octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Standalone story which is entertaining enough, despite the premise. Basically it's Thor and his dragon friend acting out their daddy issues. Like the women of the Faroe Islands, I don't much care. (I suspect they ran away to the Faroe Islands just so they wouldn't have to listen to any more men complain about how they don't get on with their fathers, and who can blame them.) Had a worthwhile ending, though - I'll say this for comics, they don't give you a lot of space to slump around with excuses and apologia. You do a bad thing, your arse gets a funeral pyre and done with it. Perhaps we should find a way for Thor to cross universes and do the same for Kylo Ren...

I rated and reviewed the individual comics collected in this edition separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating's 3 stars because that's the average of the separate issues. Overall, I found it likeable enough but not on the same level as The God Butcher. Part of that's down to tone and structure - which is both less even and less intricate this time round - but most of it's down to the villain of the piece. Gorr from Butcher was very strong initially and became less so over time due to his boring motivation. In The Accursed, however, it's the turn of the dark elf Malekith to act as antagonist. I'm new to reading these comics, and I get the impression that he's a returning character - fair enough, but I can only judge on what's happening here. For most of the collected issues he's not very interesting to me, certainly much less so than Gorr, but in #17 (the best of the bunch) he captures my attention, clearly having out-thought the good guys which I find so much more compelling than all the previous bloody slaughter.

Fun, but rather slight.

Caveat: I got a copy of this book free from the publishers because I'm reviewing it for Strange Horizons. The full review will be appearing there soon, so this is only a few short comments for my own record. The gist of which is: I love this book, it's outstanding. I tend to like post-apocalyptic narratives anyway, but if there's a flaw to that particular sub-genre it's that it often wallows in melodrama. My preferred explorations of post-apocalyptic stories tend to be the quiet ones - the ones that have something to say and who say it with restraint. And that's what Sweet Fruit, Sour Land does - told from the point of view of two protagonists, it's an allegory of missing things, of fruit and absence and what it means to be alien in a world that has no place for history any more. And within all this dislocation, resistance is framed as the idea of making connections, of building relationships instead of tearing them down, and it's lovely and horrifying and fragile and so simply told that all the work going on underneath to build this story barely registers.

So it looks as if this is the new mini-series in the God of Thunder run, and it's got an environmentalist bent. Basically, the villain of the piece is an evil corporate-type running the Earth to doom for profit, and he is everything you expect such a character to be. Avenger Thor is not amused. I mean, I sympathise heavily with the narrative here, but I'm far more interested in the second (and clearly related) storyline, in which Old Thor is grieving over the dustbowl apocalypse that is the Earth of his own time, his younger self having clearly failed to save it. (It looks as if Young Thor is nowhere to be found, which, good - he's the least interesting of the three by a mile.) But let's face it: we all know how this story's going to end.

It's funny how most of my ratings for this series of comics are reliant on what I think of the villain. It's their efficacy that drives the story, often enough, and if I can't warm to them it's harder for me to warm to the story they're driving. (By "warm to", I don't mean like or admire; I mean get interested in.) And I can see the reasoning here: by their very nature, comics are so brief that they're reliant on metaphor to give layers of meaning to their stories, so it's understandable that Agger is made literally monstrous here. But it's not literal monstrosity that's the cause of our environmental problems, it's simple small-minded selfishness, and I'm not sure that dressing that up as something else makes it any more compelling. If anything, it simplifies and removes blame from the vast complicit majority. Fixing that problem is too complex to explore in comics, perhaps, so we get the metaphor. And it doesn't quite work for me, which means that while I'm enjoying this storyline, I'm enjoying it as I enjoy popcorn: as something fun but slight. Still, popcorn has its place...

Okay, this is just silly. I'm not sure which is worse - on the one hand we have Old Thor getting punched through the Earth and into the moon, shattering it to pieces. On the other, the modern-day Thor who, after many issues where it's made plain he has absolutely no compunction in slaughtering various intelligent creatures, is stopped by a summons from simply killing a man who is not only literally destroying the planet, but is deliberately killing the town and inhabitants that Thor has come to love.

The story is stupid. The villain is stupid. I don't care how "threatening" this story makes him, he's a walking evil stereotype. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How The God Butcher has fallen to this mess is frankly incredible.

I just knew that bloody necrosword wasn't going to be left to rot. Nothing with a name that daft was ever going to be allowed to be buried. Though for all the focus on weaponry, Avenger Thor's sudden and uncharacteristic reluctance to use his is still a massive problem for me here. In choosing not to use it, the text seems to be arguing that people should be beholden to a visibly corrupt system. The lazily-sketched villain at the centre of the piece has bought off all the laws to enable him to ruin the environment, and this is apparently valid as everyone around him - including the superhero - treats those corrupt laws as though they are to be respected... knowing as they do how very corrupt they actually are.

It beggars belief. Stories require suspension of disbelief, yes, but there's a limit to what I'll swallow in the name of credulity.

There's such a lot to like about this series. The zombies are genuinely creepy, but the world that springs up around them is potentially even scarier. There's a fantastic example in this book about a religious group that considers becoming infected as the path to immortality, and ritually infects their kids. There's also their tendency to remove the teeth and lower jaws of zombies and treat these essentially neutered creatures like pets afterwards, walking them on leashes and everything. (The image of those jawless zombies is absolutely incredible.) I'd love to rate this 4 stars, but as with the first volume, Ryan's insistence on shoe-horning in yet another sodding love triangle is undercutting all that lovely horror. I cannot tell you how little I care - her romantic subplots are consistently the weakest, most repetitive part of this universe yet she can't seem to resist undermining her heroines by turning them into indecisive weepy messes over boys. I really wish she would resist. The books would be a lot stronger for it.

This is much better. After two absolutely dire issues, this story is hauled back on track by main force. Mostly because it stops trying to make the most gratuitously stereotypical villain since ever the centre of the story and refocuses on Thor's relationship with Midgard, how its fate affects him and what he'll give up for it. Basically, it's stopped trying to be intellectually barren and started going for emotion instead of badly-thought out plot. What a relief!

You know, I thought that because issue #23 was such an improvement on the ones immediately before it that this story was headed on an upward trajectory, but alas. It's dropped right back down to moronic again. The bits with Thor were good, but the villain here has "Idiot Plot" written all over his forehead. He wins in part because the townsfolk around him have inexplicably lost all memory and good sense - perhaps there's a forcefield of vacuity around him, because several issues ago he was destroying their town and mocking them in their places of business, offering a side of chips for everyone who'd lost their job. And suddenly the dire environmental consequences that he was gleefully causing, that the town knew he was gleefully causing, have destroyed that town and all they can think is "You're clearly the good guy!"

Idiot plot, idiot plot. Roz, you've only just started to get a personality and even I can see you're too good for this.