The Introverted Intonations Of An Anxious Act (Bocchi The Rock)

But the right words never come

It all comes out silly-dumb

And all the things I need to say

And all the big words seem to stay

On the inside

On the inside

Hi, welcome to 2025! I'm Frezno Inferno, and I am an incredibly anxious person and an introvert.

This is important information to know up front before I get into analyzing this here Japanese cartoon. In a lot of ways, this post is an opening up of my very soul for you all to read, and more so than usual. I have to do it in order to properly convey just what it is about the show that resonates with me. I have also chosen to attempt to add a little brevity to this writeup and just do it all in one reasonable shot, rather than a 10,000 word affair where I go over everything that happened in it. In the first place, the structure of the show doesn't really allow for that. More than that, opening myself up to that degree for that length would destroy me. Let's not do that. Let's instead open up about that anxious introversion, what I deal with, and define myself a little before we truly begin. I have to transmute myself into a fucking tuning fork so that you can hear how I and the show resonate. Weird metaphor, I know, but let us commence.

Frezno's Games Of The 2024 Thing!

Well, here we are once again, in the twilight hours of 2024. It's been a wild year for me here on the blog. Lots of comics, a few big projects, and just great experiences all around. Despite talking more about shows and comics this year, do remember that this blog started as a video game one. So, as we always do at the end of the year, let's pay tribute to that. I didn't play a fuckton of video games this year, but the ones I did definitely left an impression on me. We're doing the structure just a little differently, as I have categories with multiple games in them. I'm excited, and I hope you're excited, so let's dive right into it with the first one.

Frezno's Comics Challenge: The Straight Story Six Part 6 (20th Century Men)

Well, here we are. Once we get this one in the bag, I will have spent the calendar year of 2024 having talked about these. A whole year of being a comics critic. We're not quite done, as I've said, but let's straddle the line and ride out 2024 before worrying about those last ones. We've got a real doozy of a book here, which Sean referred to as "the angry one". That's not wrong, of course. 20th Century Men, by Deniz Camp and S. Morian, is a furious fusion of ink and words. It is a totemic cry which resonates across generations, borders, and everywhere else in time, space, and emotion. We have made much here of the Dark Heart Of America, and it is present in this book. There's a power-hungry president doing terrible things to maintain his seat of power and American superiority, and he's metaphorically in bed with war profiteers and big corporations who make money off of human suffering. The book goes far beyond that, though. This is a book about war. not America, and the dark heart does not just beat in America. It is a global thing, and I can use the power of my words to lead you down a path to see that quite easily. Watch.

New Doctor Who First Impressions: 2024 Christmas Special (Joy To The World)

Doctor Who totally knows what's in Marsellus
Wallace's briefcase.

You know, I straight up forgot I had to do this. Seriously, I was awaiting Christmas and all that, and knew that there was a special and I watched it, but it was not until laying in bed this morning that I was like "Oh fuck me, I write about new Doctor Who, don't I?". So here I am, in a basement hundreds of miles from home, banging this one out on a laptop. Funny, I did much the same for Empire Of Death but it was upstairs and it was hot out. Now it's downstairs and cool, so let's discuss Joy To The World. It's fine. Yeah, it's a perfectly adequate holiday offering from our old pal Steven Moffat. It is not terrible, but neither is it the best Christmas special he's ever written. I still have nice things to say about it, so let us do that now, as we so often do.

Frezno's Comics Challenge: December 2024 (Danger Street)

 I must admit that there was a certain sense of trepidation when I realized exactly what this comic was. As we wind down near the end of the Comics Challenge (it should finish in January, unless Sean decides to alter the deal and make me pray it not be altered further) I reflect a little on how far I've come. There have been many stories and many ways to see those stories, and now armed with those tools I am unleashed once more upon... a Big Two Superhero Comic. There was a general sense of "oh no" considering how my brush with a DC superhero comic this summer went. Brimming with surface-level diversity but far more concerned with getting drunk off its ass on Lore and giving fascists a hug and saying that violence is not the way, it gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to the Chibnall era. Thankfully, Tom King's Danger Street is not that. Despite being a superhero book, Danger Street has quite a lot going on under the hood. It's too much to go into all at once, but I've found that leads to the type of broad strokes brevity which leads to my best writing. As such, let's plow on in.

Frezno's Comics Challenge: The Straight Story Six Part 5 (Material)

Welcome back, once again, to the Comics Challenge. We are just a little bit late because I spent the last days of November on a weekend trip, and I did not get to do this before leaving because I was focused on finishing Non-Specific November Writing Month. I did indeed hit my word quota, and I still need to finish the story, but with 50k in the bag I can let that rest for one more day and get back to my comic book obligations... and fuck me, what a comic book we have here. Material Volume 1 (there sadly do not appear to be subsequent volumes) is a tight and poly-authored little thing that nevertheless contains lots and lots of depth. I'll go as deep as I can, but I only need scratch the surface long enough to wring some coherent words and analysis out of the book. Which I'm good at doing, and will do so now. There has been a running theme throughout the TV shows I've covered on the blog between 2022 and 2024, a concept which I coined a phrase for: The Dark Heart Of America. From the ugly historical microcosms of Quantum Leap, to the systemic rot lurking in the id of small-town America in Twin Peaks, to the battle against crime and the darkening of one's soul in Miami Vice, it's been there. Material is a comic about the dark heart of America, but the way in which it's told and the heady concepts it plays with are of definite interest.

Frezno's Comics Challenge: November 2024 (The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion)

(TW: Anti-semitism, the recent election.)

Sometimes, like as we saw with From Hell, comics can be a form of magic. At times it can create something wonderful and resonant with that power, but at other times there are some really dark synergies at play. Case in point, this book. It's not even the fault of the book, as it's a very important and powerful text that makes the world better for existing. No, it's just the timing of things. My esteemed comics critic and guide on this journey, Sean Dillon, selected this one for the month of November. They could have given it to me in March, or in May, or in any of the other months, but he picked this one for November. They informed me of this selection on October the 19th. Two and a half weeks later, in the United States Of America, the world plunged backwards into hell once again. We will deal with the horrific synchronicities at play in recent world events in a bit, but first as always we must define the book and its author.