The Dark Tower

Fiance and I saw The Dark Tower yesterday. Apparently a lot of people didn't like it, but I don't really do reviews except MovieBob, and watching his reviews means making time to go look at things that aren't on my RSS feed.

I liked it. I don't seem to need as much to like a movie as a lot of other people. And I find portal fantasy comforting as only a '90s kid can. I also liked that the protagonist, generic as he was, was genre savvy and sensible. He only wandered off on his own once, and ran away when he was told to. Plus he throws something through a portal before walking through it. Smart kid. I also couldn't help noticing the drop-spindle shape of their multiverse, and the fact that reality, all realities, are beset from the outside by demons. I have this ongoing project of connecting all the fantasy novels, although whether it's literary research or something more fanfictiony I don't know yet.
I miss portal fantasy. It seems like lately, explaining things in fantasy is supposed to be lazy, and making that easy on yourself by introducing an outsider is even worse, but that never bothered me. I like young people getting to leave their boring and/or shitty lives and experience magic as a metaphor for having some goddamn autonomy. I like interdimensional travelers who have seen it all. I like people who aren't from earth, or aren't from our earth, trying to navigate it with the help of some middle school kid who's just new enough to personhood himself that he can actually articulate things how things work. I like Earth as being this weird small town of the interdimensional community that no one really leaves or visits. I don't have a point, it just makes me happy. Now I want to reread An Accident of Stars, but I can't, because I have to work.
Oh, actual Thought. The portal fantasy of the '90s was a lot about people reading the fantasy of the 80s and thinking "But what if I could go there?!" And like, there's a tendency to think you need an "everyman" protagonist to send to another world, but you don't, and it would be really cool to see more kinds of...OMG ok I am adding to my list of things that need to exist like, a Portal Fantasy Diversity Scholarship, where people from some frequently traveled fantasy dimension help people from other worlds, including ours, who have been under-represented among the worldwalkers they've seen so far, go over there and maybe go to school there. So like you could have a couple of marginalized kids from earth, plus like, put them in a cohort with people from other worlds who are marginalized, or who aren't but have trouble accessing dimensional travel.