After an album as culturally dominant as Brat, there was only one way forward: don’t try to make Brat again.

We’ve seen this countless times across music, fashion and film. Sequels chase the magic of the original, remakes attempt to recreate lightning in a bottle, and follow-up albums often become diluted versions of the works that made artists famous in the first place. Once something becomes a cultural phenomenon, trying to replicate it rarely works.

Charli xcx clearly understands that.

Rather than making Brat 2, Music, Fashion, Film takes a complete detour. As Charli herself has put it, “the dancefloor is dead.” Gone are the relentless club beats that defined Brat, replaced by a rougher palette of fuzzy guitars, distortion, riot grrrl influences and grunge-inflected production. Electronic textures haven’t disappeared entirely, but they’re no longer the centre of gravity.

Every Charli album sounds like Charli, but from a different angle. The production evolves, the influences shift and the aesthetic changes, yet her artistic identity remains intact. Reinvention has always been central to who she is as an artist, but what’s happening between Brat and Music, Fashion, Film feels like something more specific than reinvention. Reinvention implies starting over. What Charli does is closer to transformation: taking the same raw material — the same voice, the same instincts, the same restlessness — and letting it become something else entirely without ever losing the thread back to where it started. Brat didn’t get discarded to make this album. It got metabolised into it.

Initially, though, I wasn’t convinced.

When “Rock Music” dropped, I was honestly nervous. I didn’t love it. Then came “SS26”, which I enjoyed more but still wasn’t entirely sold on this new direction. It wasn’t until “Camera” that everything started to click.

Listening to the album in full, I realised I’d been judging it by the wrong criteria. These aren’t songs chasing instant gratification. They’re songs that gather meaning through accumulation.

The production is undoubtedly the album’s biggest strength. “Yeah” builds its verses out of plain, repeated refusals — the same handful of words looped rather than developed — so that the emotion feels stuck rather than resolved, before the song breaks open into crashing distorted guitars that does the releasing the lyrics won’t. “Card Declined” does something even more interesting: it opens with reverb-soaked, almost haunting guitar and a single flat line about going shopping, using consumption as shorthand for numbing out rather than actual desire. Then, in its final forty seconds, the song abandons that mood entirely — the guitar turns warmer and more direct, and the lyric shifts to something plainly sincere, repeated like she can’t stop thinking it. It’s the most quietly devastating moment on the record precisely because the rest of the song has spent three minutes deflecting.

Many of these songs unfold gradually rather than chasing immediate hooks. They often begin sparse and restrained before expanding into something louder, warmer or more abrasive, rewarding patience in a way Brat rarely asked listeners to.

One of the album’s quietest transformations lies in Charli’s voice. She often sounds less interested in performing emotion than simply stating it, allowing the production to carry the emotional weight instead.

Lyrically, however, it doesn’t stand up to some of her previous work.

The writing is honest, direct and introspective, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was holding something back. Brat contained songs like “Girl, so confusing”, “Sympathy is a knife” and “I think about it all the time” that felt almost painfully vulnerable. They explored female friendships, insecurity, jealousy and identity with remarkable openness.

Those themes haven’t disappeared here, but they feel less exposed. Music, Fashion, Film certainly wrestles with identity, but in a way that feels more guarded. Perhaps that’s intentional. Not every album has to lay everything bare. Still, I found myself missing some of the emotional honesty that made Brat so compelling.

That doesn’t make this a weaker album, just a different one.

Reinvention over repetition

One thing I really admire about Charli is her refusal to repeat herself.

I actually found myself thinking about Sabrina Carpenter while listening to this album.

Part of what made Short n’ Sweet so successful was the balance it struck: playful sexuality, clever innuendo and genuinely sharp pop songwriting. Songs like “Juno” and “Bed Chem” became defining moments of that era, but Man’s Best Friend often feels as though it amplifies those elements rather than building on them. The innuendo becomes more constant, the sexuality more pronounced, almost to the point of parody. Rather than evolving the formula, it risks becoming trapped by the very thing that made its predecessor such a success.

Charli does the opposite.

Instead of giving audiences another Brat, she swerves completely. It’s a risk, but it’s also a risk made possible by Brat itself.

Brat didn’t just make Charli more famous; it gave her enormous cultural capital. After becoming one of the defining artists of the decade, she earned the freedom to pivot so dramatically without losing her audience entirely. A grunge-inspired follow-up to Crash might have landed very differently. A grunge-inspired follow-up to Brat is still a gamble, but it’s one cushioned by the goodwill and trust that Brat created.

That’s not to diminish the risk. Reinvention and transformation is always risky, particularly after releasing an album that reshaped popular culture. But Brat afforded Charli something many artists never receive: the freedom to experiment because audiences now follow her, rather than simply the sound she makes.

Authenticity, or the performance of authenticity?

Where my feelings become more complicated isn’t actually the album.

It’s everything surrounding it.

Charli recently wrote that she believes “anti-marketing” is the future: still marketing, but more intimate, personal and less concerned with projecting scale. The Substack posts, smaller shows and quieter aesthetic all seem designed to support that idea.

I actually think she’s right — to a point.

Audiences are becoming increasingly sceptical of polished advertising, and marketing will inevitably evolve alongside that.

What I don’t agree with is the implication that traditional marketing has somehow disappeared.

This rollout still relied heavily on user-generated promotion. Fan TikToks, edits, online discourse and algorithmic sharing remained central to how these songs travelled across the internet. The marketing didn’t become quieter; it became decentralised. Rather than brands pushing content towards audiences, audiences became part of the campaign itself.

That’s what made the anti-marketing discourse feel slightly disingenuous to me. The marketing never disappeared. It simply adopted the aesthetics of authenticity.

Ironically, I also appreciate that the songs themselves don’t feel engineered for virality. So much contemporary pop is built around the promise of a fifteen-second hook; a snippet destined for TikTok dances and edits before listeners have even heard the full track. Music, Fashion, Film largely resists that impulse. It asks to be listened to as an album rather than mined for moments. That’s something I genuinely admire.

More broadly, though, I think anti-marketing is something of a luxury. It’s much easier to reject traditional promotion once people already know who you are.

Brat became a cultural phenomenon because it was impossible to ignore. The lime green, the memes, the collaborations, the endless online discourse — it all helped build the cultural capital that now allows Charli to experiment with appearing less commercial.

That’s often how cultural capital works. Once something becomes ubiquitous, there’s a certain prestige in appearing to move beyond it. Mainstream visibility becomes something to reject, not because it’s no longer effective, but because rejecting it becomes a statement in itself.

Most emerging artists don’t have that luxury. They still rely on TikTok, Reels and algorithm-driven discovery simply to be heard. Quiet marketing only works once you’ve already captured people’s attention.

That’s the contradiction I kept returning to throughout this era. The campaign frequently positioned itself as moving beyond conventional marketing while continuing to depend on many of the same systems of visibility that made Brat such an unavoidable cultural event. It wasn’t the absence of marketing that interested me. It was the performance of its absence.

There’s a certain cultural currency today in appearing too cool for mainstream marketing. Quiet rollouts, niche platforms and anti-commercial aesthetics have become their own form of branding. Authenticity itself has become something that can be carefully curated.

All of the B-side tracks have been kept off streaming services, available only through physical editions or paid downloads. Artists are, of course, entitled to distribute their work however they choose. But when streaming has become the primary way people experience music, deliberately placing part of an album behind additional purchases inevitably creates a sense of exclusivity.

I admire artists who experiment with how their work is released. What troubles me is how easily accessibility becomes negotiable once an artist no longer depends on reaching as many people as possible.

Why should the most dedicated fans have to spend even more money to experience the complete body of work?

The visual identity of this era raised similar questions for me.

I actually think the album cover is beautifully photographed. Charli has spoken about liking the idea that choosing three people naturally encourages fans to imagine who their own ‘top three’ would be. I genuinely like that concept.

But album artwork is never neutral. It creates meaning before you’ve even pressed play.

Brat was an era illuminated by women and queer creatives. The 360 video celebrated female artists and collaborators. “Girl, so confusing” became one of the defining songs of the project because of what it said about female relationships, culminating in Lorde’s remarkable remix. Even when Brat explored conflict, it remained deeply rooted in women’s perspectives and queer culture.

Music, Fashion, Film signals something quite different. The artwork centres three older men, while the “Camera” video casts Vincent Cassel. Whether Cassel was chosen for the visual parallels to La Haine or for another reason entirely, his presence isn’t culturally neutral. He’s attracted criticism over the years for his views on women, his public admiration for figures such as Andrew Tate and his relationships with women decades younger than himself. None of this makes him untouchable as an actor, but it does mean his inclusion carries meaning — particularly for an audience largely made up of women, queer people and gender-diverse fans.

I’m not suggesting Charli owes her audience complete creative deference. Artists should be free to transform and to challenge expectations. But transformation also changes the relationship between an artist and the people who helped transform them into a cultural phenomenon in the first place. At times, this era feels less interested in inviting those communities into its world than asking them simply to accept it.

That, more than anything else, is where the impression of distance begins to emerge. Not arrogance, necessarily. Not contempt. But a growing sense that Charli no longer feels particularly accountable to the audience that helped build this moment.

Combined with the discourse surrounding “pre-Brat” fans versus newer listeners, the campaign sometimes risks feeling more exclusive than inclusive.

What made Brat feel so exciting was that everyone was invited to the party. This era occasionally feels as though access itself has become part of the performance.

My ranking (for now)

None of that changes how much I’ve actually enjoyed sitting with these songs. Discourse aside, here’s where they land for me right now, and like every Charli era, I expect this list to move.

1. Wink Wink

2. Card Declined

3. Yeah

4. Magic Metal Montana

5. No One Lasts Forever

6. Camera

7. I’m Afraid

8. Persona

9. 2007

10. SS26

11. Rock Music

Even “Rock Music”, my least favourite, is still a song I genuinely enjoy.

Final thoughts

Discourse aside, I’ve found myself genuinely enjoying Music, Fashion, Film. The songs have steadily revealed themselves with each listen, and there are already tracks here that I prefer to some of Brat’s biggest moments.

Following Brat with another Brat would have been the safer choice. Instead, Charli has once again transformed herself, proving that her greatest strength isn’t remaining in one lane but continually finding new ones.

Sonically, this is an exciting, cohesive and often brilliant record that I suspect will only grow on me with time.

At the same time, I can’t completely separate the music from the era surrounding it. The anti-marketing discourse, the exclusivity of the B-sides and some of the visual decisions all shaped the way I experienced the album, not because they diminished the music itself, but because they changed my understanding of who this era imagines its audience to be.

Transformation doesn’t only change the artist. It changes the relationship between the artist and the people who transformed them into a phenomenon in the first place.

Music, Fashion, Film doesn’t eclipse Brat, but perhaps that’s exactly why it succeeds.

The best artists don’t recreate lightning in a bottle. They find a completely different storm. Charli xcx remains one of pop’s great transformers — not because she leaves her past behind, but because she keeps finding new ways to carry it forward.

My only remaining complaint?

Why are all the songs so short?

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What do you think about Charli xcx’s new album and era?

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The art of adaptation

Before getting my claws into the film, let’s set the record straight: what actually is an adaptation?

In biology, adaptation describes how a species becomes suited to its environment; art does something similar. It reshapes older work to fit a new artist’s intent and a new audience. A film adaptation is a balancing act, trying to maintain the source text’s core whilst fleshing something different out around it. Not too different, just moulding the original story for screen, and for a broad modern audience (not just book lovers).

Just to note: I first read The Odyssey (Emily Wilson’s translation) three years ago (wow, I’m old) and haven’t returned to it since, so I’ll be working partly from memory here — if I get something wrong, please tell me in the comments.

Nolan’s infidelity: making myth real

The biggest change Nolan makes isn’t any single plot point. It’s the decision to take one of the strangest, most fantastical stories in Western literature and turn it into something closer to a grounded, realist war film. That choice is the key to understanding almost everything else Nolan changes. It shapes the way he writes Odysseus, removes much of the poem’s supernatural strangeness, and, I think, has a particularly noticeable effect on the women around him, who become increasingly tied to his guilt and his journey home.

It’s worth saying upfront that this isn’t entirely a problem Nolan has created. The Odyssey is, after all, Odysseus’s epic, and everyone else is arguably in service of his journey by design. But Nolan pushes this much further than Homer does, and it’s worth asking what is gained — and what is lost — when you transform a mythological epic into a story about a war veteran haunted by what he has done. That, ultimately, is what interests me about this adaptation: not simply what Nolan changes, but why. What happens when you strip away the fantasy and replace it with realism? And what does that transformation do to the people left behind?

I'll begin by looking at the costumes and dialogue, partly because these have already generated so much discussion online, before turning to Nolan's stripping back of the poem's fantasy and the way he transforms its monsters, gods, and supernatural elements into something more grounded and human. From there, I'll look at what this shift does to Odysseus himself, and then to the women around him, before coming back to the question of what Nolan's version ultimately gains — and loses — by making Homer's myth more real.

Costume, Tone, and the Nolan-ification of Homer

The trailer made Nolan’s intended tone obvious immediately: moody, serious, war-worn. Gone is the colourful armour ancient Greek soldiers likely actually wore, replaced with the familiar, muted Ancient-Rome-adjacent look we’ve seen a hundred times before. Historical accuracy clearly isn’t the priority here, and having now seen the film, that instinct was right: this is realism replacing fantasy, start to finish. The whimsy and strangeness of the poem gets traded in almost entirely for the modern lens of the guilt-ridden war veteran, and that trade defines everything else about the film.

That trade shows up in the dialogue too. Apparently Telemachus calling Penelope and Odysseus “Mum” and “Dad” isn’t historically accurate — who would have guessed? Would “Mother” and “Father” have landed better? Not really. It’s Ancient Greece either way, and neither is what anyone in that world would actually have said. The entire register of the dialogue is “wrong” by definition; the only way round that would be having the cast speak Ancient Greek. That said, “Mother” and “Father” might have offered a quicker, if slightly false, sense of “we are watching something ancient” — a kind of ‘shorthand accuracy,’ which actually isn’t accurate at all. The American accents felt slightly off throughout too, in a way I can’t quite pin down — Tom Holland’s especially. None of it broke the film, but it’s the same tension as the costuming: this is a film reaching for a feeling of the ancient world rather than any real fidelity to it, and mostly, that’s a fair trade to make.

But the more telling version of this trade is what happens to the poem’s genuinely fantastical moments.

Making the monsters human

Many of the fantastical creatures, stories, and presences are stripped down to a more real version.

The sequence with Polyphemus (the Cyclops) focuses entirely on grim survival and visceral realism rather than playful mythic wit. Even the facial structure of Polyphemus makes him seem more real, as the twisted nose and eye imitate real human abnormalities, like cyclopia, rather than simply plonking an eye onto a large man. Scylla receives a similar treatment. Fantastical sea monster no more, but rather a large, barnacle-like creature emerging from the rocks.

The fantasy also disappears with the sirens. We do not see or hear them; we see only feminine figures, and I am glad Nolan keeps it this way. Yet again, the film creates a kind of symbiotic tension between rationalisation and mystery. By withholding the sirens’ magic, Nolan removes the overtly fantastical while simultaneously preserving the mystery of how they enchant their victims.

Odysseus attempts to rationalise what he heard, explaining that:

“It told me what you most want is what you most can’t have. What you most can’t have is what you already had and lost.”

The sirens’ song therefore becomes less a mystical force than a reflection of Odysseus’s own desires, regrets, and failures. What he most wants, perhaps, is what he once had and sacrificed through the war: a life before the chaos, rage, and destruction that followed. His explanation thus feeds into Nolan’s wider stripping away of fantasy. The sirens are not simply supernatural beings whose song has enchanted him; their song becomes something human, an expression of the guilt and regret he already carries. Just as the destruction of the war cannot be attributed to the gods, neither can Odysseus’s suffering be reduced to supernatural forces beyond his control. The guilt belongs to him, and to humanity. The chaos and rage are the consequences of human choices, ambition, and violence. Even the sirens’ song, then, is ultimately brought back to something human: not a mystical temptation imposed upon Odysseus, but the manifestation of the desires and regrets he carries within himself. Much like Athena, who becomes a silent symbol of war rather than an active divine force, the sirens remain present as an idea while their supernatural power is stripped away.

And then the Gods. Where are they? This is the crux of Nolan’s adaptation. Are the gods real? Are they to blame for what’s occurred, or is it humans who have destroyed their own civilization, and will keep on doing so? I’ll come back to this a bit later.

Taken together, the pattern is consistent: wherever the poem asks you to believe in something genuinely strange or supernatural, Nolan finds a way to make it smaller, more explicable, more human.

Odysseus and Penelope

That trade is most visible in Odysseus himself. In the poem, he’s the protagonist, but not always a likeable one — witty, a trickster, someone several of the gods actively dislike for exactly that reason. Nolan’s version dials most of that down. His hubris barely registers; the famous “Nobody” scene with the Cyclops — the moment of cleverness and ego that gets him and his men cursed by Poseidon in the first place — is replaced with an arrow to the eye. It’s a strange swap. In the poem, the trick is entirely in character; watching Nolan’s Odysseus solve the same problem with an arrow felt like watching a different person.

But the omission also speaks to the film’s wider shift away from fantasy and towards grim realism. A conversation between Odysseus and a Cyclops, built around a playful linguistic trick, belongs to the strange, fantastical energy of Homer’s world; an arrow to the eye keeps Nolan’s version firmly in survival mode, with a touch of ego and defiance. The stripping away of fantasy and the transformation of Odysseus into a more guilt-ridden, human figure therefore work symbiotically: as the gods and the supernatural recede, the responsibility for the violence, destruction, and loss of humanity falls increasingly onto Odysseus himself.

That tension is, I think, one of my main issues with the film: it never quite settles on how far into the historical-fantastical register it wants to go, versus how much of Homer’s supernatural world it wants to retain. Odysseus stays likeable throughout, but some of his actions — listening to the sirens, shooting Polyphemus in the eye, fighting to keep his men alive — can be read less as the hubris of Homer’s Odysseus and more as acts of defiance against the gods themselves. This is where the film’s ambiguity becomes interesting. If Odysseus is not simply being punished for his own arrogance, but is actively resisting a divine power that may or may not exist, then the question becomes whether he is responsible for his fate or whether the gods are. Yet some of the choices (this one included) read less like character work and more like plot mechanics, doing just enough to still justify Poseidon’s curse.

Penelope suffers a version of the same flattening — and hers is a useful place to start, because it shows exactly how this works. I liked how strong a character she is here, and Anne Hathaway’s performance is genuinely excellent, but she reads as an odd blend. She is the Penelope of the poem but with a very contemporary feminist sensibility, and the two don’t always sit together. One moment she wants nothing more than Odysseus home and ruling again; the next she’s chafing at not being allowed the throne herself. It’s a modern instinct grafted onto an ancient character, and it shows most clearly in how the film handles her unweaving trick. In the poem, this is arguably Penelope’s defining act of cleverness. She unpicks her weaving each night to buy herself time and keep the suitors at bay, entirely on her own terms. In the film, it’s Antinous who reveals to the audience that she’s been doing it. The cleverness of the discovery gets handed to him; Penelope, meanwhile, is caught out. Rather than being represented as the smart, conniving woman quietly outmanoeuvring every man in the room, as Homer writes her, her act of rebellion is framed as a shameful act . It’s a small change, but it undoes a lot of what makes her interesting in the source material, and it’s worth saying, this is technically always a risk with this story: it’s Odysseus’s epic, so everyone else is, by design, somewhat in service of his journey. But Nolan pushes that further than the poem ever does, turning “in service of” into “reduced to.”

Circe, Calypso, and Telemachus

Circe is where the film’s changes worked best for me. I loved her as a character, and the scene where she turns Odysseus’s men into pigs is genuinely horrifying in the best way — a real gut-punch, and a much more visceral take on that moment than the poem gives you. What’s different is the relationship itself: in the poem, Odysseus stays with Circe for a year, and it’s an affair in every sense. Here, there’s a single, gentler scene where he persuades her to turn his men back, and that’s it — no affair. Maybe that’s simply runtime (this is already a three-hour film). But I suspect it’s also a deliberate softening: modern audiences don’t forgive infidelity the way an ancient audience might have, and an unfaithful Odysseus risks losing our sympathy entirely, which would undercut the whole “rooting for him to get home” arc Nolan is clearly building. I liked the affair in the book — well I wasn’t actively rooting for it — but I think it tells you a lot about both of them as people. But for a film this dependent on us liking its hero, I think cutting it was the right call.

I want to add, also, that I wasn’t a fan of the whole ‘old hag’ look they went for with Circe. It’s such an overdone visual shorthand for a witch: an older woman, living alone, slightly scruffy, with a bird in the house and a bubbling pot of mysterious broth. Yes, it makes sense within the ‘real’ aspect of the story Nolan is going for. If Circe has been living alone on an island for centuries, of course she might look a little worse for wear. But she is still a nymph who could live for thousands of years, and I can’t help feeling that the film’s attempt to make her ‘realistic’ relies on a very familiar and rather clichéd image of what a witch is ‘supposed’ to look like. It’s another example of Nolan translating something mythological into something recognisable: Circe’s otherness is replaced with an instantly familiar visual archetype.

Yet, interestingly, Circe’s words remain closely tied to the film’s wider themes. She describes men as pigs; disgusting creatures driven by endless desire and appetite, where too much is never enough. Her words echo the film’s wider preoccupation with male ambition and excess, and with the destructive consequences of always wanting more. Odysseus and the Greeks went to war in pursuit of something they believed they needed, but victory was not enough; conquest led to further violence, destruction, and loss. Circe’s criticism of male desire therefore feeds directly into the film’s treatment of war. The same appetite that drives men towards women, power, glory, and conquest can become insatiable, and ultimately destructive.

Calypso gets far less generous treatment when it comes to characterisation — though it’s worth separating that from how she’s styled, since the visuals aren’t really a question of one goddess getting a fairer deal than the other, just a way of marking them out as opposites. She and Circe are, on paper, close variations on the same figure — both women alone on their own islands, both divinely beautiful, both holding Odysseus captive in different ways. Yet the film draws a sharp visual line between them: Circe reads as witch-hag, the one who actually turns men into pigs, while Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, gets the glossier, more conventionally “modern beauty” treatment — strolling the beach like she’s shooting a perfume advert. That contrast does real narrative work, separating the two even though they’re structurally so similar: Circe stays coded as a threat throughout, while Calypso, despite holding Odysseus against his will for seven years, gets framed less as his captor and more as the one trying to help him — as though he’s the one keeping himself there, unwilling to face going home, rather than her keeping him.

That reframing is part of a wider flattening in how she’s actually characterised. She’s essentially the blueprint for what I’d call a “Nolan woman” — present almost entirely to move a man’s journey forward, used here as little more than a vehicle for exposition. She’s a genuinely complicated figure in the source material, a villain of sorts who holds Odysseus captive against his will and abuses him for seven years, and reducing her to a plot device feels like a real flattening of that. It’s also just strange plotting: she holds him for seven years, feeding him the lotus flower, and then one day simply decides he should stop and remember who he is? It happens with almost no motivation given at all, apart from a bit of thunder.

Telemachus fares about the same. He’s a major figure in both poem and film, and yet there’s honestly not much to say about him — which is itself the problem. He comes across as fairly useless, and by the film’s ending, where he’s crowned king with neither father nor mother present (Odysseus is exiled), I found myself unconvinced. The coming-of-age arc is nominally there, but we don’t really see him grow into someone capable of ruling; we’re told he wants the throne, but never shown much reason to believe he’s ready for it. Mostly, he functions as a stand-in for the audience, finding out what happened at Troy, piecing together what happened to his father, rather than as a character in his own right. He does help deal with the suitors, but nowhere near to the extent he does in the poem. In the source text, Odysseus returns home roughly halfway through the story; in the film, it’s very near the end (which, frankly, is a relief pacing-wise). But once he’s back, it’s Odysseus who takes the lead on killing the suitors, leaving Telemachus’ role even smaller than it might otherwise have been.

Athena and Helen

Athena is the character I’m still turning over. In the poem, she’s Odysseus’s patron; a goddess of war and tactics who actively favours him, cunning and ruthless in her own right. Arguably, she should have played something closer to the role Calypso does here: the driving force pushing Odysseus to recover his memory and sense of self. Instead, Nolan diminishes her into something closer to a symbol — guilt, atrocity, the cost of war — rather than an active presence in the story. I did like what that symbol became: the beheading of her statue, and a woman (Zendaya’s character, seemingly an ordinary woman killed in the Troy massacre) becoming his private stand-in for her, a silent, walking manifestation of his guilt. I’m choosing to read her as exactly that — a random woman turned symbol, not the goddess herself — which fits the film’s wider question of whether the gods were ever real at all, or whether humanity always had control and simply chose to destroy anyway.

But as a symbol, that’s genuinely all Athena becomes. No motivation, no character exploration, no depth, nothing. Her scenes add nothing to the plot beyond that one image. I liked the silence of it, as a symbol of guilt specifically. But it’s hard not to feel that diminishing her this far is more than just a stylistic choice — it feels like a real flattening of a genuinely complex figure. The actual Athena would never have decried the Trojan horse the way this film implies the gods might; she’d have been enthralled by exactly that kind of cunning. Turning her into a passive symbol of guilt, rather than the active, strategic force she is in the poem, sits uneasily with me, even accounting for the “were the gods ever really there” question the film is clearly trying to raise.

Helen of Troy gets an even rougher deal. She and Menelaus exist in this adaptation almost entirely to narrate backstory to Telemachus, and Helen herself gets genuinely lost in the process — blurred together with her sister Clytemnestra, and overshadowed by Agamemnon’s role as Odysseus’s dark foil. I liked the idea of Agamemnon functioning that way, a mirror showing what could have happened to Odysseus on his own homecoming, but the film introduces so much of his storyline, so quickly, that it became genuinely confusing to follow — and I say that as someone who’s read the source text. There was a stronger version of this available: Helen could have worked as a foil for Odysseus’s guilt in her own right, someone else carrying the scars and shame of the war, rather than being folded into someone else’s story. Instead, she’s yet another woman in this film reduced to a vehicle for exposition rather than a character in her own right.

What the War Actually Costs

Nolan’s real angle here is bigger than any single character: war, the guilt it leaves behind, and the idea that humanity itself — not the gods — is what destroys civilisation. It’s there in how the film treats the Trojan horse, which reads as a genuinely ungodly, unjust act; a line crossed rather than a clever trick. Odysseus spends much of the film giving the animals he hunts a fighting chance, stringing his bow properly rather than ambushing them. The Trojans get no such chance. It’s not Zeus’s law being broken by simply going uninvited into someone’s home; it’s an ambush from the inside, a total betrayal of trust, dressed up as strategy. That’s made most explicit when Odysseus admits to Penelope what he and his men really were during the war: not heroes, but something closer to raiders — “the people of the sea” — taking what they wanted, ignoring the old laws, bringing chaos wherever they went. That’s what the war actually was, stripped of any heroic gloss.

And for it, Odysseus has a gruelling journey home, loses all his men, and returns home to be exiled: a noticeable change from the original. Exile seems to be the best answer for killing all the suitors, as we know that can’t be excused from the men’s families. Odysseus would not be accepted as king. Yet again, a modern response to the original source text, a punishment must follow an act of dishonour and cruelty.

The verdict

So, is it any good? Honestly, yes. Was it faithful to the poem? No, not really. Would I have liked a bit more fantasy and whimsy in the mix? Yes. Was I irritated by some of the character changes? Definitely. But none of that stopped me from having a genuinely good time. Nolan clearly wanted to make another war film, just a different kind; one built around guilt, the loss of humanity, and Odysseus as the war-worn veteran rather than the clever trickster of the poem. It’s not how I’d have adapted it myself, but it’s a genuinely interesting choice, and mostly, it works. It’s epic in the way it should be, the cinematography backs that up properly, and I’d recommend it — just maybe not to the book purists in your life.

I think the focus on the cost of war and the loss of humanity is a decisive turn from the original, but one with a clear purpose behind it. These aren’t half-arsed changes made for the sake of being different, or deviations with no real direction (cough cough, “Wuthering Heights”). Nolan’s choices feel deliberate, directional, and purposeful. I may not agree with every one of them, but I admire that this is not an adaptation that changes things simply because it can. There is a clear vision behind this version of The Odyssey, and every major departure from Homer seems to serve it.

That said, stripping the poem of so much of its fantasy in favour of realism has a cost of its own, beyond just the gods and the monsters. It is the same instinct, I think, that flattens Penelope, Calypso, Athena, Helen and even Circe into symbols and plot devices rather than people — a very grounded, very human, very masculine war story, where the women exist mainly to reflect Odysseus’ guilt back at him rather than to carry weight of their own. That is the one thing I can’t quite forgive.

Perhaps, then, Nolan does not completely remove the fantastical elements of The Odyssey, but rather repurposes them. The fantastical remains, but its meaning is shifted from the supernatural and mythological towards the human and the tangible. The sirens become manifestations of guilt and regret; the monsters are stripped of some of their mythology and made frighteningly physical; even the gods themselves become uncertain, their presence hovering somewhere between divine intervention, symbolism, and human interpretation. There is a symbiotic relationship here: the more Nolan strips away the certainty of the supernatural, the more responsibility falls back onto the human beings at the centre of the story. The war, the destruction, the guilt — these become tangible human consequences, even when the film leaves open the possibility that the gods may still be there. It is an interesting and, in many ways, compelling modernisation of Homer — but perhaps the irony is that, in making the myth more human, Nolan also makes the women within it less so.

Have you watched it yet? Let me know your thoughts, and if you liked the changes Nolan made.

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My other seeds of thought:

I remember a teacher at college telling us about a former student of hers who’d gone down to Oxford, maybe just to look round, get a feel for the place before applying. I can’t quite remember the details, but the bones of the story stuck: the person showing her around gave her a nickname, something to do with being northern, and used it the entire visit. Nothing dramatic happened. No one was outright cruel. She just came home feeling judged, a bit ostracised, like she’d been filed under a category before she’d said more than a few sentences. That same teacher also told us, quite matter-of-factly, that we’d probably struggle to get jobs in television and the like, not because we weren’t capable, but because of how people are judged on accent alone. northern voices read as a little dim-witted, rough and tough, apparently, but also friendly, funny, good for a laugh. Nice to have around, less nice to be taken seriously by. Those two stories have stuck with me for years, probably because they’re so small and so ordinary. Nobody did anything you could really point to. And that’s rather the point.

The Sound of Authority

Turn on the news, walk into a courtroom, watch almost any British institution address the public, and you’ll hear some version of the same voice: Received Pronunciation, or something close enough to pass. RP doesn’t just sound neutral — it sounds like competence itself, like the accent of people who are, by default, to be believed. Nobody asks the newsreader to prove they’re clever. The accent does that work for them. Regional accents, meanwhile, get cast as the voice of the ordinary, the relatable, the “real” — which sounds like a compliment until you notice that “ordinary” is rarely the accent handed the microphone when something important is being said.

Lancastrian, Mancunian, Geordie, Scouse, Brummie, Cockney — these accents carry real warmth in the popular imagination. People genuinely associate them with friendliness, humour, being down-to-earth. But that warmth sits right alongside an assumption of “less educated” or “common,” and the two rarely get separated. You can be liked and underestimated in the same breath. This isn’t just a feeling, either — Queen Mary University’s 2022 accent bias research found RP still sits at the top of the prestige ranking, while Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester accents rank at the bottom, and around a quarter of working-class senior managers reported being mocked for their accent at work.

Class-Coded Stages

Even Shakespeare hasn't entirely escaped this, which feels like it should be a bigger scandal in English departments than it currently is. It's not universal — I've seen productions cast Cockney or other southern non-RP voices for exactly the same effect — but the pattern I've noticed most, growing up watching this myself, leans northern: aristocrats and rulers in RP, servants and comic relief in northern accents. And the reason isn't really a mystery once you sit with it: it's shorthand. A regional accent tells an audience, in the seconds before a character has done anything at all, exactly what to expect of them — gullible, a bit dim, comic, servant-class. RP does the opposite work, signalling intelligence and authority before a single line of dialogue has been earned. It's a lazy but effective bit of stagecraft: rather than building a character through what they say or do, the accent alone does the job of telling the audience how to read them. The specific regional choice is almost beside the point — northern, Cockney, Essex, whichever — what matters is that it isn't RP, and that absence is doing all the signalling.

The Apprentice Effect

This isn’t confined to costume drama. It happened on primetime television this year, on The Apprentice, during a video game task. Levi, from Yorkshire, was swapped out of a voice-acting role by a teammate, Lawrence, who told him — more or less on camera — that it was because of his “Yorkshire twang.” Levi raised it himself in the boardroom afterwards. What’s most telling isn’t the remark itself, but how little reaction it got in the room. No pushback, no real acknowledgment that anything unusual had happened. If Lawrence had dismissed a teammate over something else they couldn’t control, the silence in that boardroom would have looked very different. Accent bias so often works exactly like this: casual, almost invisible, absorbed as common sense rather than challenged as prejudice.

Talking Up, Talking Down

There’s actual terminology for this, which I came across during my A-levels: upward and downward convergence, and upward and downward divergence. Upward convergence is what someone like me does without really deciding to — softening my vowels, sharpening my consonants, becoming a bit more “RP” around people from that world. When I’m with southern friends, I catch myself annunciating my o’s a little more, saying “I’ve b-ee-n” instead of “I’ve b-i-n.” Downward convergence is the opposite: someone with a standard accent deliberately loosening it to sound more working-class, more relatable, more “one of us.” George Osborne did this rather infamously in 2013, delivering a speech on welfare in Kent in a noticeably “Mockney,” Estuary-leaning register — a long way from his usual voice, and widely read at the time as a rather clumsy bid for street cred from a Chancellor accused of being out of touch.

Even the names of these things give the game away. “Upward” and “downward” aren’t neutral directions — they’re a value judgement dressed up as geometry. Standard is up. Regional is down. Nobody needed to write that rule down; the terminology just assumes it. Worth saying too: the “North is poorer, South is richer” instinct behind all this doesn’t really hold up — London has the widest gap between rich and poor of anywhere in Britain, and every city, North or South, has its wealthy streets and its struggling ones. The accent hierarchy persists anyway, quite happily divorced from the economics it claims to track.

And it cuts the other way too. Divergence is when people lean into their accent rather than away from it — someone from my hometown, dropped into a group of “well-spoken” (I’ve done it again) southern voices, might subconsciously broaden their accent rather than soften it, almost as a small act of loyalty. The SNP’s Lara Bird got caught in something close to this recently: old footage emerged of her speaking pure RP, which sat oddly next to the noticeably rolled Rs she used taking her parliamentary oath days later. Whether that was a deliberate performance of Scottishness or just an accent finally relaxing into its natural home under pressure, the online reaction assumed the worst — that it was calculated, a costume put on for the cameras. Meanwhile the reverse happens further up the social scale: people with posher accents sometimes over-enunciate around regional speakers, not to build rapport, but to draw a line; a subtle way of signalling, without saying it outright, who’s from where.

It’s also, cynically, a rather effective and convenient tool, one most of us reach for subconsciously without quite admitting it. Politicians use downward convergence constantly to seem like “normal people” — Nigel Farage’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here stint and his TikTok cameos using younger slang did exactly this, warming up an audience of young men before the manifesto properly landed. Hannah Spencer, the Green Party’s Gorton and Denton MP and a former plumber, gets the opposite treatment: praised by some for being refreshingly “like us,” and dismissed by others as somehow not fitting the part of an MP — which tells you rather a lot about what people still expect that part to sound like.

The Bit We Weren’t Taught

When I did my English Language A-level, we spent a good deal of time on accent and social groups — but almost all of it was class, region, and age. Regional and working-class accents got the spotlight; accent shaped by ethnicity barely came up at all, which in hindsight feels like a fairly significant gap. Because a distinctly non-British inflection — an accent shaped by a first or family language other than English, rather than by geography alone — gets derided in much the same way, and often more harshly. The same Queen Mary research mentioned earlier found Afro-Caribbean and Indian-inflected English ranked at the very bottom of the prestige scale, below even the regional accents this piece has spent most of its time on. It’s the same underlying mechanism, accents standing in for assumptions about intelligence, professionalism, who gets believed, but with an extra layer that class bias alone doesn’t carry: the implication that the speaker is somehow less British, less “from here,” regardless of where they were actually born and raised. It deserves its own proper piece rather than a paragraph, but it felt wrong to write about accent bias in Britain and leave it out entirely.

Accent bias matters because it decides, often instantly and unconsciously, who gets treated as capable and who gets treated as a stereotype. It shapes who’s cast, who’s promoted, who’s believed. Recognising it, whether that’s in Shakespearean plays, reality TV, or in a school trip to Oxford, is a small but necessary place to start unpicking it.

So I’ll ask you what I keep asking myself: what accent were you told, one way or another, to hide, or to lean into?

If this is the sort of thing that interests you, Accent Bias Britain is a genuinely excellent resource — the research project behind several of the studies referenced above, and worth a proper look if you want to go deeper than one Substack column can take you.

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And I do get it. I’ve seen the fancasts. I’ve probably agreed with some of them. So when something feels “off,” it’s hard not to immediately question it. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I keep coming back to the same question: why do we care this much, and how much should we actually get a say?

In Defence of Fancasting

At its best, fancasting can:

• Highlight underused or overlooked actors

• Push for more accurate or inclusive representation

• Broaden Hollywood’s often limited casting pool

• Creates a community of fans, and sparks conversation and discussion

Fancasting ensures the happiness of the fans. It creates a democracy where fans get a say in the films and TV they watch. As the primary consumers, their opinions should be accounted for, as I said before, they are the ones actively watching and promoting the film.

Fans are everything when it comes to film and TV. They’re the ones who watch, who judge, and who promote. Without them, nothing really succeeds. So of course studios want to keep fans happy. But there’s a difference between listening to audiences and… letting them cast your film for you.

That’s basically what fancasting has become.

When Imagination Turns Into Expectation

At its core, fancasting is harmless. It’s fun. It’s just imagining who could play who. Now with social media, fancasting has snowballed into a much larger phenomenon, where certain actors become the choice, and anything else feels wrong.

What starts as imagination can quickly harden into expectation.

For example:

• Across the “Emily Henry universe,” names like Logan Lerman, Dev Patel, and Dylan O’Brien circulate constantly.

• James Bond discussions reliably include Idris Elba.

• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo fancasts often spotlight Ana de Armas or Rachel Zegler.

These are all great actors. But it does start to feel a bit… repetitive? Like we’ve swapped one limited Hollywood pool for another slightly reshuffled version of the same thing.

Appearance vs Talent

Fancasting seems to often ignore acting talent.

It often feels like it’s based almost entirely on appearance. People want someone who looks exactly how they imagined the character, like a perfect copy-paste from page to screen. But acting isn’t cosplay. A character isn’t just hair colour and height; it’s presence, energy, chemistry. And we, as viewers, aren’t in the audition rooms. We don’t see the screen tests or how actors actually play off each other.

Yulin Kuang, who is directing Beach Read, posted the announcement with a lengthy comment, in which she writes, “Once we knew Phoebe [Dyvenor] would be our January, my efforts became more focused and specific – not on who would play the best Gus according to the text, but who would play the best Gus oppoiste our specific January.”

Well, this had people up in arms.

I understand why people didn’t like her comments; it sounds like accuracy isn’t a priority. But at the same time… it’s a romance. If the chemistry isn’t there, the whole thing falls apart.

I think if someone played Gus who looked the part, but the chemistry and performance fell flat, I’d be… bored.

I mean, after all, chemistry can’t be forged, can it?

This also brings in the question of adaptations, and how closely identifiable should the film be to the book. What do you prioritise when adapting a book? How true it stays to the source, or how it works for visual media?

I want to clarify that it’s been over 2 years since I read Beach Read, and I wasn’t obsessed like many other are, so my opinion on who plays January and Gus is already not as important as other fans.

But as I said, I will always prioritise the connection between the characters, and the ability to embody the role.

And I think this ties into a larger issue with adaptations in general. There’s always this expectation that they should be as close to the book as possible, but film and literature just don’t work the same way. Something that reads well doesn’t always translate visually, and vice versa. At some point, choices have to be made.

Fancasting in Action

We’ve seen what happens when fan expectations drive casting too heavily. Emma Watson as Belle in Beauty and the Beast is probably the clearest example. People wanted her, she looked the part, and yet… it didn’t fully land. Not because she’s bad, but because fitting the image of a character isn’t the same as embodying them.

And honestly, the casting for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping feels like proof that studios are very aware of online fan culture now. I refuse to believe the casting directors weren’t scrolling TikTok edits and Reddit fancasts while putting this together.

Because so many of the choices feel almost too perfect for the internet. Elle Fanning as Effie Trinket? That casting had been circulating online for years before the book was even announced. Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman feels similarly engineered to appeal to audiences. And Jesse Plemons as Plutarch Heavensbee genuinely feels pulled straight from fan discussions, largely because people have long pointed out how much he resembles a young Philip Seymour Hoffman. Mckenna Grace, too, was one of the most common names I saw attached to Maysilee Donner almost immediately after the book released.

And to be fair… I kind of get it. These choices are exciting. The cast is stacked, and most reactions online have been overwhelmingly positive.

But that’s what makes it interesting to me. Are these genuinely the best actors for the roles, or are they the best choices for generating hype online? Maybe both. Maybe that’s just modern franchise filmmaking now. Studios know fandom culture is essentially free marketing, and casting someone the internet already approves of creates immediate goodwill before a trailer even drops.

I guess we’ll see how it actually performs when the film releases in November 2026. Because fancasting always sounds great in theory — but performance is the thing that ultimately decides whether a casting choice was inspired, or just internet bait.

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Fans: Do We Know What’s Best?

Honestly, I think fans (myself included) sometimes just lack imagination. It’s easy to say “this person is perfect” or “this casting is completely wrong,” but history proves otherwise. No one would have predicted Robert Pattinson as Batman, or Heath Ledger as the Joker. Even Matthew McConaughey shifting from rom-coms into films like Interstellar felt unexpected at the time. And yet those choices worked, because casting isn’t about ticking boxes, it’s about interpretation.

At the end of the day, fancasting is part of what makes online film culture so enjoyable. It builds community, sparks conversation, and lets people imagine their favourite stories.

But I do think it sometimes tips over. The problem isn’t fancasting itself—it’s how quickly it becomes expectation. People stop approaching adaptations with curiosity and start approaching them with a verdict already written. Anything that doesn’t match the version in their head is immediately dismissed.

Criticise afterwards, absolutely. That’s part of engaging with film. But going in a bit more open-minded would probably make the experience better for everyone involved.

Of course, there are exceptions where criticism is completely valid in a different way. In cases like “Wuthering Heights”, where casting choices such as Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff sparked discussion about race and source material fidelity, the conversation goes beyond fancasting culture and into something more structural. That isn’t really about imagination, it’s about adaptation choices that actively reshape what the story is.

But outside of those specific cases, I think it’s worth remembering that fancasting is just that; fandom imagination. It’s not instruction. And maybe the healthiest way to engage with adaptations is to let go of the version we’ve already cast in our heads, at least until the film actually gives us a reason not to.

What do you think about fancasts? Are you a fan? (please excuse the pun)

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Case Study: “Wuthering Heights” and the Absence of Belief

After watching the recent adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, I found myself asking a simple question: how can two of the most attractive and successful actors of their generation feel so devoid of chemistry?

I’ve written previously about Emerald Fennell’s version of the novel — its brooding aestheticism, its performative radicalism, its lack of emotional depth. But what lingered most, on reflection, was something more fundamental: I simply did not believe in the relationship. I wasn’t invested. I wasn’t moved. I didn’t even particularly care.

In a story defined by obsessive, destructive love, this absence is fatal. Films are, of course, artificial constructions, but their success depends on their ability to mask that artificiality — to draw us in; to make us feel as though what we are watching is emotionally true. Here, that illusion never materialised. I remained a detached spectator, seeing only Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi performing proximity rather than connection.

Age, Perception, and Casting History

There is also, perhaps, the question of age, or rather, the perception of it. There are only seven years between Robbie and Elordi, a gap hardly unusual on screen. And yet, it felt more pronounced. Elordi, still strongly associated with adolescent roles in Euphoria and The Kissing Booth, carries a certain youthful coding, while Robbie’s presence often leans toward composure and maturity. The result is not a true age gap but a tonal mismatch that subtly disrupts believability.

It’s not that age gaps inherently prevent chemistry—history shows they can thrive under the right circumstances.

Examples of Chemistry Across Age Imbalances

And yet, age gaps (or exaggerated imbalances) have never inherently prevented chemistry. If anything, they often sharpen it.

• In Mamma Mia!, Christine Baranski’s Tanya shares a flirtatious, knowingly theatrical dynamic with a much younger man during “Does Your Mother Know.” The relationship is exaggerated, playful, and far from traditionally believable, and yet it works because there is confidence, humour, and mutual engagement.

• A more recent example can be seen in The White Lotus (Season 3), where Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea forms a ‘yin and yang’ connection with Rick. Their dynamic is not especially romantic or stable, but it remains compelling. She reaches, he withdraws; she pushes, he resists. There is tension, imbalance, and — crucially — movement.

These examples suggest that chemistry does not depend on age, realism, or harmony. Instead, it emerges from something more fundamental: responsiveness, a dynamic to react to and shape. In “Wuthering Heights”, by contrast, that sense of dynamic feels absent. There is no push, no pull, no sense of two people actively creating something together; only mutual indifference.

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Sex Sells, But Does It Create Chemistry?

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that sex sells. Romance, desire, and speculation are powerful hooks across media: advertisements, video games, YouTube thumbnails, books, and films. In film, this often manifests as the suggestion, or fabrication, of off-screen chemistry.

Consider Anyone But You, starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. Public flirtation, social media posts, and rumours created the perception of a real connection. The eventual revelation that this was, at least in part, a deliberate marketing strategy reinforces the point: chemistry need not be invented, but can be amplified, framed, and made legible for audiences.

In contrast, the rumours surrounding Robbie and Elordi felt hollow. There was no public interaction, no subtle cues, no shared moments to support speculation. Without that lived-in connection, marketing alone could not convince us.

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Social Media and Overexposure

The age of social media complicates chemistry further. Actors are no longer distant or mysterious; we see their partners, habits, and personalities constantly. This visibility can flatten performances.

Similarly, in music, marketing often tries to engineer moments designed for virality: songs crafted to fit a 15-second TikTok dance, choreographed moves intended to spread across feeds. The intent is the same as in film promotion: to make audiences feel like they are witnessing something “real”, and not primed for promotion and consumption.

By contrast, some of the most compelling on-screen relationships emerge when that external knowledge is limited. Normal People, starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, creates palpable tension and intimacy partly because the actors’ off-screen lives were largely unknown to audiences. The absence of preconceptions allows the chemistry to exist fully within the narrative.

Heated Rivalry and the Power of Tension

This becomes even clearer when considering relationships built on conflict rather than immediate intimacy. In Heated Rivalry, the central connection develops over time, forged through conflict, restraint, and repeated interaction. The chemistry is compelling because tension accumulates and stakes rise — every interaction builds on the last.

Many marketing strategies attempt to replicate this through trope-based promotion—enemies to lovers, forced proximity, rivals—but without underlying development, these labels become hollow. Heated Rivalry demonstrates that chemistry is a process, requiring friction, conflict, and real stakes.

Marketing, Tropes, and the Spectacle of Romance

The marketing of Wuthering Heights leaned heavily into familiar romantic tropes: friends to lovers, forbidden desire, heightened passion — echoing algorithm-driven trends in online romance literature. But in reducing a complex story to a spectacle of sex and desire, the marketing may have attracted eyes, but it could not generate genuine investment. Without a real dynamic between Robbie and Elordi, the spectacle collapses.

Hugh Grant and the Role of Real Interaction

Hugh Grant has suggested that on-screen chemistry may be declining because actors no longer connect in the same way — that time once spent talking, rehearsing, and building rapport is now replaced by phones and distraction. Chemistry does not require friendship; in some cases, tension or even dislike produces compelling results — Dirty Dancing and The Notebook are prime examples. What matters is the presence of a dynamic to react to, shape, or resist. Indifference, on the other hand, is nearly impossible to perform convincingly.

In fact, using Mamma Mia! as an example again, the relationships between all the characters feel captivating, dynamic, and, most importantly, real. And, we all know how much fun they had on set…

Conclusion: Can Chemistry Be Developed?

So — can chemistry be developed?

Yes, to an extent. Performance, editing, and marketing can enhance, highlight, or frame chemistry. But genuine connection — the kind that draws us in, unsettles us, and convinces us — is harder to manufacture. It requires actors to engage with one another, to react, to resist, to push and pull.

“Wuthering Heights” serves as a case study not because it is uniquely flawed, but because it reveals a broader tension in contemporary media: between authenticity and construction, presence and indifference.

In the end, audiences can sense the difference, and they respond accordingly.

Why do we create art? Why do we consume it? Do we create and consume art for the same reason? Or, perhaps, do we create and consume according to entirely different needs, desires and feelings?

People create art for a whole variety of different reasons. There are the personal exorcists, whose art carries a piece of their soul. Others will write about social observations, collective experiences, and the relationships we find within society. In truth, there are countless reasons why people choose to create art, and those reasons change across disciplines. Sculptors may approach creation very differently from musicians, for instance.

The means of creation, however, has been tainted and distorted by the society we live in.

Capitalism is to blame, as usual, killing creativity with consumerism. This has, unfortunately, accelerated over the past few decades in Western Society. Record Labels, publishers and production companies (etc) increasingly favour the products most likely to turn a profit. It’s all about money, power, and glory (thanks, Lana, for the quote).

Capitalism in Romances

The capitalist juggernauts vanquish the smaller companies, and independent book shops, singers and authors are bought and absorbed. You’ve Got Mail is a perfect example of this, with Kathleen Kelly’s “The Shop around the Corner” being replaced by Fox Books. It’s no coincidence that the film’s ending evokes “The Wizard of Oz” with its vibrance and the accompaniment of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Their romance is planted in a dreamlike land, away from the commerce that once fuelled their animosity.

It is a threshold where the physical world and technological worlds collide, wherein the online fantasy and social reality of one another dissolve into one. This union of identities leads to the happy conclusion between Joe and Kathleen.

Anyway, enough about Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (but if you’d like to hear more, I’d be more than happy to oblige …)

What the smut?!

In the book industry, poorly written, ‘trope-focused’ and smut-filled romances and romantasies are becoming mass-produced. They are churned out faster than ever, favouring well-loved, popular and familiar stories over experimental, unsettling or unique narratives that threaten not to sell.

The capitalist market is transforming artists into robots, and dehuminising their work from soul-babies to detached products. Don’t get me started on how “Wuthering Heights,” directed by Emeral Fennell, was marketed using these same tropes (luckily, I’ve already written about that).

Looking at trends like romantasy, it is clear that one of the main reasons we consume art is for entertainment. I mean, a romantasy pairs arguably the two most escapist genres: romance and fantasy. A love story born from a dreamscape, situated in a literal fantasy world where women can be the most powerful being alive, with the hottest and strongest man imaginable by her side, I mean, why wouldn’t we want to read this?

In the society we find ourselves in, bleak and dreary at its finest, it’s no surprise we want to consume art which is escapist, exciting, and easy to consume.

However, this causes an overstauration of art produced purely for entertainment, often lacking depth or originality. The same narratives are churned out, and the same morally gray male main protagonists appear with increasingly frequency (cough cough, Fennell).

“Un-entertaining” art

More and more, I find myself returning to a phrase I first heard from Simon Pegg in Criterion’s “Closet Picks.” Discussing David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, he says:

Pegg’s comments have been rattling around my brain ever since I saw this. Every time I’m not immediately enamoured with something I’ve watched, read, or listened to, I find myself digging deeper into its purpose. It’s made me question the way I engage with art, and my overall consumption habits.

It forced me to think about all the times I’ve encountered something I didn’t necessarily enjoy, but which still made me feel something.

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Can bad art can be excused for having a ‘deeper meaning’?

For instance, I recently read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, and for me, I did not find this enjoyable. In fact, I felt massively frustrated, annoyed, and angry at the characters and their decisions.

Some elements simply didn’t work for me. My main issue lies with the novel’s insistence on the rarity and significance of true collaborators. Toward the end of the book, Sadie says:

“Lovers are … common” … “Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare” (392)

Still, the book made me think deeply about friendship, collaboration, and creative partnership. My mixed, and often colourful, feelings about the novel occupied my mind for weeks.

For that alone, Zevin deserves credit.

And to be fair, the character work is strong. They feel fully realised — messy, flawed, and often irritating, but unmistakably human. They aren’t dreamlike role models, but people whose flaws shape and complicate their relationships.

Does this mean, then, that bad art can be excused for having a ‘deeper meaning’?

It’s a complicated issue, because the reverse argument also exists — that perhaps “bad” art can be excused for being entertaining, commercially viable, or easily consumed.

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The resurgence of aestheticism?

For instance, in my “Wuthering Heights” essay, I discussed the two perspectives that emerged during the film’s premiere: one arguing that it was unfaithful and even offensive to the original source text, and the other insisting that it is simply an adaptation — one that doesn’t need to be endlessly analysed or imbued with deeper meaning.

Here, we return to the infamous aestheticism movement, which rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. Popularised by artists, such as Oscar Wilde, who famously argued for the idea of “art for art’s sake”. Its purpose is to have no purpose. To exist as art. To be beautiful, and that’s it.

Ironically, Wilde’s work has been endlessly studied (guilty!). After all… are the curtains really just blue?

Despite Wilde’s resistance to interpretation, art is always shaped by the society it is created. Whether intentionally or not, art reflects the world around it. It reacts to social conditions, political climates, and cultural anxieties. Art has also frequently functioned as an ideological tool used to further propaganda and spread messaging.

So perhaps Pegg is right. Perhaps entertainment really is an overrated function of art.

Or perhaps it isn’t.

What do you think? Does all art need a function, other than to entertain? Are romantasies and ‘smut’ narratives redundant, or do they have a place on the bookshelf? Do Pegg’s and Wilde’s words ring true today?

After all my musings, I’m not sure I have a definitive answer. I keep oscillating between these ideas.

Honestly, I think they might both be true at once.

My fable

If you’re one of my eight friends on Goodreads and Fable, you may already know my thoughts on this trilogy. Well, my very immediate, nonsensical and jumbled thoughts, so here, I’m trying to lay them out fully.

Going in, I was intimidated. The hype around this book is intense. The Poppy War is so widely venerated, that I expected to fall in love with it. Especially since I loved Kuang’s Babel, so I trusted her skill, but I wasn’t sure how that brilliance would translate into a fantasy series.

My goodreads

What I didn’t expect was that it wouldn’t feel like fantasy at all.

Because once you look closely – actually, upon thought, you don’t need to – the world barely disguises its inspirations.

Nikan is China. Mugen is Japan. Hesperia is Britain. The massacre of Golyn Niis is clearly the Nanjing Massacre. Military strategy comes straight from The Art of War by Sunzi (the modern Chinese spelling for Sun Tzu). Characters are translated straight from ancient Chinese history like Su Daji and Jiang Ziya.

Even the settings draw heavily from real places such as the Wudang Mountains.

The only truly speculative element is magic.

But even that is grounded in reality. Shamanism, ritual, sacrifice, divine possession — these are not inventions so much as reinterpretations of religious traditions. It’s a bit like the difference between science fiction and fantasy, the former rooted in scientific belief. Rather than being rooted in science, The Poppy War is rooted in religion and spirituality. Rel-fic? Spirit-lit? Hmm, not sure these work.

I digress.

Strip away the supernatural, and what remains is historical fiction.

So why is this shelved as fantasy?

To me, it reads more like historical trauma reframed through magic. Less fantasy, more amplified history.

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The Power of Brutality

Where the series excels is in its refusal to soften war.

The tonal shift in the first book is shocking. What begins as a familiar military-school fantasy becomes something grotesque and deeply uncomfortable. Kuang forces the reader to sit with violence. To see it. To feel it.

There is no heroism here. No romance. No glory.

For readers like me, who don’t come from a background of studying twentieth-century Chinese warfare, this series becomes a brutal introduction. It opens doors. It demands curiosity.

And that’s one of its greatest strengths.

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But Is It Original?

Here’s where my feelings get complicated.

Because the story follows history so closely, the worldbuilding sometimes feels… thin. The parallels are so transparent that the narrative occasionally feels predictable. If you already know the history behind it, I imagine much of the trilogy would lose its tension.

At times, it feels less like invention and more like translation.

And perhaps that’s intentional. Kuang’s work, from Babel to The Poppy War, is obsessed with translation — linguistic, cultural, and historical.

But expecting a fantasy, I found myself wanting more imagination.

Then there’s Rin.

I know she’s widely praised as a morally complex protagonist; a feminist who burns her womb. Yes, this is the discourse I’ve seen about her on TikTok, comparing her to other female fantasy protagonists. She’s often praised for her strength and ambition – which I don’t think is completely mistaken, to be fair. It made me expect Rin to be a morally grey character, wherein I ultimately ‘like’ her through my penchant for morally complex characters.

But for me, she crossed a line from morally grey to morally gone.

By the end of the first book, her actions are horrific. Throughout the second, I struggled to connect with her at all. She swings from brilliant strategist to impulsive and self-destructive, and at times I found her frustratingly incomprehensible.

I grew tired of Altan’s shadow. I grew tired of her lack of foresight and unwavering arrogance — which I guess is her hamartia. It’s hard to care for a character when she’s (mostly) apathetic towards everything.

The third book does recover some of this. Rin’s motivations became clearer in the middle of the narrative. Her choices still disturbed me, but they began to make more sense.

I didn’t love her.

But I did begin to understand her, and in the end — frustrating as it was — it felt like the only logical, tragic outcome.

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Final Thoughts

Overall, I did enjoy this trilogy. I admired its ambition. I respected its refusal to comfort the reader. And it introduced me to a historical context I might never have explored otherwise. And I will be thinking about this a LOT.

However, I didn’t love it. Perhaps part of that is due to my expectations going in to the novel. Perhaps not.

But maybe that’s the point. Kuang’s work isn’t meant to be escapist. It’s meant to confront. To disturb. To unsettle.

And it definitely does.

So I’m curious:

• Do you see The Poppy War as fantasy?

• Or as historical fiction with a mythological lens?

And if I’ve misunderstood any of the historical influences, please correct me! I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts!!

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As the curtain pulled back, the audience was instantly and unwittingly beguiled into a play-world that felt equal parts stage production and fever-dream. I was no longer standing in the O2 Apollo Manchester on a Sunday evening, but was instead pulled into a green world — a space where reality shimmered differently, and the stage became a fever-dream playground of music, costume, and spectacle.

The duo transformed the stage into a living, surreal storybook, where each song became an act and every costume created a new character, adding layers to the narrative. Mica appeared in angel wings, a flowing cape, and — my favourite — a sunflower headpiece, moving seamlessly from one scene to the next. There were no pauses between songs; the set flowed like a continuous story, with her speaking to the crowd layered directly into the music via their True Blue Interlude, blurring the line between performer, narrator, and soundtrack.

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On stage, Mica’s vocals floated above the pulsing synths, airy and layered, while her movements, spastic, whimsical, yet deliberate, animated the performance, guiding the audience through this dreamlike, phantasmagorical world. Behind them, a screen displayed hypnotic visualizers synced with the music, adding a futuristic, otherworldly dimension. The lighting amplified the sensation that the audience was moving through a carefully choreographed hallucination, part theatrical play, part immersive dreamscape.

What makes Magdalena Bay’s live show so captivating is the interplay between spectacle and intimacy. While the production was grand — costumes, projections, lights — the performance never felt distant. High-energy beats collided with ethereal melodies, and the staged chaos of Mica’s movements felt both playful and meticulously orchestrated. It was dizzying, hypnotic, and utterly mesmerizing: a celebration of electropop as both art and theatre.

A Magdalena Bay concert is more than a show; it is an immersive story told through sound, movement, and visual spectacle. A fever-dream as carefully orchestrated as any play.

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Wuthering Heights, what once was a socially rich and complex novel, has been repackaged into a surface-level sex fest, hiding beneath a pretence of radicalism.

Perhaps my words are too strong. But for me, “Wuthering Heights” is a striking departure from its source.

To put it lightly, Emerald Fennell misunderstands Emily Brontë’s fully realised characters, sidelines the novel’s central themes, and simplifies the narrative into “the greatest love story of all time.” As one Letterboxd reviewer put it: this is the worst thing to happen to Brontë, and she died of tuberculosis.1

The film just feels… empty. As though the core of the narrative has been hollowed out and hotboxed with an aesthetic mist of broodiness.

Yet whenever I, or likeminded others voice these criticisms, we’re met with a familiar defence.

Why not form your own opinion? Why not just enjoy it for what it is? Not all art has to be overanalysed.

And I understand the appeal. It is visually intoxicating. It feels daring, contemporary, and emotionally immediate. But feeling bold and being bold are not the same thing.

These two opposing attitudes fascinate me: the so-called book purists and elitists versus the self-proclaimed “cool girl,” whose nonchalant detachment allows her to enjoy the film purely for its aesthetics. Somewhere between these poles lies a wider cultural shift. Increasingly, we are sold highly sexualised spectacles under the guise of provocative social commentary.

To be clear: I am not a prude. I am certainly not advocating a return to conservatism. But films like this, alongside Saltburn, belong to an oeuvre that attempts to outdo itself through shocking, taboo sexual displays. Transgression becomes branding. Eroticism becomes marketing. Shock becomes shorthand for depth.

Classics have always been reinterpreted, but many contemporary adaptations reshape their sources into something more digestible, more attractive, and ultimately more profitable. I’m not opposed to modernisation. In fact, some of the best adaptations are conscious of what they’re doing — Clueless, for example, is playful, self-aware, and intelligent in its translation. The problem arises when a work is watered down into a glossy collection of marketable tropes. Warner Bros. itself posted a teaser for “Wuthering Heights” describing it as “for the friends-to-lovers fans.” The film is being positioned, very deliberately, as a romance.

When asked whether the Valentine’s weekend release was intentional, Margot Robbie enthusiastically agreed, suggesting audiences see it with friends on Galentine’s, cocktail in hand, and then return with a partner the next day.2 The marketing is clear: this is an event romance, something social, aesthetic, and consumable.

At times, the film feels less indebted to Wuthering Heights than to Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice. Invoking Wuthering Heights allows the male lead to be positioned as morally grey — a trait that currently dominates contemporary romance, particularly on BookTok.

Even visually, there are moments that feel uncannily familiar. It is hard not to see echoes of Joe Wright’s aesthetic sensibilities.

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The film’s over-eroticism reduces the novel into a glossy, steamy spectacle. The film presents itself as daring and challenging, but what is it actually doing beyond appealing to mass consumption? Fennell repackages Brontë’s work as aesthetic eroticism, a romantic spectacle that flatters itself as subversive.

And just to note, I am not demonising the romance genre. I think it has an important place in both literature and film. My frustration lies in turning something that was never purely a romance into one, simply because that is what sells.

The most jarring change is Heathcliff. In the novel, he is a socially ostracised and abused outsider, his racial and cultural ambiguity central to his treatment. In this version, he is reimagined as a conventionally attractive white man. Fennell has said that Jacob Elordi personifies the Heathcliff she imagined at fourteen. Fourteen. This confession alone reveals the adaptation’s lens. Heathcliff becomes less a study of oppression and more a brooding fantasy figure: wandering the moors, yearning for Cathy, licking walls. His motivations flatten. His cruelty becomes aesthetic rather than social.

Meanwhile, other casting decisions raise uncomfortable implications. Characters framed as obstacles and problems — Edgar and Nelly — are now people of colour. Some argue that making Heathcliff white avoids villainising a marginalised figure. I would argue the opposite: removing the racial dimension erases the novel’s commentary on exclusion, while redistributing negative roles elsewhere. Brontë’s portrayal of Heathcliff’s mistreatment illustrates how oppression metastasises into callousness. That complexity disappears.

And Isabella. In the novel, she is a victim of emotional, psychological, and implied sexual abuse. Here, she is transformed into a caricature: strange, infantilised, and disturbingly coded as someone who desires degradation. By framing her consent as explicit, the film collapses the distinction between coercion and consent. A far more powerful interpretation might have explored manipulation — how victims are conditioned to misunderstand their own abuse.

As for Cathy, I struggled to see her at all. Instead, I saw the actress, the image, the aesthetic. She feels less like Brontë’s Catherine and more like a self-insert: a stylised object of desire rather than a volatile, destructive force. The result is a central relationship that feels hollow. When Cathy dies, the emotional impact barely registers. Their bond, meant to be metaphysical and consuming, becomes physical and transactional. They meet, they have sex, they part. Soulmates reduced to sneaky links.

Even setting the novel aside, the film feels confused. Its revenge arc lacks urgency, its emotional stakes feel muted, and its characters drift through beautifully shot landscapes without purpose. The narrative gestures toward depth without ever committing to it.

Ultimately, this adaptation reflects the broader cultural moment it inhabits. It is all surface and no substance. All beauty and no weight. A performance of seriousness rather than seriousness itself.

And perhaps that is what unsettles me most.

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2

Robbie, Margot. The Hollywood Reporter.

@hollywoodreporter#MargotRobbie thought #WutheringHeights would be "perfect" for a #ValentinesDay weekend movie release

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Moving away from the dreamy, phantasmagoric textures of My Love Is Cool, Visions of a Life, and Blue Weekend, The Clearing sees Wolf Alice shift toward a more “mature” sound, one rooted in 70s glam rock influences, and a richer, more pronounced use of strings. Ellie Rowsell’s vocals cut cleanly through the instrumentation, particularly on Leaning Against the Wall and Bloom Baby Bloom, where her range feels both commanding and vulnerable.

Lyrically, the album doesn’t abandon the thematic terrain that has long defined the band. Angst, identity, love, and freedom remain at its core, reinforcing the spirit embedded in their very name. The motif of the “girl raised by wolves” lingers, and tracks like The Sofa crystallise this band’s identity — proving that even as the sound evolves, the essence of Wolf Alice remains intact.

Seeing the album performed live in Manchester in late 2025 only strengthened that impression. The Clearing doesn’t stray from their origins so much as it reframes them. Hearing these new tracks sit alongside older material revealed a discography that feels cohesive yet constantly evolving. Ellie commanded the stage with assured presence, yet moments like hers and Theo’s familiar side-to-side sway during Giant Peach (a movement they’ve carried with them since their earliest performances) preserved that sense of intimacy and shared rhythm that first defined them.

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Final thoughts

For me, The Clearing was something of a surprise on first listen. I wasn’t immediately overcome with the same love or obsession I had for Blue Weekend; tracks like Two Girls and Bloom Baby Bloom didn’t initially deliver the same enchanting, hypnotic pull I had come to expect. Instead, the album felt sharper, more abrasive in places — less dreamlike, and more deliberate.

And yet, with time, it has steadily grown on me. The more I revisit their discography — which, lately, has been a daily ritual — the more I find myself returning to The Clearing. What once felt unfamiliar now feels intentional; what seemed harsh now feels assured. It may not enchant in the same way as its predecessor, but it lingers differently, and perhaps more persistently.

My first post on here — and I’m not entirely sure what’s taken me so long. Procrastination, probably. Or the quiet fear that once you start something, you have to mean it.

Why do I feel such a pull towards this space? Towards this output of thought? Why, oh why, do I feel the need to share what lives in my head? Is it the hope of finding like-minded people? Of producing what I myself love to consume? Or something more egotistical — the desire to believe I might be a great thinker and writer, more philosophical than I perhaps pretend to be?

(tiktok: twigs.archive)

Substack feels like permission. It offers the “common” person a place to publish without waiting to be chosen. A space where thoughts — half-formed or fever-dreamed — can exist in the open. An amalgamation of stories, inspirations, prompts, analysis. A community of people who simply want their words to be seen.

Writing has always been something I wished I was good at. Words, after all, are the foundation of our lives. They tell stories and fables; they persuade, connect, command. Words are the output of ourselves. They reflect who we are, what we are, and what we want to be. They reach out from one person to another — intimate acts of speaking and listening, shaping identities and relationships in the process.

As Joan Didion writes:

Her certainty carries a beauty I can only aspire to. The kind of clarity and conviction I hope to grow into as both a writer and a thinker.

For me, writing is almost an exorcism of the self. A release. A way of untangling the noise in my head and making something deliberate out of it. I’ve written often in my journal about the vitality of words, and I’ll return to that in future posts. For now, I’ll spare you the deeper spirals (It is only my first post, after all).

To write freely is a privilege I don’t want to take for granted. There is a certain romance to being a writer — an enchantment I can’t quite resist, even when procrastination and exhaustion try their best to pull me away. Or perhaps I just want to live out my early-2000s rom-com magazine journalist fantasy. Jane; Jenna; Andie — Is that you?

To arrange words in a particular order, to shape how they might move or mould another’s thoughts, still feels unfathomable to me. And yet, here I am — trying, perhaps, to become something I am not. (Plato would have something to say about that.)

So this is me, beginning.

In Viridia, you’ll find music, literature, film, cultural musings, and whatever else happens to grow here. Small worlds. Big feelings. Probably too many thoughts.

If you’ve found your way here, I’m glad you did.