Author Archives: Bobduh

Andor – Episode 2

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I thought we’d take a quick jaunt to a galaxy far, far away, as we check back in on the harried Cassian and his adventures in Andor. Our first episode offered an anxious pressure cooker of a premiere, with Cassian’s unintentional killing of two empire sentries instigating a pan-galactic manhunt at the hands of one overzealous deputy inspector. Meanwhile, Cassian himself is basically cashing in all favors, his pursuit of his long-lost sister temporarily yielding to the necessity of surviving the next forty-eight hours.

It was a gripping, grounded premiere on the whole, articulating the lived experience of the empire for those huddling below, with no great destiny or magical powers likely to save them. And Cassian himself embodies that refreshing realism; he is not seeking to change the world, he is only pursuing his sister, hoping to carve out some fragment of peace and normalcy under the omnipresent but frequently indifferent gaze of their oppressive overlords. Cassian isn’t a “chosen one,” he’s just determined and unlucky, one of the countless nobodies that fate has thrust into a position to do some meaningful, lasting good in the world. We are not naturally destined to kick fascism’s teeth in, but when that jaw is presented, it is our collective duty to kick with all our might. Let’s see how Cassian fares!

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Summer 2025 – Week 12 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has unsurprisingly been pretty well dominated by my continuing adventures in Silksong, which has been kicking my ass with a regularity I haven’t experienced since I first picked up Demon’s Souls. I do think there are perhaps some sequences that are a touch over-tuned, but on the whole I’m appreciating how its challenges force me to genuinely master its combat system, and hoping to beat the thing before any bosses ahead of me get patched into politeness. Meanwhile, my housemate spent the last two weeks binging the entirety of Black Clover, which actually surprised me with its sturdiness of form and likable cast – it’s not a genuinely great shonen, but it’s certainly much better than the JJK/Demon Slayer generation. With that complete, we’re definitely on the hunt for more background anime – but in the meantime, let’s burn down the week in films!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 9

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re returning to Vox Machina in a moment of absolute catastrophe, which seems at this point to be the default state of our luckless party. Percival has straight-up died, which I must confess I never saw coming. Character death is the most extreme dramatic tool in the entire DnD kit, and as I’ve said in the past, more often tends to be narratively destructive than useful. Sure, you can always roll a new character, but that character won’t have the same connection to the campaign as your deceased hero, and premature character death can leave someone’s personal arc awkwardly unfulfilled. These issues can be mitigated through effective DM-player discussion (or ignored, if you’re just a bunch of interchangeable murder hobos), but nonetheless make character death a naturally fraught, generally discouraged possibility.

Beyond that, the team have also at last gathered their allies and sprung their trap on Thordak, only to learn that his trap involved manipulating their trap, thanks to that dastardly double agent Raishan. As such, their hard-won allies are now cooking in dragonfire while they assess a newly sealed secret entrance, having gambled their hopes on a dragon’s loyalty. It’s a fairly sticky situation!

As for my own DnD adventures, we went through a bit of a hibernation period over the end of the year, but that left me plenty of time to construct my next major questline. Having mostly written straightforward adventures that are pretty close to linear roller coasters, I decided to push myself to write something more open-ended, which resulted in the creation of a frontier town packed with four different intersecting subquests, culminating in a Seven Samurai-style town defense bringing all those subquests’ characters back into play. As a storytelling perfectionist who overwrites everything, I fear I may have simply created a different kind of linear narrative with lots of linking steps, but I’m doing my best to facilitate more unscripted, emergent drama, and I’m eager to see how this experiment plays out. Anyway, enough about me – let’s get back to the dragon fight!

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The Fire Hunter – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to the ominous, intriguing world of The Fire Hunter, a world where Prometheus’ gift has turned against us, and even proximity to an open flame will turn human beings into ashes. Stranded within isolated villages, the last embers of humanity eke out a desperate existence, each community an essential link in a chain bound by forest-traversing trains. And now even that existence seems threatened, as greater and more terrible Fire Fiends challenge the few vessels left to humanity, and curses spread through the cowering villagers.

And of course, all that’s only the trouble faced by one of our two protagonists; over on Koushi’s side, we’ve also learned that the current governmental order is on the brink of collapse, that violent separatists are preparing for a major attack, and that anyone who’s in the know is already stockpiling weapons for the coming chaos. The Fire Hunter has constructed a world as evocative as it is fragile, and I am profoundly curious as to how Touko will find her place within it (or even survive the next five minutes, for that matter). Let’s get to it!

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Yuri is My Job! – Episode 12

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we return once more to Cafe Liebe, with Blume elections settled and Schwesterns firmly solidified. It’s been a bumpy road to this point, as the navigation of personas inherent in our themed cafe has forced basically all of our “students” to reckon with the performances they already adopt in their own lives. Through the ornate rituals of Cafe Liebe, they have found new ways to express their own feelings, whether through embracing its time-honored artifice or realizing how their true intentions stray from its formula.

Cafe Liebe encourages intimacy up to a specific predetermined threshold; there is no love within its walls, only a performance of longing calibrated to the expectations of the crowd. And while you could rightfully argue that media of liberation becoming its own convention is a betrayal of those seeking genuine free expression, it is equally clear that these precise restrictions allowed characters like Kanoko and Mitsuki to feel safe within its walls, cushioned within a world of limits and language they could fully understand. Just like the formative dramas it is based on, Cafe Liebe is a sanctuary of adolescence, a cushioned world where they can play-act the feelings that frighten them, and thereby gain the confidence to embrace their true selves. Let’s see how their journey continues as we return to Yuri is My Job!

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Summer 2025 – Week 11 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has been entirely consumed by Silksong, and friends, the Silksong is good. Hollow Knight’s sequel picks up close to where the original left off in terms of platforming and combat complexity, assuming swift mastery and rewarding those who adapt to Hornet’s powers with one of the most precise, satisfying, and fundamentally elegant move sets in the genre. Every boss fight here is hard won, and as a result they each require adapting and evolving, ensuring you gain the skills to challenge ever greater foes. And of course, Team Cherry’s storytelling and artistry are as compelling as ever, with Silksong offering a sprawling, beautiful world full of endearing characters and forbidding mysteries.

It feels preposterous that a game carrying such lofty expectations could actually surpass them, but that’s where I’m currently at: bound by my consummate professionalism to write this article, longing to return to Silksong and divine the secrets of its imposing citadel. If you’ve no Hollow Knight experience, I’d strongly suggest playing that one before engaging with Silksong’s terrors – not only is Hollow Knight necessary preparation for the sequel, it’s also just a perfect game in its own right. But for now, let’s burn down the week in film!

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Monogatari Off/Monster Season – Episode 6.5

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re returning back to Monogatari’s wandering supplementary stories, as Nadeko’s adventures in identity-forming give way to some kind of sprawling Shinobu saga. As a pair, the two arcs seem likely to illustrate the far poles of Monogatari’s fables. Though it involved a great number of magical doppelgangers, Nadeko’s story was ultimately all about her personal psychology, grappling with the fundamental question of how our evolving senses of self square with the ostensibly stable trajectory of a specific life goal. By embracing the legitimacy and lingering truth of her old personas, Nadeko committed herself to moving forward without rejecting the past, finding personal insight and even community in her past selves.

In contrast, Shinobu’s stories are often Monogatari’s most fanciful, leaning into alternate realities, supernatural threats, and generally external conflict in all its manifestations. It seems appropriate then that we are opening with what is billed as “A Cruel Fairy Tale,” the latest of Monogatari’s frequent story-in-story digressions, complete with its own studio, adaptation team, and presumably novel aesthetic. If there’s one thing Isin loves more than stories about people, it’s stories about stories. Let’s get to it!

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Blue Reflection Ray – Episode 11

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today is certain to be a moment of reckoning, as we return to Blue Reflection Ray with Mio’s promised reprieve just now coming to its end. Having vowed to rewrite the past and thus provide her doomed world with a future, Mio is prepared to do whatever it takes to protect her sister Hiori. Meanwhile, Shino waits hungrily in the shadows, plotting to turn that same sister into the despairing fuel for her ambitions, with Mio’s demise likely serving as the catalyst.

It’s all a satisfying muddle of desperate hopes and brewing betrayals, lent some welcome emotional weight through the clear merit of Mio’s challenge to the Blue Reflectors. “Embrace your trauma in order to overcome it” is not a universally applicable solution, particularly for someone like Nina, who has not only suffered more acutely than any of our heroic leads, but who also lacks the support network that cushioned characters like Miyako through their recovery. And beyond this, for all we’ve learned about the reflectors, they still appear to be appendages of a system we do not understand, designed for purposes that remain wholly unclear. Thus our heroes enter the day of reckoning with no plan, no coherent philosophy, and no understanding of their own purpose. Let’s get to it!

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Shoushimin Series – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to Shoushimin Series, as our two mysterious youngsters attempt to crack the mystery of Osanai’s stolen bike. Having tracked Sakagami to a driving school on the outskirts of town, Jogoro feels certain the case can be solved with only a few crucial leaps in logic. Of course, accomplishing such a feat would require returning to his old self, and abandoning the pursuit of normalcy that has defined his bond with Osanai.

That in turn brings us to my own subject of fascination: the sharp-edged true selves underlying our leads’ humble, mild-mannered facades. Jogoro’s explosion at Kengo offered our expected and extremely welcome articulation of his anxieties, as he reflected bitterly on how his curiosity and intelligence had only isolated him from his peers, who disliked being examined and “solved” like experimental subjects. And Osanai seems similarly uncomfortable with the ambiguous, ephemeral “human element,” seeing in the impositions of her peers an unresolvable equation, a debt that can only be cleared through retribution.

Both of them are too pure and intense for the thoughtless niceties of high school; both of them have clearly seen in the eyes of their peers a recognition of the remorseless scientific instruments they see in themselves, and have retreated from this negative mutual understanding towards the fuzzy, frictionless malaise of self-conscious normalcy. But the masks slip with their every step forward, and with even Kengo now demanding Jogoro embrace his asshole self, their maintenance of this charade seems at its end. While Hyouka championed sincerity and proud self-expression, Shoushimin Series asks “what if our sincere, earnest self is a creature the world would hate?” Let’s see how they fare!

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Summer 2025 – Week 10 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am lamenting the death of the summer, and prepping for another eight month New England winter here in the frigid, unforgiving northern reaches. But hey, at least we’ve got Silksong coming on Thursday, which I imagine will be consuming my life altogether for the ensuing weeks. I doubt you need my recommendation, but Hollow Knight really is that good – by far the best Metroidvania game I’ve played, with an inventive world that constantly rewards exploration, delightful art design, and an incredibly responsive, tightly tuned combat system. In contrast with 3D Souls-likes’ increasing reliance on pure reaction time, Hollow Knight consistently rewards spacing, forethought, and genuine mastery; it’s basically the perfect marriage of platforming and Castlevania (or even Smash Bros) combat. You can tell I’m already salivating, but I’ll try to contain myself for the moment, as we burn through another week in films!

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