of The Wheel of Time one day.

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The packaging left something to be desired, and there was a lot of room in the box, so the book moved around in transit and was damaged. I did the unboxing on YouTube, showing what happened exactly:

I immediately submitted a request for a replacement copy, sent pictures of the damage, and Dragonsteel seemed to do the right thing by allowing me to return the book (why they wanted the damaged book back, I’m unsure) and get a new copy that was pristine. I was happy with their prompt response, but now, 45 days later, things have changed, and Dragonsteel is no longer responding to me.

It looks a lot like Brandon Sanderson and his company have stolen my money, and here’s what’s happened so far.

When I first submitted, as soon as I recorded, they immediately sent an automated response that it was under review:

Everything went fine, and they accepted it, giving me a return label:

Note the tracking number, as it’s evidence that I did exactly as they requested:

Putting the tracking number into UPS, you can see that the package was delivered, with a handy picture showing that multiple packages like mine arrived this way. They must have had quite a few damage returns.

This is where it gets strange, as you can see this was delivered on September 8th, but on September 14th, I got a reminder to send the return:

I thought nothing of it, considering it an automated system, and figured it was a glitch so I ignored that first one.

Then, a week later, I got the email again:

I grabbed the email for questions in reply, store at brandon sanderson, because this said it was a no-reply email, and forwarded this to them:

I received no response.

On September 28th, I got another email, this time telling me the return label expired, and that they were closing my case:

I once again sent an email to the store email listed for questions:

At this point, I was realizing something was very wrong, so I started going to Dragonsteel’s website. They have places to put in tickets.

Every day for the last week I’ve been putting in tickets:

It keeps telling me a ticket gets created, but I don’t receive an email confirming:

It’s now 45 days after I mailed my return, and I still haven’t received any updates and no response.

Now, generally, I’d just think they’re really inundated, but this is a lot of emails on my part, and a lot of days have gone by. There’s another factor to consider: I’m critical of Sanderson’s recent content, and they really don’t like me over there. In fact, I’ve been blocked on social media:

Not just by him, but also by Dragonsteel, the business account, who I don’t even think I’ve interacted with

It makes me wonder if there is a corporate directive within Sanderson’s group not to reply to me, which is ridiculous, as I not only run the biggest news site in SF/F here (thank you all for reading!), but also I’m a customer who paid for a massive premium product.

I don’t know how to rectify this at this point, and this is enough money that I care about it, so I have no choice but to make it public, in hopes that Sanderson will get me my book!

UPDATE: I just went into my account with them through Shopify, and it says this:

It looks like someone internally might have flagged this.

Do you think this is them being too busy, or is it malice against me within the organization?

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Support my fantasy work and help me make back my $200! I write a good, clean series that anyone can enjoy:

Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Coy Jandreau, co-host of DC Studios Showcase: The Official Podcast, said critics of HBO’s Lanterns “can choke on their own tongues dude, they’re not worth living,” in a clip that has circulated on X since Oct. 12.

He made the remarks on The Reel Rejects, an independent YouTube show, not on the official podcast. DC Studios and HBO had not commented at publication. The clip lands as Grant Morrison and Ethan Van Sciver publicly pan the finale and as James Gunn’s “Sorry if you don’t like it” is still circulating among fans.

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What Jandreau Said

The video is titled “Lanterns Be Really Exposing How Stupid Some People Are.” Jandreau appeared with host Greg Alba, who had received hostile comments about his coverage, and the two discussed the Lanterns finale and its critics.

Jandreau said: “I don’t miss the feeling of doubting whether or not I’d save someone’s life if they were drowning.” He asked whether he would “let someone die because they’re probably an idiot?” and answered, “Maybe.”

Then: “They can choke on their own tongues, dude; they’re not worth living.” He added, “we’re overpopulated,” and, “these people are cannon fodder, and that’s what they want to be.”

He went on: “They choke when they drink water. Stupid people. These are embarrassments to carbon, man.”

The Hal Jordan Death Set the Tone

The backlash began with the premiere, which ended with the death of Hal Jordan, played by Kyle Chandler. Damon Lindelof told Entertainment Weekly his first reaction to the idea was, “They’re never gonna let us do that.” He said the writers considered saving the death for the finale and rejected that as too “clickbaity.” Lindelof also said, “We were immediately signaling to the audience this is where the show is willing to go.”

Gunn answered fans in September posts on Threads. Hal’s screen time, he wrote, is “more live action screen time than all the live action screen time he’s had combined throughout history.” Knowing when Hal dies “is absolutely not the same thing as killing him off right away.” He closed with: “Sorry if you don’t like it.”

The finale revealed that Sheriff Kerry Kane, played by Kelly Macdonald, was the killer, and John Stewart lets her avoid prison.

Morrison and Van Sciver on the Finale

Grant Morrison, writer of The Green Lantern, wrote in an Oct. 10 Substack post: “The Guardians are now fine with their operatives being murdered.” He called the finale “a morally and legally incoherent conclusion.”

Ethan Van Sciver, who drew Green Lantern: Rebirth with Geoff Johns, reviewed the finale on X on Oct. 7: “You failed.” He added, “In trying to demote Hal, you killed John’s decency, loyalty and his soul.”

Breitbart’s Warner Todd Huston wrote that Kane’s shooting of Hal “does not seem to make any logical sense,” and that Hal was “not acting belligerently or threatening her or Noah in any way.”

Jandreau is not the first voice tied to the official podcast to draw fire. Co-host Frankey Smith drew criticism last month for calling Hal a racist and telling a fan to watch Paw Patrol.

What the Numbers Show

The finale drew 10.5 million viewers globally and 7.2 million in the U.S. over three days of crossplatform viewing. The premiere drew 9.3 million globally and 6.6 million in the U.S. The season averaged about 19.3 million viewers globally.

The show holds 92% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 139 reviews. The audience score opened the season at 89% and sat at 70% after the finale, the lowest of the released DCU titles. Supergirl holds 72%, Creature Commandos 79%, Peacemaker Season 2 79% and Superman 90%.

HBO has not ordered a second season. Showrunner Chris Mundy is writing it anyway. DC Studios has no other TV series in production besides The People vs. Gorilla Grodd.

After Gunn’s “Sorry if you don’t like it” and Jandreau’s “they’re not worth living,” will DC Studios say whether a co-host of its official podcast speaks for the studio?

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Sign up for the Ayla Rin: Gateway to Doom Crowdfund, coming soon for great cosmic comic books with a cover by legendary Green Lantern artist, Ethan Van Sciver:

Catch up on prior chapters:

Chapter 1:

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Love the response to our Malfoid fiction! Thank you guys so much for all the kind words, and really thank you for the new paid subscribers who joined to read. I’m going to try to get chapter 2 up tomorrow and if it remains a hit, we will keep it going as an additional boon for Fandom Pulse.

Fandom Pulse is a full-time job, and we provide the best pop culture news out there with more and more interesting content than pretty much every Substack! Please support us by grabbing a paid subscription!

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PlayStation is selling the God of War Laufey Collector Box for $149.99 with the game sold separately, and fans are lining it up beside Rockstar’s $399.99 GTA VI Collector’s Edition, which also ships without the game.

Pre-orders for the box opened Tuesday at 10 a.m. local time, according to the PlayStation Blog. Within hours, posts on X were calling it a scam.

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What $149.99 Buys

The Collector Box lists at $149.99 in the U.S., €149.99 in Europe and £129.99 in the U.K. It holds a light-up Faye statue, a 51-card Oracle Deck and a physical mini artbook. The listing is labeled “(game sold separately).”

The statue is eight inches tall and shows Faye, Phranque and Rue fighting Begtse’s soldiers. PlayStation says the box comes in “highly limited quantities” and “exclusively direct from PlayStation (where available).”

God of War Laufey launches on PlayStation 5 on Feb. 16, 2027. The post lists no price for the Standard Edition or the Digital Deluxe Edition.

Fans: “A New Level of Scam”

Bad Leroy Brown (@Levonaxper) posted at 7:15 a.m. on Oct. 13: “Collector Edition without game is a new level of scam from Sony and Rockstar.” The post shows about 48,000 views and 1,500 likes.

Rino (@RinoTheBouncer) wrote: “Collector’s box without a game 😅💿 What a joke your company have become.” It shows 29,000 views and 1,100 likes.

CaptainUSATX posted a “NO DISC?? NO BUY” meme with the line “Another scam like the GTA VI ‘Collector’s Edition’.” It shows 3,200 views and 124 likes.

TBAG (@TBagGamingYT) posted the PlayStation listing and wrote: “”Game sold separately” are you kidding me!?!?!? You pay $150 and you dont even get the game???” It shows 6,900 views and 219 likes.

The GTA VI Box Set the Template

Rockstar announced Grand Theft Auto VI: The Goodtime State – Vice City Collection in late September at $399.99 in the U.S., £350 in the U.K. and $559 in Canada. Dexerto reports it holds a six-inch Macca the Gator figure with a stash compartment, Oakley Frogskins sunglasses, a New Era snapback, a crossbody bag and other merchandise, and that “You don’t get a copy of the game with that, however.”

The Red Dead Redemption 2 Collector’s Box cost $99.99 and also left out the game, which makes the GTA VI box roughly four times the price. Pre-orders ran to GTA VI‘s Nov. 19 launch. Neither report includes a Rockstar statement on the price or the missing game. Fans objected within days and there’s still a boycott going.

PlayStation’s box is cheaper by $250. The structure is the same: a collector’s package, no game, and a second purchase needed to play. CaptainUSATX’s post draws that line directly, and Bad Leroy Brown’s names both companies. The GTA VI fight had been about one publisher’s price. This one makes it a pattern.

With Rockstar’s $399.99 box and now PlayStation’s $149.99 box both asking collectors to buy the game again, will a collector’s package without the game become the industry’s new default, or the point where buyers stop paying?

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If you like Harry Potter or Japanese fantasy light novels, this is for you.

So without further ado, I left a sample for you in hopes it can get some good free subscribers on board. I appreciate the support as it takes a lot of work to run Fandom Pulse here and this is quite the undertaking on top of it!

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Chapter 1:

From the Register of Kept Places, St. Brendan’s Collegium

Merrow, Weston. Place held since birth. Ring setting: iron, as for his mother. Key to be sent on the day his stone ripens and not one day sooner. The Provost asks that the key not be delivered by gull, by cat, or by Mr. Corrigan, who has been told twice.

Every compass in Merrow’s Pawn & Loan pointed at me.

Twelve of them sat in the glass case by the register, brass and plastic and one Boy Scout model with a cracked face, and every needle swung my way the second I walked in from the back. I’d played it off as a trick for customers since I was eight. Most of them figured I had magnets in my sneakers. One lady from Victorville asked if I was a government experiment, and Aunt Delphine told her yes and charged her five dollars to see it again. They never pointed north like they were supposed to, not while I was around.

It was a hundred and eight degrees that Saturday, my fourteenth birthday. The swamp cooler on the roof made a noise like a dying goat. Even though it was my birthday, I still worked and didn’t mention it. It wasn’t like we were going to celebrate anyway.

Delphine sat on her stool at the end of the counter with a crossword and four pieces of nicotine gum going at once. She’d quit smoking the year I started kindergarten and had been chewing angry ever since. The aluminum bat leaned on the shelf behind her, next to the Bible and the box of rubber bands. All three got used about the same amount.

The bell over the door jangled at ten after eleven.

A trucker came in, or at least a guy dressed like one: mesh cap, Peterbilt T-shirt, a wallet chain that hung to his knee. He carried a hard-shell guitar case by the handle, out from his body, like it might bite him. Something was wrong, very wrong.

“Nice case,” I said.

“Nineteen-seventy Gibson inside.” He laid it on the counter and popped the latches. “Worth two grand, easy.”

It was a sunburst Hummingbird with a crack in the pickguard and somebody else’s fingerprints all over the frets. This was no fake. That part he hadn’t lied about.

I picked it up and he flinched, and I noticed something odd about the way he did. People flinch when you touch their stuff, but they flinch toward it. This guy leaned back, like he was glad to be rid of it.

I looked at his hands. They were big with sunburned knuckles, but he had fingertips as soft as a baby’s. Anybody who plays guitar regularly has calluses you could strike a match on. This guy had never played anything louder than a car radio.

“What do you tune it to?” I asked.

“Normal.”

“Normal what?”

“Guitar normal.” He scratched his neck. “Look, kid, is there a grownup I can talk to?”

Delphine didn’t look up from her crossword. “He’s the grownup. I’m the muscle.”

I strummed once. The tuning sounded in Drop D, a little flat. Another lie I’d caught him in. I turned it over. On the back of the headstock somebody had stuck a tiny sticker, a white dove inside a circle, the kind churches hand out at summer camp.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked.

“My uncle. He passed.”

His eyes went to the door when he said passed. They’d gone to the door on uncle, too.

I set the Gibson back in its case, gently. “I’ll give you sixty.”

His eyebrows went up. “Sixty bucks? For a Gibson?”

“Sixty for the case. The guitar I can’t take without paperwork.” I slid the ticket pad across the counter and clicked a pen. “State law. I need your driver’s license and a thumbprint, and it all goes to the sheriff’s database by Monday.”

That was true. It was also the point where honest people reach for their wallets and the other kind reach for their keys.

He backed away from the counter.

“Forget it,” he said. “This place is a joke.”

“Your guitar,” I said.

“Keep it.”

The bell jangled. A pickup with no tailgate tore out of the lot and fishtailed onto Main Street, and the dust hung in the heat a long time after.

Delphine turned a page. “Dove sticker?”

“Grace Fellowship, down in Hesperia. They did a car wash fundraiser in June. I bet they’re missing a band.”

“Call ‘em.” She snapped her gum. “And kid. There’s no reward in it.”

“I know.”

“Just so you know it.”

I decided to call anyway. Nothing at Merrow’s was free, and that cut both ways. If you didn’t pay for a thing, you didn’t keep it. Delphine had been teaching me that since before I could reach the till.

I found the church’s number on a flyer still pinned to our corkboard. A youth pastor named Ruiz picked up on the second ring and made a sound when I said Gibson, like somebody had handed him back a kidney. He said he’d drive up after lunch. He said God bless you, twice. I had no idea what to do with that. Nobody had ever blessed me over a guitar before. So I said you’re welcome, and wrote Ruiz, 1 pm on the back of my hand, and hung up.

When I set the phone down, Delphine was watching me over her reading glasses.

“Fourteen,” she said.

So she’d remembered. I shrugged. “Yep.”

“Huh.”

She went back to the crossword, but her pen didn’t move. She was looking at the compass case instead, at twelve needles all pointing at me, and her jaw worked that gum like it had done something to her.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. Go check the cooler pads.”

I went. Behind me, every needle in that case turned to follow, patient as a debt collector.

I didn’t know yet that I owed anybody anything.

###

Delphine’s swamp cooler sat on the roof like a tin doghouse, and every August the pads dried out faster than she could complain about them. I climbed the ladder out back with a garden hose and a new set of pads from the hardware store. The tar paper was soft enough to hold my footprints.

I unscrewed the side panel. A gecko shot out of it and down the drainpipe, and the panel’s edge of rusty sheet metal caught my palm on the way.

I yelped. It stung for about two seconds. Then it stopped.

Blood beaded along the cut. I sat back on my heels and waited, because I already knew how this went.

Cuts didn’t stay on me. When I was seven I split my chin open on the bike rack at school, and by the time Delphine got me to urgent care, the doctor couldn’t find anything to stitch. He said kids heal fast. Delphine said thank you and drove me home without a word. It was another of those little, weird things like the compass that didn’t make sense, but I’d learned not to question too much.

Watches didn’t stay on me either. There were seven dead ones in my desk drawer, every one from the case downstairs, every one stopped within a day of going on my wrist. Battery, windup, and a solar one Delphine swore was indestructible. None of them lasted.

And I had never been cold. Now, I lived in the California desert which was pretty hot during the summer, to be fair, but what most people don’t know is that Barstow nights drop into the thirties in January, and I still slept with the window open and a sheet.

I let the cut annoy me, which was a mistake. Under my sneakers, through the roof, the LOANS sign over the front door started to buzz.

The lights did that when I got mad. They’d done it since I was little. When I was nine, a kid at school called Delphine a crazy old lady. I came home so angry that every bulb in the shop burst at once. Delphine swept up the glass without asking what happened. Then she sat me on the counter and held my face in both hands.

“Nobody sees that,” she said. “You hear me?”

“What is it?”

“It’s nothing. It’s you being a pain in my neck.” Her thumbs shook. “Promise me.”

I’d promised her, and I’d kept it. When the lights started up, I did what I always did. I counted the till in my head. Once I got to dimes, the buzzing stopped.

The cut was a pink line. By the time I’d hosed down the new pads and screwed the panel back on, it was gone.

Even though I knew I was a freak, I wondered if it was hereditary, and that led me to thinking about my mother.

Her name was Elinor, and she died the night I was born, and that was the whole list of things Delphine would tell me. I found one picture of her when I was ten, digging in a dresser I wasn’t supposed to touch: a woman on the deck of a boat in heavy fog, laughing, one hand up to block the camera. She had a dark, plain ring on.

Delphine caught me holding the picture. She took it out of my hands, and I never found it again, but I remembered the ring.

Pastor Ruiz pulled into the lot at one o’clock on the dot in a minivan with a GRACE FELLOWSHIP magnet on the side. He was younger than I’d figured, thirty maybe, with a soul patch and a T-shirt that said JESUS IS MY CO-PILOT on the front and BUT HE DRIVES on the back.

“You must be Wes.”

“Yes, sir.”

He opened the case on the counter and went quiet. He touched the crack in the pickguard with one finger.

“Our kids saved for two years for this,” he said. “Somebody took it right out of the van in the Stater Bros. parking lot. I figured it was in Vegas by now.”

“The guy who brought it in didn’t play.”

“How could you tell?”

“Soft fingers.”

He laughed and pulled out his wallet. “Here. For your trouble.”

It was a twenty. I kept my hands on the counter.

“No thanks.”

“Come on. Take it.”

“I didn’t sell you anything,” I said. “If I didn’t sell you anything, I don’t get paid. That’s how it works.”

From her stool, Delphine turned a page of the crossword. “He’s like that. I raised him well.”

Ruiz looked from her to me, and then he put the twenty away and stuck out his hand instead. I shook t and his watch went dark.

He tapped it twice. “Huh. Battery, I guess.”

I put my hands in my pockets.

He left a flyer on the counter on his way out. Youth Group, Wednesday Nights, Free Pizza. “In case you’re ever down in Hesperia,” he said.

“Nothing’s free,” I said.

He grinned at me from the door. “Grace is. That’s kind of the whole pitch.”

The bell jangled, and the minivan pulled out, slower than the pickup had.

I meant to throw the flyer away. I folded it into my back pocket instead, and I didn’t think too hard about why.

When I went back to the counter, every compass in the case swung to meet me, same as always.

Across Main Street, in the shade of the bail bonds office, a man in a long grey wool coat was standing perfectly still, looking at our window. It wouldn’t have struck me as too strange, but this was August, and it was a hundred and ten degrees out.

###

By two o’clock it had climbed to a hundred and twelve, and the man in the wool coat was still standing across the street.

I’d checked on him four times. He hadn’t moved or looked at his phone or gone into the bail bonds office to get out of the sun. He just stood in that thin strip of shade with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at our window, and every time I looked back, he was looking at me.

Delphine had gone into the storeroom to fight with the inventory binder, so I was alone at the counter when he finally crossed Main Street.

He didn’t hurry. A truck honked at him, and he didn’t even turn his head.

The bell jangled. A breath of cold air came in with him. I started to suspect there might be something beyond normal-strange about him.

Up close he was grey all over. From his coat, to his flat-combed hair, even his eyes, and his skin. It didn’t look healthy. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on him anywhere, and I could tell, because I was looking for it.

“Afternoon,” he said. His voice was soft and polite. It had a radio quality to it, a sound that could lull a person.

“Hi. Can I help you find something?”

“I believe you can.” He stepped up to the counter and looked down at the glass case. “Those compasses. I’m told they do a trick.”

“It’s just magnets,” I said. “In my shoes.”

“May I see?”

The thing about working a counter is you don’t get to pick your customers. Delphine’s rule was that anybody polite got polite back, until they gave you a reason. He hadn’t given me a reason yet, except for the coat, and the cold, and the fact that he’d stood in a hundred and twelve degrees for two hours to watch me.

So I stepped closer to the case.

What usually happened was the needles would swing toward me, the customer laughed, and I sold them a compass for eight dollars. This time the needles swung toward me, and then they swung back toward him.

They did it twice. All twelve of them twitched between us like they couldn’t decide. Then they settled back on me and stayed there.

The man smiled for the first time in a manner I didn’t like one bit.

“There,” he said. “There you are.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re Elinor’s boy.”

I blinked, taken aback.

“How do you know her name?” I asked.

“Oh, a lot of people knew your mother. She was very well known where I come from.” He tilted his head and studied me, the way I’d studied the trucker’s hands that morning. “You have her chin. Did you know that? And her temper, I’d guess. Does the light flicker when you’re angry, Weston?”

He knew my real name. Nobody called me Weston except the school district.

Above us, the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling started to buzz.

I started counting the till in my head, fast. Twenties, tens, fives.

“Ah,” the man said, pleased, and looked up at the lights.

The storeroom door banged open.

Delphine came out of the back with the aluminum bat already in both hands. I’d seen her pull that bat on a meth head and on a guy who tried to pawn a stolen wedding ring, and both times she’d been loud about it. This time she didn’t say a word until she was standing between me and the counter.

“Out,” she said.

“Mrs. Merrow.” The man inclined his head to her, very polite. “You’ve kept him well. I’ll say that for you.”

“It’s Miss. And I said out.”

“Fourteen years is a long time to keep a promise.”

“Then I’m good at it. Get out of my store, or I’ll find out what color you bleed.”

He looked at the bat, and then at her face, and then at me. He didn’t look scared.

“Happy birthday, Weston,” he said, and he left.

The bell jangled behind him. He crossed Main Street at the same slow pace and walked off toward the train yard, and the heat shimmer swallowed him up before he reached the corner.

Delphine didn’t lower the bat until he was gone.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Nobody.”

“He knew Mom’s name. He knew my name. This isn’t normal.”

“I said he’s nobody, so leave it at that.” She walked to the front door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and turned the deadbolt. It was ten after two on a Saturday. She always kept the store open, even on holidays. Nothing could deter Delphine from the potential of making a buck. This was getting stranger by the second.

“Go upstairs and leave me be for an hour,” she said.

“I have questions, though.”

“You’re not getting answers. Do as I say.”

She leaned the bat against the door frame instead of putting it back on the shelf.

On the floor just inside the door, where the man had stood, there was a footprint. It was wet, which again didn’t make sense given the high heat of summer in the desert. I crouched down and touched it. It was cold.

“Off with you!” Her tone was much angrier.

I frowned at the footprint and trudged upstairs.

###

I’d spent the afternoon in my room pretending to read and listening to Delphine act strangely downstairs. She didn’t open the shop back up. Mostly she paced. Once she got on the phone in the storeroom and talked low enough that I couldn’t make out a word.

When she finally came up, she was carrying a Del Taco bag and a little white box from the Chevron on Main Street.

“Birthday dinner,” she said, and set it all on the kitchen table.

Inside the box was a chocolate cupcake with a plastic lid, the kind that sits by the register next to the beef jerky. She dug a birthday candle out of the junk drawer, stuck it in the frosting and lit it with a kitchen match.

“Make a wish,” she said. “Don’t tell me what it is.”

I wished I knew who the man in the grey coat was. Then I blew out the candle.

We ate at the table with the TV on mute. Delphine didn’t touch her burrito. She kept looking at the window, even though there was nothing out there but the parking lot and the sign for the bail bonds place.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“Eat your taco.”

“I”m not going to give up on this. He knew mom’s name.”

“Lots of people know lots of names.” She picked at the foil on her burrito. “Doesn’t make them anybody worth talking to.”

“He said she was famous where he comes from.”

“He says a lot of things, apparently.” Then she stopped picking at the foil, age lines showing on her face. “Your mother liked chocolate. Those cupcakes, especially. She used to eat the frosting off first and leave the rest for me.”

It was the most she’d told me about my mother in three years. I sat very still in case she’d say more.

She didn’t. Instead, she got up, threw her burrito away without eating it, and went to bed at eight o’clock.

I picked at the rest of my food before trying to go get some sleep myself. I found my mind racing, and that i couldln’t.

Around midnight, I went down the back stairs to the shop in my socks. I revert to counting tills when I’m uncomfortable, whether I’m angry in my head, or physically doing so when I can’t sleep. It’s not that I think Delphine got it wrong. It’s that money is the one thing in the building that always comes out the way it’s supposed to, and I like that. I counted it twice. It came out the same both times, eight hundred and forty dollars and fifteen cents.

Before I went back up, I stopped in the living room and looked at the music box.

It sat on the top shelf above the TV, where it had been my whole life. It was small, about the size of a loaf of bread, made of dark wood with brass corners, and it had a keyhole in the front and no key. Delphine said it was my mother’s, and that the key was lost, and that if I ever pried it open with a screwdriver, she’d sell my bike. There was a design carved into the lid, a looping shape like a letter from an alphabet nobody uses.

On the way back to my room, I put my hand on the door to push it open, not remembering having closed it in the first place. This day kept getting odder, but I hoped tomorrow would go back to some semblance of sanity. Inside, my old canvas work jacket hung on the hook, which I hadn’t left there either. I didn’t wear my jacket during the summer.

I put my hand on it. The left pocket was warm, like something in there had been sitting in the sun.

I reached in and pulled out a key.

It was brass, about as long as my finger, with an old-fashioned round bow and a single tooth. It wasn’t from the shop. I found myself glancing around the room, but it was quiet, and no one was there.

I went back down to the counter, turned on the little lamp, and got out Delphine’s jeweler’s loupe from the drawer. There was no maker’s mark anywhere on it. But on the round part of the bow, so small I’d have missed it without the loupe, somebody had carved a design.

It was the same looping shape as the one on the music box lid.

My heart beat hard enough that I could hear it. I went back upstairs, pulled a chair over to the shelf, took down the music box and tried the key.

It didn’t fit. The key was twice as big as the keyhole.

I sat down on the floor with the music box in my lap and the key in my hand and tried to figure out what kind of person sneaks into your room and leaves you a key that doesn’t open anything. It had to be the man in the grey coat. There were too many coincidences otherwise. But how did he get inside?

I put the music box back exactly where it had been. Then I went to the top of the back stairs and looked down into the dark shop.

The compass case was right there at the bottom of the stairs. Most of those compasses had glow-in-the-dark needles, and in the dark they showed up as twelve little green lines.

They were all pointing up the stairs. They moved with the key. I tested it a few times. Shaking my head in confusion, I took the key into bed with me and closed my fist around it, guarding it with my life. It had to mean something.

Continue to Chapter 2:

By the end of the 1960s, Mary Stewart had settled into a rhythm that suited her publishers. Every year or two she delivered a romantic suspense novel, sending an ordinary person to the Greek islands or to Damascus and dropping them into a car chase or a locked room. Disney had filmed one of them. When she began a novel about the wizard Merlin, her publishers did not want her to write it, she said years later, because her thrillers were selling too well to risk.

The book was The Crystal Cave, published in 1970. It opened a five-novel Arthurian series, won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has rarely been out of print since. Stewart died in 2014 at 97. This month Centipede Press began selling a collector’s edition of the novel, priced at $165, from October 11. The story starts in Sunderland in 1916, with a vicar’s daughter named Mary Rainbow.

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A Scholarship Girl From Sunderland

Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow was born on September 17, 1916, the daughter of a vicar, Frederick Albert Rainbow, and a New Zealand-born primary school teacher, Mary Edith Matthews. At eight she was sent to boarding school in Penrith, where she was bullied, and she later said the experience left a lasting mark. At ten she won a scholarship to Skellfield School in Ripon and excelled at sport.

Oxford, Cambridge and Durham all offered her a place. She took Durham, which came with the largest bursary and the least travel. She graduated with first-class honours in English in 1938. A first-class teaching diploma in English and art followed in 1939 and a master’s degree in 1941. During the war she taught in primary and secondary schools and part-time at Durham School, and at the university she worked as an assistant lecturer from 1941 to 1945. After the war she returned as a part-time lecturer, mostly in Anglo-Saxon literature, from 1948 to 1956.

At a VE Day dance she met Frederick Stewart, a young Scottish geology lecturer. Their engagement was announced a month later, and her father married them in September 1945. An ectopic pregnancy in her thirties left her unable to have children, and she began writing novels.

Thrillers by the Year

Stewart said she had been writing stories since she was three, and in 1955 the habit paid off. Her first novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, went to Hodder & Stoughton and sold at once. The next year she and her husband moved to Edinburgh, where he became professor of geology and mineralogy. He was knighted in 1974, which made her Lady Stewart, a title she never used.

The books kept coming every year or two. Nine Coaches Waiting appeared in 1958 and My Brother Michael in 1959. The Moon-Spinners followed in 1962, This Rough Magic in 1964 and Airs Above the Ground in 1965. The settings ranged from the Greek islands and Damascus to rural England, Spain and Austria. Stewart liked to drop ordinary people into stock thriller situations such as the car chase and the locked room, and she wanted their fear and outrage to push them into physical courage without turning them into conventional heroes.

This Rough Magic and Airs Above the Ground earned Edgar Award nominations, and My Brother Michael was a Gold Dagger nominee. Disney adapted The Moon-Spinners in 1964, with Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach starring. The Agatha Awards later gave her a lifetime achievement honor. By the end of the decade there was no obvious reason for her to change anything.

Merlin, Against Advice

The pull came from outside the thriller shelf. By the late 1960s readers had rediscovered T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Arthurian stories sold again. Stewart had always wanted to write a historical novel. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain gave her a place to start, and she chose Roman Britain for the setting. She kept away from Mary Renault’s novels while she worked, because Renault’s influence on her was so strong.

The book was largely her own invention, she told Raymond H. Thompson in a 1989 interview, with little taken from tradition. Her publishers had not wanted her to write it, she said, because her earlier books were selling so well. She added that she would never have written it if she had thought about markets, and that she had no plan for a series.

Merlin tells the story himself. He is the illegitimate son of a Welsh princess, growing up at the court of Maridunum under an uncle, Camlach, who has reason to want him gone. An old scholar named Galapas teaches him natural lore and leaves him the crystal cave of the title. Merlin prophesies before the High King Vortigern, escapes to Ambrosius and serves him, and then serves Uther Pendragon. The book ends on the night Arthur is conceived, so Arthur himself has not yet been born.

Stewart made Merlin the narrator instead of Arthur and set the story in the fifth century instead of the twelfth. Her Merlin is a prophet and an engineer more than a wizard. Some critics scorned her use of Geoffrey of Monmouth as a source, and she never claimed scholarship for the books. She said she was content to sit among the historians Gibbon called embellishers of fragments and fables. Kirkus Reviews took a harder line in July 1970: “Period play, ripe and windy, for ladies easily lulled.”

The publishers who doubted the project watched it sell, and it brought her an entirely new readership.

Each Volume the Last

Stewart wrote the sequels one at a time, and she said she wrote each volume believing it would be the last. The Hollow Hills arrived in 1973 and The Last Enchantment in 1979, completing what HarperCollins later issued as the omnibus The Merlin Trilogy in 2004. The Wicked Day followed in 1983 and turned to Mordred, whom she wrote as a tragic figure instead of a plain villain. The Prince and the Pilgrim in 1995 closed the saga at five novels.

The Crystal Cave won the Frederick Niven Literary Award, and it and The Hollow Hills each won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. In 1991 the first novel reached television as Merlin of the Crystal Cave, directed by Michael Darlow, with Robert Powell and Jon Finch in the cast.

The Last Novels and the Last Years

Between and after the Arthurian books she wrote for younger readers. The Little Broomstick appeared in 1971, Ludo and the Star Horse in 1974 and A Walk in Wolf Wood in 1980, and all three were adapted for Jackanory. Ludo and the Star Horse won a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Little Broomstick became the 2017 animated feature Mary and the Witch’s Flower, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. A poetry collection, Frost on the Window, came in 1990. The suspense novels continued at a slower pace, among them Touch Not the Cat in 1976 and Thornyhold in 1988. Rose Cottage, in 1997, was her last novel.

The Royal Society of Arts made her a fellow in 1968. The Scottish Parliament gave her a lifetime achievement award in 2006, and in 2009 Durham, the university she had chosen for its bursary, awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters. Frederick Stewart died in 2001. She lived in Edinburgh and near Loch Awe, where she gardened and kept a black and white cat named Tory that lived to eighteen.

Mary Stewart died at home near Loch Awe in Argyll on May 9, 2014. She was 97. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography added her entry in 2022.

Where She Fits in the Legend

Stewart did not work alone in the field. Rosemary Sutcliff had published Sword at Sunset in 1963, a historical novel of a Roman-British Arthur who narrates his own story and has no magic. Stewart worked the same early period from Merlin’s side and added the Sight, Merlin’s gift for knowing things before they happen. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon appeared in 1983, the year of The Wicked Day, and told the legend through its women.

The Merlin books have rarely been out of print since 1970. Medievalist Gillian Polack has written that Stewart’s novels shaped how many recent fantasy and historical fiction writers picture Merlin and Arthur.

Centipede Press, which has also published collector’s editions of Michael Shea and Fritz Leiber, lists its The Crystal Cave as sewn, on acid-free paper, with a dust jacket. It costs $165 and went on sale October 11.

Stewart’s publishers wanted another thriller and got a fifth-century Merlin instead. Which working genre writers are sitting on a book their publishers have told them not to write, and what would it take for a publisher to let them?

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Royal Road has deleted Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Tsundere, the Malfoid rewrite by the X writer known as GuardBro (@GuardTm), and the site’s own rules back the removal. Most of the fiction is J.K. Rowling’s text, and Royal Road requires authors to hold the rights to what they post.

GuardBro now hosts the work in a Google Doc, where he says more than 100 people have had it open at the same time. He says a chapter was reported before the deletion. He has not said that Royal Road gave him a reason.

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What the Writer Said

On the removal and the report, GuardBro said: “Royal Road seems to be taking umbridge with some chapters containing “minimal” changes, so there may be chapters missing from the website. As well, the offending chapter was reported, so there’s some wild turkey out there thumbing their ticklers through my s***. Anyway, you can find the chapters in the link above as we wait for other websites to start working agian.”

On why he leaves out chapters: “I’m trying to keep the chapters in-line with the original story as much as possible so people aren’t lost as s*** when the read the fic, why I completely omit unchanged chapters. I tried just doing my changes in little blurbs in the earlier chapters of the book but people were completely lost as to when and where they were in the story, which was getting frustrating.”

Then the deletion: “Royal Road deleted the whole thing, lol. Ah well. Still gonna keep plugging away at updating, changing, and deviating the story with Malfoid, y’all are just going to have to use the google doc until AO3 shoots up.”

He has since said the Google Doc has gone viral, with more than 100 people accessing it at one time.

The document opens with his own label for the work: “The following fanfiction is obviously parody, if not outright satire due to internet memes.”

Royal Road’s Fanfiction Rules

Royal Road allows fanfiction, and its content guidelines set these terms:

• Authors who post represent that they hold the necessary rights and are not infringing a third party’s rights. Content that infringes another person’s intellectual property is removed.

• Work based on another author’s setting, characters or terminology must be tagged as fanfiction, with credit in the description.

• Fanfiction cannot add donation links or buy internal advertisements.

• Titles cannot be “infringing on someone’s intellectual property rights.”

• Fictions are checked against the guidelines, and one that breaks them can be deleted and the account banned.

In a June 2024 post, the site called fanfiction “a legal gray zone” and said its lawyers advised against allowing monetization of it.

Those terms give Royal Road grounds to remove a rewrite built on Rowling’s own chapters. GuardBro’s own phrase, chapters containing “minimal” changes, is the issue the site’s rights clause is aimed at.

What Is in the Document

The Google Doc runs about 204,000 words across Books 1 to 3, plus a Book 4 stub that points to a second document. It says the story deviates “at the exact point in which Harry meets ‘Draconia Malfoy’ during their robe fitting,” and that chapters where nothing changes are omitted.

The chapters it keeps run for thousands of words each. Fewer than one paragraph in ten mentions Malfoy, so most of the page is the surrounding narrative of Rowling’s books with Draco’s pronouns and some added lines and thoughts. The title also reuses the structure of Rowling’s first book title.

The work contains no explicit sexual content.

The Malfoid Backdrop

Female Draco fan art, called “Malfoid,” has been spreading since September. A Sept. 22 post from @redteneri has 21.9 million views and 174,000 likes, Know Your Meme added an entry Sept. 30, and a Weeknight explainer on YouTube has 249,000 views. Fandom Pulse’s earlier report covers the trend and the reaction.

The backlash has reached artists. yunayu deleted a drawing from Bluesky and apologized. The attention on GuardBro’s rewrite comes from the same wave, and the Google Doc that replaced his Royal Road page now holds about 204,000 words built from Rowling’s books in front of readers who arrive a hundred at a time.

With Royal Road’s rights clause behind the deletion and a Malfoid craze sending a hundred readers at a time to a Doc full of Rowling’s pages, how long before the Google Doc goes the way of the Royal Road page?

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The BBC has commissioned a two-part documentary on J.K. Rowling, and its second episode will examine her views on gender identity, “which place her at the heart of increasingly bitter online exchanges.” Rowling will not be interviewed.

The film, working title J.K. Rowling, is made by Rogan Scotland and was greenlit by BBC Two, BBC Scotland and iPlayer. It is being shopped at MIPCOM and is due on the BBC next year, after HBO’s Harry Potter series premieres in December.

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Two Parts, Two Very Different Subjects

The first episode “will spotlight the creation of Harry Potter and the stratospheric success of the wizarding universe created by Rowling.” The second “will examine her interventions on Scottish independence, feminism, free speech, and gender identity, which place her at the heart of increasingly bitter online exchanges.”

The series draws on archive material, Rowling’s words and interviews with people who worked with her. The National reports two 60-minute episodes. Deadline describes the film as exploring “the author’s dramatic rise, cultural influence, and contested legacy.”

Simon Young, the BBC’s head of history commissioning, is the only person Deadline quotes: “Thirty years after the publication of the first Harry Potter book, there feels like no better time for the BBC to explore one of the towering figures of British literature.” He continued: “No cultural history of Britain in the 21st century would be complete without the story of the boy wizard that J.K. Rowling created, the publishing and film-making phenomenon that she spawned, or the polarising public figure she has become.”

Who Is Making It, and Who Is Not Talking

The BBC commissioned Rogan Productions, the company behind Grenfell: Uncovered, and the film is made by Rogan Scotland. Commissioners named by Deadline are Jack Bootle, head of specialist factual commissioning, and Louise Thornton, head of multi-platform commissioning at BBC Scotland. The executive producers are James Rogan and Mark Hedgecoe.

Deadline reports that “Rowling will not be interviewed for the documentary, but is aware that it is being produced.” Film Stories reports she is not believed to have been involved. No presenter, director or list of contributors has been announced.

Rogan told Mediashotz the film looks at “how her unflinching personal beliefs have sparked a fraught and divisive dialogue that continues to this day.” David Harron of BBC Scotland called Rowling “arguably one of the most influential figures in the literary and wider media worlds.”

Licence-Fee Money for a Film the Subject Won’t Join

The BBC is funded mainly by the licence fee that British households pay, and BBC Two, BBC Scotland and iPlayer are all BBC services. Deadline’s report does not give a budget or say how the production is financed. It also does not say who the interviewees are.

That leaves the questions the BBC has not answered. Who speaks in episode two, and do any of them share Rowling’s position on sex and gender? Will the film put her April 2025 post, “I love it when a plan comes together. #SupremeCourt #WomensRights,” in front of viewers as a victory lap or as a provocation? And does a BBC that has not yet seen its own film’s final cut get to call the result impartial?

Six Years of Being Cancelled

The pressure on Rowling goes back to June 2020, when she mocked a headline that used the phrase “people who menstruate” and drew a firestorm of criticism. Daniel Radcliffe responded with an essay on The Trevor Project’s website that included the line “Transgender women are women.” Emma Watson posted on Twitter, without naming Rowling, that “Trans people are who they say they are.”

Rowling did not back down. In April 2024 she answered a supporter who expected Radcliffe and Watson to apologize, writing “Not safe, I’m afraid,” and said celebrities who backed “a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights” should save their apologies for others.

The pile-on has reached the franchise’s own fans. Wil Wheaton, the subject of an earlier Fandom Pulse report, replied on Threads to a user asking whether people were watching the new Harry Potter series: “As so many have said, f*** no we aren’t, we are standing with trans people.” The post is the latest example of a celebrity telling fans to boycott a series Rowling is attached to.

A Mixed Relationship With the Corporation

Deadline notes that “Rowling has a mixed relationship with the BBC. She has collaborated successfully with the BBC on adapting her Strike novels, but she has been critical of the corporation’s reporting on trans rights.”

The timing is deliberate. The BBC film is being shopped at MIPCOM now and will premiere next year, after HBO’s Harry Potter series arrives in December. The first episode rides the franchise’s return, and the second puts the author’s gender-identity views in front of the same audience.

With Rowling declining to take part, the BBC calling her “polarising” in its own commissioning language and the film arriving beside HBO’s Harry Potter launch, will the BBC give viewers a documentary about her work or a trial of her views?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Polygon ran an opinion column on Oct. 12 headlined “Doctor Who’s showrunner is right: Hate is ruining Star Wars,” built on one line from Russell T. Davies’s new memoir: “Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, they’re all being brought down by contempt.” Writer Aimee Hart uses it to blame an “industrialized online hate economy” and cites fans attacking cast members as the proof.

The column never asks who started the fight. Over the last two years the stars and creators of Doctor Who, The Acolyte and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy have answered critics in public, and Davies himself has offered several different explanations for why his show struggled.

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