Rasher Report #1: Something New
I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here, but I sure am doing it.
I had a longer piece here about my reasons for starting a newsletter, but what it really boils down to is, I wanted a place to put my writing. The internet is getting more fragmented, people are leaving social media, and nobody reads blogs anymore. People like stuff in their email inboxes, the old-fashioned way, so I'm giving this a shot.
And I want to write more. I feel like I have ideas that fizzle away, projects I never finish, and reviews that nobody sees. I hope that putting myself on a weekly schedule will motivate me to share more of what I'm thinking.
I want to share this with anyone who wants to read it, so all of the issues will be free of charge. Nonetheless, the Ghost platform is built to attract paid subscribers, and I’m not opposed to the idea. If you want to kick in a few dollars a month to show your appreciation and cover the costs of operating this thing, I will be delighted and flattered. I'm still deciding what perks to provide for paid subscribers - maybe the opportunity to request topics. I'll let you know when I figure that out.
Welcome to The Rasher Report. I hope I keep this up for a while. I hope you stick around for a while. Let’s see what happens.
You were promised figure skating
And I give you figure skating! The Japan National Championships always take place during Christmas, while I'm asleep, which means I don't usually get to watch much of them until the following week. Overall, 2022 was one of those trainwreck Nationals, especially on the men's side, where guys who qualified for coveted Grand Prix Final spots did things like place 13th in the short program. But the favorites rose to the top, reinforcing my impression that right now, Uno Shoma and Sakamoto Kaori are the best men's and women's figure skaters in the world right now, respectively. I could not be happier to see Uno sail away with his fifth national title, but today is for appreciating the phenomenon that is Sakamoto Kaori this season.
Sakamoto began competing internationally in 2013 at the junior level and has had great success ever since, but 2022 was the year when she emerged as Japan's brightest figure skating star. Back in February, she upset a widely predicted Russian sweep of the Olympic Games podium by taking bronze - and after a series of scandals and horrifying geopolitical events rightly exiled Russia from international sports, Sakamoto became the Olympic Gold Medalist in many of our hearts. She followed that up with a decisive win at the World Championships in March. Sakamoto has endured some hiccups in the 2022-23 season, most notably a nightmare of a free skate at the Grand Prix Final that dragged her down to fifth place out of six skaters. But she's had some competitive highs, too, such as an exceptional pair of winning performances at Skate America in October and her decisive victory at Nationals last week.
Sakamoto's real emergence, however, has been as a performer on the ice. She's been competing creative programs for most of her career - her 2015-17 free skate to the Color Purple soundtrack was a unique and lovely piece of choreography - but her approach began to shift around 2018 toward programs that make clear statements about Sakamoto's personality and philosophy. She's worked with a number of exceptional choreographers - Shae-Lynne Bourne, Benoît Richaud, David Wilson, Marie-France Dubreuil, Rohene Ward - but every program seems like an expression of Sakamoto's perspective, not the choreographer's. Several of her programs, like her spiky No Roots short program from 2019-20 and the No More Fight Left in Me program that brought her success at 2022 Olympics and Worlds, have raised controversy among fans for being weird and avant garde.
But that's what impresses me about them: she's enthusiastic about pushing the boundaries of what's pretty on the ice. She's also putting forward a consistent message about how feminine strength can and should look, which is especially important for an athlete who has reached her peak in her twenties. Even as a young teenager, Sakamoto looked sturdy, like her training practices involve enough calories and rest to build muscle and prevent injury. It's rare for a figure skater to compete at a high level for almost a decade without taking time off for a major injury, but Sakamoto has never had to withdraw for longer than a competition or two. She's also noted that time off the ice during the COVID-19 pandemic gave her the opportunity to improve her power and stamina - and it shows.
She also seems to have developed her mental health in ways that her current programs reflect. In the past, Sakamoto struggled with consistency, and she commented to the press about not understanding why she made mistakes in competition on elements she never misses in practice. While she hasn't publicly discussed mental health support or changes to her mindset, Sakamoto's free skate this season, set to Sia's "Elastic Heart," portrays a woman fighting to see her resilience as an asset. There's a lovely contrast between her pose at the halfway point of the program, which looks tense and closed, and the open and free pose in which she ends the program. This year, Sakamoto is stating who she is with confidence, and that makes her the kind of star that women's figure skating needs.
The Fifth Annual Germain-Rasher New Year’s Eve TV Forcening
Every year, my wife and I spend New Year’s Eve together on the couch, watching TV. Specifically, we take turns making each other watch TV shows that we wouldn’t make each other watch any other day of the year. This is a major event in the Germain-Rasher household, planned throughout the year, often with taunting and hinting about the horrors to be revealed. Aside from the types of shows we have in common – sci-fi, superheroes, The Good Place - Ami’s TV taste runs toward anime, Western animation, and tokusatsu. I, on the other hand, watch a lot of prestige dramas, crime and legal procedurals, and reality competitions. We’ve been doing this for five years, and neither of us has run out of ideas, so it’s a tradition now. In the past, I’ve recapped the Forcening (TM Extra Hot Great) on Facebook and Discord, and one of the great things about this newsletter is that I can share it with anyone who cares to read it.
Round 1: Sarah’s pick
Defiance – “Ostinato in White”
I won this year’s coin flip (actually, Ami just told me I could go first so she could get first dibs on the charcuterie board while I fussed with the HDMI cable) and chose one of the best episodes of this middle-of-the-road SYFY Channel drama about humans and alien refugees trying to live together in post-disaster St. Louis. Ami was quick to pinpoint why I’m so fond of it: it has a Firefly-meets-Deep Space Nine milieu, melding two of my favorite shows of all time into something that is decidedly less good. Still, Ami found it pleasant enough and said it was the kind of thing we’d watch together if it were airing now.
Round 2: Ami’s pick
Tokusatsu Gagaga – “Tokusatsu Girl”
Every year, Ami makes me watch a tokusatsu show about a team of color-coded heroes battling monsters in a quarry, and by now, I’ve stopped begging for amnesty and accepted that I married a wonderful person who enjoys some things I just don’t get. But this isn’t tokusatsu per se; it’s a sweet drama about young women who are tokusatsu fans, with a bit of an Ally McBeal vibe. The lead actress, former figure skater Koshiba Fuka, is a bundle of charisma, and I had a surprisingly nice time with this.
Round 3: Sarah’s pick
The Good Fight – “The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality”
At its high points, I think The Good Fight was the best show on TV, and I was sad to say goodbye to it as it wrapped up its last season in 2022. Of course, that means this was the show Ami disliked the most out of everything I made her watch this year. I chose this episode because it’s one of the few that stands alone enough to work as an introduction to the series, and because I was curious to see how it would play now that we’re a couple of years removed from the chaos of Trump’s presidency. I still think it’s a sharp thought exercise about liberal complacency, but Ami disagrees. She thought the metaphor was muddled, and the story leaned too hard on the #MeToo movement, which she is right to point out has had less cultural staying power than we thought it would in 2020.
Round 4: Ami’s pick
The Legend of Vox Machina – “The Terror of Tal’Dorei,” parts 1 and 2
Ami thought I’d like this series – an animated offshoot of the Critical Role universe – enough that I might want to watch the whole thing this year. Instead, it solidified the fact that “other people playing Dungeons & Dragons” is not a genre that appeals to me. Aside from some tired gay stereotypes, it’s all done well enough, but I’d rather play D&D than watch it. I’m glad this exists for the people who will enjoy it.
Round 5: Sarah’s pick
Weeds – “Pittsburgh” and “Doing the Backstroke”
This show, about a suburban mom who becomes the local cannabis dealer after her husband’s death, went so precipitously downhill in its last couple of seasons that I remember it being a just okay thing that I loved anyway. But watching the extraordinary season 2 finale and season 3 opener, which are bridged by one of the wildest cliffhangers in TV history, reminded that this show was terrific for its first few seasons. Ami was super into this, far more than I expected her to be, and is nudging me toward a rewatch. She didn’t pinpoint what drew her in, just that it was funny and paced well, and that Nancy Botwin has big Hawkeye Pierce energy.
Round 6: Ami’s pick
High School Heroes – “Pink’s Determination. Goodbye, For Now.”
2022 will go down as the year when Ami found tokusatsu I would enjoy. There’s more attention to script and character on this show than on most Japanese preteen action series, but what got me was one of the sweetest trans coming out stories I’ve seen on TV. For Ami, who is exactly the kind of trans girl who has always wanted to find out she was destined to become the Pink Ranger, this is an absolute gift. I don’t need to see more of the show, but I admire what it’s doing.
Round 7: Sarah’s pick
Barry – “Chapter Seven: Loud, Fast, and Keep Going” and “Chapter Eight: Know Your Truth”
Ami has intermittently wandered in while I’ve binged this fabulous HBO dramedy about a hit man who just wants to act, but she had never actually watched it. After the first episode we watched together – the penultimate episode of the first season – she said it was too heavy for her, although she admired the acting and direction. The season finale is lighter, or at least more cheerfully brutal, and she was more into it after that. She says I didn’t need to tell her that NoHo Hank is my favorite character, because I have a type.
Round 8: Ami’s pick
Spy x Family – “Operation Strix” and “Secure a Wife”
My line on anime is always, I enjoy anime when it’s the kind of thing I would like regardless of whether it was anime. Spy x Family is a great example of that, a bonkers action comedy about a spy, an assassin, and a child telepath who become a family in order to disguise their respective secret identities, including from each other. It runs on pure chaotic energy, and there’s a real humanity to the characters and their found family relationship. I’m not rushing to watch the rest, but I’d happily do so if Ami wants me to.
Round 9: Sarah’s pick
White Collar – “Pilot”
I hadn’t planned to watch this show this year, but Spy x Family reminded me of it. As I remembered, it’s no great work of television, but it’s an entertaining hour as long as you accept that it bears no resemblance to real-world art forgery or law enforcement. Ami responded to it as she usually does to anodyne procedural dramas, with a “this is fine” shrug. Nonetheless, she agrees that there is no heterosexual explanation for anything that occurs on this show, despite its best efforts to butch up Matt Bomer.
Round 10: Ami’s pick
Ghost Stories – “The Bloody Sports Festival – Datto!!”
Ami was getting tired by this point (she actually fell asleep at about 10:45, and I had to wake her at midnight for a kiss, after which she promptly rolled over and resumed unconsciousness). So she decided to wrap up this year’s Forcening with one of the greatest hits from a previous year. As the story goes, this was a much-hyped high school horror anthology from the turn of the Millennium that flopped hard, and the dubbing team was basically told to do whatever they wanted because it wasn’t going to make any money. The result is a madcap What’s Up, Tiger Lily meets MST3K juggernaut of off-color jokes, some of which are over the line, but most of which are riotously funny. I didn’t love this episode as much as others I’ve seen, but it’s still the best kind of ridiculous.
A few quick things
Song of the week: "Easy on Your Own" by Alvvays, which everyone seems to agree put out one of the best albums of 2022.
And a cat photo!
Thanks for reading! See you next Tuesday!