2026, Q2 - Finishing the Scarlet Witch Omnibus

The second season of Apothecary Diaries (Toho Animation, 2025) was everything I could have wanted from a second season. It had higher stakes and it seemed like a standalone arc at the beginning, before tying back interestingly into the first season. It also introduced (kinda) one of my favorite characters of the show, and the climax was very interesting the whole way through. And this is while I actually had a difficult time watching serialized media, due to external circumstances. I already had high expectations of it, which is why I picked that season of anime to watch from last season, and they were more or less met. I'd be very satisfied if this were the end of the story, but if it's not, I'm certainly happy to watch a third.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination is a post-humous anthology of the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. I found a pretty edition of it at an airport in Warsaw, and since I didn't have anything by Poe in my bookshelf yet, I decided it was worth the few Euro the price converted to. I had read some of the stories before, and had a vivid memory of them, I assume from another anthology I read during my library days. I don't quite like Poe's writing style, because it feels a smidge too expository to me, but as an early mystery writer, I suppose that's not too much of a dealbreaker. Often, the concepts he writes about are interesting to me, and they have become staples of the gothic horror genre for a reason. The Dupin Stories, I suppose, come to mind first and foremost, as they seem most apparently a precursor to the Holmes-alikes of the literature world. The plot in these stories has mostly already happened, because the plot consists wholly of the mystery to be solved. Dupin spends most of the story walking step by step through the mystery, that's already solved in his mind. It's, in a way, the conceptual opposite of modern detective stories in which the process of solving the mystery is often highly dynamic, but key information is witheld. Between the two, I, perhaps spuriously, somewhat prefer the latter, even if it defeats the point of a mystery story entirely, simply because it still has a hope of entertaining. None of this is the fault of Poe. The sensibilities of the time might have rendered this static presentation more entertaining than it is to today's audiences, which have internalized story structures, archetypes and plot staples to the point where they can tell when any one of them is overly present, or entirely absent. It just renders his stories as an appreciation of the old masters, rather than an entertaining read for its own sake.

Wonka (2025) is a movie I feel conflicted about. I like movie musicals as a concept, as evidenced by the fact that I like musicals as a whole and everybody benefits from wirework that's not several meters in the air. Additionally, I didn't grow up with any nostalgia for the original Gene Wilder movie, nor do I harbor any special fondness for the Roald Dahl story, if only for the fact that I never really found his stories all that charming. Still, this iteration doesn't quite sit right with me. I became very aware of the trappings of the movie musical around the time La La Land came out, which I still love to this day, but it was also accompanied by The Greatest Showman which I suppose I feel similarly conflicted about. The latter I think is an apt comparison, because this newest Wonka iteration is at least slightly afflicted with the same weaknesses. I can ignore a weak plot if the music is good, and while the songs are nice enough, and at least more fitting in tone than the ones that featured in the vast majority of The Greatest Showman, I feel like there is a clash between the compository style of the original, music, which features in key moments, and the new additions. In that way it resembles slightly the Mary Poppins sequal that was swiftly forgotten upon release. The technical side of the music is executed fine enough, though the pitch correction was very present in some scenes, which is a shame, since as far as I can tell, all actors on screen are decent singers. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they shot the scene with audio and maybe did rounds of ADR afterward, though it might have been easier to perform the dances on top of recording or a click track. As far as movie musicals go nowadays, it sits squarely in the middle of the lineup, I feel. Not a Tom Hooper monstrosity, not something that I absolutely needed to see.

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean (2017) by Gerald Horne tricked me somewhat with its cover. It felt so thoroughly like it belonged in the 90s that I was a little surprised to find it was so relatively recent. The book presents, essentially, a play by play of the relationship between the European settler-colonialism and the development and enshrinement of slavery as a pervasive institution. It covers the beginnings of slavery, rather than the end, which, now that I've read the book, I realize, is heavily abbreviated in regular education, even outside the US. It's slightly off-putting how much the legal insititution of slavery was a collaborative effort, even as the different European naval powers still waged wars against one another. It wasn't a very engaging read to me, but I think it was still a good use of my time to have read it, as I wasn't aware of the details of the early beginning of the category of "whiteness".

Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 2 made a lot more sense to me as a compilation than the first one did. I suspect that might be because the "secondary" character meant more to me immediately than Darcy did in the first volume, since she seemed like part of the setting initially and I wasn't so sure about how that was meant to function. That doesn't mean I really knew the character in question, it just registered more immediately. I had pretty large break reading comics in between reading this and the previous volume and while getting back into it was easy enough. I did find myself having trouble with some of the formatting of the pages, but that might have been the state I was in when picking it back up. I found the volumes of this run up to volume 5, so I'm going to try and finish them relatively quickly for now and then check into something else that's maybe a little more stylish.

There is no Antimemetics Division is an serialized collection of stories set in the SCP universe written between 2015 and 2020. I picked it up, because the title is striking. I've never had the time to get into serious SCP lore, but it's very much up my alley as a fan of stuff like Delta Green. The book reads initially like a vignette of stories centered on a Marie Quinn, the head of the Antimemetics Division within something called "The Organization". I'm sure it has its place in the lore, as I've the term thrown around, but I think the story works without knowing the full extent of the different organizations. Later on, the book evolves into a more concentrated story, with more of what I understand the classical trappings of the SCP lore to be, including involving civilians in the effects of the anomalies and plans specifically constructed to circumvent the highly specific ways these anomalies functions. The book reads relatively comfortably, as it's very contemporary, and the concepts that are introduced with each chapter keep things interesting.

Said On Opera (2024) is a collection of opera reviews by Edward Said, more known by his seminal work Orientalism, which I have not read yet, but plan to in the near future. It handles its subject matter like a review in an opera magazine might, assuming some knowledge of the specific text, which I don't really have. I'm passingly familiar with Fidelio and parts of Wagner's work, but since I don't really listen to music in my usual day to day, I have basically no familiarity with his Ring, because getting familiar with 60 hours of music, is a big ask. Still, he gives a sense of the perspective through his writings, finding some points of interest through which to interpret the work in such a way that a narrative emerges. I have to assume that Said has an intense appreciatiom for opera, being able to cite text from each of the pieces to support his interpretation, certainly more than I can honestly muster. I suppose I will actually read Orientalism if I want to know whether this was a good primer on his style of analysis.

Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 3 is the Pietro Volume in the collection, which, at this point in time means, that there is a fair amount of familial baggage. This is starting to read like a case study of "I don't understand X-Men lore" in that even though events that are relevant are shown in flashback, I'm fully lacking the context that would make those events make sense, and provide the full framework to deliver the emotional payoff that it was probably supposed to have. At least the plot in itself took a clear backseat to the emotional story between the siblings, so my reading experience didn't suffer from not knowing who the villain of the week was.

Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 4 is perhaps the most interesting of the volumes, if only because it deals directly with Wanda's past and relationship to it. It's got the most interesting art, as she moves through realms and deals with the giant eldritch horrors. It's also the first of these Omnibus volumes that has concept art pages that I find interesting, because of the inclusion of Lore. It also includes a few nice family moments toward the end that makes rounds off the story in a way that seems more cohesive than the previous volumes. I'm supposing that Wanda's reservations regarding the Dark Hold won't be resolved by this volume, nor should they be. There's been an undercurrent of superficiality in the writing of these volumes that has been bothering me, because it makes the struggles very "solvable" by way of magic, and such fundamental story conflicts are probably better served by longer storylines.

Ghost Spider: Broken Chords (2026) is one of the many multiverse storylines that the character seems to be irrevocably tied to. I've seen a lot of trade volumes for the character around, so I've become a little more familiar with the status quo that this character is associated with. It's very cozy, which meshes very well with the playful art styles these stories are usually illustrated in. Again, I'm not too familiar with all the ancillary characters in these, and I don't really understand the canon, without which the story isn't too interesting, it still managed to be a denser plot than the Scarlet Witch Omnibus Volumes, just because it wasn't so occupied with the action. I think that made it more of an enjoyable read, but I also just liked looking at the pages more, because the simple layout meshed well with the art style and it didn't take itself too seriously.

I caved and watched the fourth season of Make Some Noise, because I already enjoyed most of Game Changer, and I ran out on the back-log. I still think I enjoy the weirder aspects of Game Changer more than I do the relatively straight-forward improv, which makes my enjoyment mostly dependent on the contestants. It makes me notice something about improv that I wasn't aware of before, which is that I primarily enjoy improv when it's impressive on its face. Very few people make me enjoy their improv through their humour alone, and usually that is when it's chaotic and weird, as would be the case with Ally Beardsley or Vic Michaelis. As such, my favorites are bits that are either music related or make me genuinely envious of how well people can use language, as is usually the case for when Ross Bryant. Still, it'll hold me over fine until Game Changer is hopefully back.

Terrorbytes (2026) is a comic anthology in the vein of Black Mirror, i.e. techno-horror with a societal twist, which tends to miss more than it hits. The first volume opens on a framing device which is the most interesting aspect I've found story-wise so far. It ties in with one of the stories, less with the others, as it leads the reader through vignettes of highly individualized stories that often make allusions to timely figures, less so topics. I guess that's what I don't love about Black Mirror either. The stories are somewhat difficult to decouple from their aesthetics when presented so overtly as a criticism of a single person, when it might have been more effective when leveled against all participants of the system. Some stories feel like shaking their fists at the youths with their phones. I'm certainly no friend of social media, but the "App that kills" has been done to death - ironically - and feels spiritually too similar to the "Video Game that kills", doubtlessly a successor to the "Movie that kills" etc. It reads easily enough, and if the framing device manages to get more space in future volumes, it might be more charming than this first attempt has been.

Batman - The Brave and the Bold - Tomorrow's Heroes (2026) is surprisingly legible for a collection that iterates through so many characters in such a small number of pages. It definitely benefits from going through some of the most iconic DC character roster, so it wouldn't need as much characterization as it features, but as someone relatively unfamiliar, I appreciate it from a story-telling perspective. In a sense, the collection might well function as a primer on the characters in the current run of DC comics (or rather the previous, if I'm not mistaken). I also learned that I never need to see another Bat-Mite panel again in my life.

Marxist Modernism (2024) by Gillian Rose is a transcription of lectures to what sounds like a contemporary arts and history class. I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I started the book. It was a relatively quick read, and given that it was a transcription of the spoken words from what's essentially the present, it wasn't too difficult to digest. The editors made the effort to source the text before printing, which is much appreciated. It's probably not a great introduction to the Frankfurt school, nor would it be for Marxism as a school, but it serves as a good overview of the relationships between the different thinkers within and around the philosophical school. There's a lot of small details, especially what Rose describes as misconceptions, that are cleared up during the course of the lectures, which made for interesting little tid-bits, if one is already familiar with the writers in question. It's a bit like learning about Ghandi's favourite ice cream flavour: Humanizing, primarily, but really not so consequential for their work. I wouldn't recommend it as a primer for a reader trying to get a grasp of the fundamentals, but even as somebody entirely unfamiliar with the Neo-Marxist body of work, a sense of the main points of their analysis will likely remain.
I'm realizing that philosophical schools like these are a tricky subject to present. The primary value in texts like these is probably to make the reader aware that this school exists in the first place, since the work itself is reasonably modern and contemporary in style that just reading the fundamental texts might be easier than trying to pull a similar understanding from somebody who has done transitive work on the text.

Sosa's Epistemology is the first philosophy book from a tradition that I wasn't pretty familiar with before checking it out. I thought I managed pretty well when getting into the existentialists, so perhaps another school of philosophy might not be very difficult to decipher. I stand corrected now, partially because I suspect that the books I read before were never meant to serve as a text for philosophers to read. There is a cadence to philosophy books that make them a little difficult to read. It's the cadence that comes to mind when a philosopher is described as "verbose", or when they're accused of "twisting words". I was never a fan of this style of writing, but it is a decent choice, given the process of argumentation as it is constructed for philosophy. Sosa builds his argument detail by detail, extrapolating to the next form of "knowledge" or "skill" or "aptitude". It seems, to my sensibilities, a lot more rigorous than some of the philosophies of old that would have to fall back on some form of divinity, which made the argument a lot easier to understand, but just not as interesting as the ones that Sosa constructs. I have a sneaking suspicion that the style is making it a lot more difficult to understand the argument, and hence to find any steps of the arguments that might not be as airtight as they seem to me now, but I will just cut my losses on this read and hope that I'll get better at parsing these texts with practice.

Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown is one of the first lesbian novels in American literature. It's often described as partially autobiographical, but as I don't really understand what that means, I hesitate to say much about it. It follows a young woman, growing up as a confident lesbian (in that she is confident about her sexuality, but she also happens to be very forward in her character) trying to navigate a world in which all parts of her identity are used to discriminate. She's an ambitious biracial woman who can "pass" for white, and each of these aspects of her identity is eventually instrumental in breaking up her romantic relationships. The novel begins in the American south, during the protagonist's school days and slowly works its way into more affluent circles, mostly afforded to her through academic excellence. It comes together as the portrait of someone who knows what they want and is willing to do what it takes to get there while staying true to themselves. I found the many interpersonal relationships very engaging, especially toward the end of the book. Molly at that point has already chosen her way, and she has several opportunitues to reconnect with people with which she's parted on bad terms, or of which she seems to have had some unfulfilled expectation. Her first lover, her mother, a cousin she had been close with once, and she observes how time has changed them in a way it simply hasn't for herself. That, specifically might have been a product of poverty, but the difference is still jarring. It left me wondering whether all the other people she's met had the same downward trajectory while trying to fit somewhere that wouldn't take them otherwise.

Ghoul (2026) by Kasey Iris is a charming graphic novel about grief. It's drawn in a loose, crayon-y style that allows for a lot of creativity in terms of layout and lettering. A lot of the text is worked into elements of the background in a way I've not seen before - not that that means anything, I've not read a lot of graphic novels - and it allows for the reader to experience the visual and audio of the world in a simultaneity that's divorced from traditional paneling. There's generally not a lot of panels that come to mind when thinking back on the work. The story itself is a heartfelt story about a girl who moves into a neighborhood of immigrants with her Filipino family after losing her best friend to mental illness. It's immediately clear that this new neighborhood is a tightly knit community. Everyone uses their mother tongue with one another while never giving the translation, and it's still a functioning way of communication. I find it charming, and the mix between English and native languages feels very familiar as a second generation immigrant. The protagonist's grief leaves her vulnerable to the influence of a snake witch that can feed off the energy of people through butterflies, and uncovers a missing person's case. It's a simple story, but the presentation makes it an engaging read. It has a happy end, which feels appropriate.

Gotham City Sirens: Unfit For Orbit (2026) by Leah Williams is a heist gone wrong story featuring the core of the Sirens, which are Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and Catwoman. The always gives way for fun story-telling, mainly because they're sympathetic characters that don't take themselves too seriously. There's the usual DC comics edge to the moment to moment action that the medium lends itself to, just by the options that emerge from its visual characteristics. I still struggle badly with placing it in the timeline, because it seems like this is the first job in a while, and meant as a sort of revival for the title, but every other Sirens book I read begins and ends in these states, so I'm not sure if that's just something that will come up when I don't read the week to week serializations.

Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev read to me like a love story than the showcase of philosophy that it was probably meant to be, because, unfortunately for me, the central framework this book seeks to showcase is nihilism, which I have a history of misunderstanding and failing to apply correctly. As far as Russian literature goes, I found it a little more of a slog to read, because thematically I was just disengaged from the entire thing. I also had difficulties getting into the first few chapters, because Turgenev is a very visual writer, whereas I am almost entirely disconnected from descriptions of visuals, especially as it pertains people. None of this is Turgenev's fault. It's perhaps the most extreme divergence between a reader and a an author I've experienced. In typical Russian fashion, the people in the book use a lot of nicknames when they're familiar with one another, which would be fine if I understood how those tie back to the actual names. Once used to the quirks of those, the book picks up. My own reading experience was slightly hampered by the quality of the physical book I was using. It's the first time I read off a print on demand copy, that had the pages glued to the spine, so I had to strain to hold the book open the entire time. It bothers me in hindsight, because I bought the copy in a physical bookstore, so apparently now I have to start looking out for print on demand books in person as well. As such, my entire interaction with this work was somewhat unfavorable, at now fault of the author, which is all in all a bit unfortunate.

The Secret of Me (2025) was a slightly unusual watch on my part. I find it difficult to watch documentaries, especially ones that center social phenomena. Film-making has a way of framing people in a way that makes them characters, meant to either build sympathy or not. It's difficult to watch documentaries that communicate opinions I don't agree with, and watching ones that communicate opinions I do agree with isn't as interesting, beyond the filmmaking and the moment to moment details. This film follows an intersex person who has received "corrective genital surgery" (in quotes because of the circumstance in which it was performed, not the procedure in general) as an infant, a practice that is still alive for reasons that are beyond my understanding. It gives the historical background of the practice, while following their journey growing up, initially as a girl and young woman, then eventually reclaiming their gender identity with a more masculine presentation after a while of organising in the San Francisco queer community. The emotional focal point is the confrontation with the surgeon that performed the surgery, as well as decided that it would be necessary. It's a calm, well mannered affair, not the least, because I feel like Jim is a very good speaker. The style of the movie is initially a little heavy handed for my tastes. I'm already not too fond of film music tracks when they strike me as "emotional" (it's not a well defined category on my part) and especially hitting the viewer with it, before the topic has been established doesn't sit quite right with me. In other places the music seems like it's used better. There is an instance of a track that incorporates typewriter sounds, accompanying the media coverage of one of John Money's experiments, and in that instance I found the music carrying momentum. Once the film got going, I could get more into it. Does my heightened enjoyment make it a better documentary at those points? I'm not sure. I'm somewhat afraid that it doesn't, because I was primed to be sympathetic to the subjects of the centered persons in the film anyway.

Gangster Ass Barista (2019) by Pat Shand has a regular pitch surrounding a former criminal trying to leave the life and struggling with their past trying to pull them back. It seemed like a fun enough story by the covers, so I picked up the first volume's worth of issues. It's a short and comfortable read, and it's nice to see comics arising from an indie space as well, even though I felt like this book in particular could have benefitted significantly from coloured pages. The art style is an almost cartoonish black and white, with thick outlines and not a lot of grayscale, which makes everything look a little flat, and even though the perspective-work isn't wrong per se, it doesn't feel like the pages have a lot of depth. On personal grounds, I'm not a great fan of resolving any kind of plot with police, partially because of my own experience telling me that they're very bad at solving problems and very good at creating more problems, so seeing the approach in this book leaves me a little ambivalent, though I understand that it's one of the usual methods of the genre.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles (2012) by Hiro Aikawa is another in the series of books about cats written by a Japanese person, which I've taken to collecting. It's the story of a man recounting his life, while pretending to look for a new home for a cat he's adopted. The perspective shifts between that of the cat, the man, and flashbacks from the view of the people he's visiting on his quest to pass his cat on. It's a simple, but beautiful story, and potent enough to make me melancholic about the ending. It's a very beautiful story about the fleetingness of life and the way that different people see the world, and also the peculiar love between humans and cats, which almost made me cry.

The Power Fantasy (2024-2026) is a series by Kieron Gillen and published by Image comics, and it's very much made me pay attention to the publishing house in particular. It centers a small group of "Superpowers", who have, through their collaboration, and also individual potential to cause death and destruction, become a political body by themselves. The story delves into their personal history and failings, and the consequences on the people around them that are privy to less power than them. It's an interesting story, and it's beautifully illustrated. I don't want to speak too much on the plot, but what I can recommend this on is the way it blends different art styles, depending on where the scene is set. The art is very effective as well. When I contrast it to some of the depictions of superpowers from other works I read in this time around, this one communicates very succinctly what is supposed to happen, and I didn't even need the description of what they do. The way the characters interact with the use of the powers suffices. In the way, I suppose, the story works so well around it, because it's a story about people and power, and not really the intricacies of the superpowers in question. In the end of each issue there were a lot of covers that are similarly stylish like the covers of this run, which were a large factor in me picking up the issue, which kinda makes me want to check out other finished runs by this publisher.

Spider Noir: The Gwen Stacey Affair is an alternative universe retelling of the beginning of the Peter and Gwen storyline, but set in the 1950s. It's an aesthetic I enjoy, and the art carrying my enjoyment of that trade. I'm not sure what to think about the plot of the whole thing. I'm not so much bothered by the guns and the Nazis, but there's some significant gaslighting component present in the story that I don't think gets resolved by the end of it. It's certainly not the ending of the story, or the run, I'm sure it'll come up eventually, but as it ends, it looks like Peter gets off clean at the end of this particular book. I'm honestly not sure if that aspect was present in the original storyline, it might well have been, but I never read the original story. Considering it's a pretty recent revision, it could have been changed a little, perhaps, though I don't know whether there is any version of this particular drama I would have liked.

Phantom Road Volumes 1-3 (2025) is a Project Blue Book-esque supernatural mystery story, published again by Image Comics. The topic is not quite the stuff I'm usually interested in, but I thought I might give it a chance, as it was the only series with full volumes by the publisher I could find at the time. It's not a completed story yet, which is why I can't say much on the writing itself. It's a little reminiscent of the Umbrella Academy in tone, though without the superpowers (mostly), which is somewhat charming. Whatever praises I had for The Power Fantasy, I can repeat more or less here. The art is heavy on hatching, very stylized, and adds a lot to the story being told. It lends the grimy feeling to all the scenes that is such a staple for mid-west Americana. I'm not personally a huge fan of the aesthetic, but I can recognize when someone made the effort to embody it, and especially when the cast and story has as much mainstream appeal to probably function equally well without a clean execution of the as well. I'm hoping that they manage to tie up the story in another volume or two, because then it'll be a quick and engaging read.

Revolusi (2020) by David Van Reybrouck was an odd read for me. I more or less read it blind, not knowing anything about the author or the work beforehand. It is the first time in a while since I did that with a history book, and my feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, it's clear that a lot of work went into assembling this book, there is a care for the subject matter on display, and the author's politics aren't entirely faulty. I also appreciate that there is no pretense about the neutrality of the work. Van Reybrouck states his opinion on the state of affairs explicitly on several occasions. The book aims to reassemble the history of Indonesia from the Dutch colonial era up to the after the successful decolonial struggle under Soekarno, using the accounts of people who witnessed it in person. The effort in otself is admirable, and it put Van Reybrouck in a tricky situation. While based in Belgium, he has Dutch roots, which places him in the position of writing about a country that was colonized by a country he has close ties to. Those ties also express themselves in the selection of sources. Because of how colonialism works, there is a relatively large Indonesian diaspora in the Netherlands and former Dutch colonies, who are often prone to romanticise the colonial periods. We dom't get much background on the sources individually, which is the way these things usually go, but begins to pose a problem when one notices how often the fact that they speak perfect Dutch, or have lived in Europe for several decades comes up in their descriptions. I don't think Van Reybrouck sought out these witnesses explicitly, I think his position as an author for decolonial history made people with a proximity to the topic gravitate toward him, and there is likely something of an implicit obligation to include them. He did include sources whom this doesn't apply to, so clearly he made an effort, but this heavy slant warps the narrative of this retelling somewhat.
Colonial history is impossible to divorce from violence, because of how central it is for its continuance. If I claim that the precise detail of the violence doesn't matter, that would be a little disingenuous. It very much mattered to the people who were there, but my particular interest is not with these details, but rather what the effect was within the relationship between the afflicted parties. To illustrate, use the popular example for Trotzki's assassination. Did it really matter that he was killed with an ice-pick, when we consider his relationship to the nationalist wing for the Bolshevik party, and his split with Stalin? Revolusi dwells a little too much on the ice-pick aspects of the eyewitness accounts for my tastes. This has a few benefits, in that it highlights forms of colonialist control that might be more easily overlooked. The use and rapid change of language as it went from Dutch control to Japanese control, and finally to that of the decolonial militias, for example is often an aspect in the snippets of eyewitness accounts. The levers of power, though, the ideologies at play and the greater analysis of the material approach are a little obscured by it, though. The methodology of the latter take a particularly bad hit, in my opinion. Van Reybrouck uses an analogy of a cruise ship, which is perhaps an attempt to do class analysis without using the vocabulary irreversibly tied to Marxism, but it tinges the analysis in a very Western, colonial hue. It manages to illustrate the differences of the material realities of the three decks, but loses the grasp on the interests that come with it, and painting them as spatially segregated gives the impression that interaction between such classes were sparse. It loses out on the roles of law enforcement, those that moved through the upper decks, invisible to those that live there, but make its luxury possible, rendering them impossible to a face-value read as they were to the colonial machine.
Similarly, the indigenous population of Indonesia takes a problematically passive role in the narrative. After the colonization by the Dutch, the people's consciousness seems almost as if in stasis until the Japanese occupation, and even then, their mist significant contribution seems to be their inaction against an invading force that until then had treated them better than their current colonial occupiers. The surface level argument paints this silent allyship as a result of some sort of race-based sympathy, but I wouldn't pay too much credit to that hypothesis. While perhaps that might have played a role on a political level, the indigenous population of Indonesia didn't have a central political body. The militarized portion of the population, subsumed into the colonial Dutch military at the time, might have been more prone to that rhetoric, but the primary difficulty in holding an occupation comes from the broader population. Van Reybrouck noted this, and the presence of Japanese immigrant even during times of Dutch occupation, as well as the positive relationship these populations had on native soil. The brutality of the Japanese occupation would express itself when the after a military victory over Dutch colonial forces was achieved. That probably shouldn't be counted as a propaganda victory of the Japanese over the Dutch, as the population on whose resistance the Dutch would have been reliant on was only exposed to it after the Dutch had left the country. The "mistake" was in conflating the local Japanese diaspora with the state they came from.
The decolonial struggle loses a lot of its meaning when reduced to the violence committed in its name. Van Reybrouck writes of a population "radicalized" by their Japanese occupiers against the Dutch and "Indo" (Dutch-Indonesian) population. That is a deeply flawed reading. By this point, the country has been in some sort of occupation for the entire lifetime of its majority population, certainly the young ones that are prone to militancy. Expecting them not to have learned the violence that had been directed against them is naive at best. This part of the history is probably harmed the most severely by the heavy Dutch slant in the selection of witnesses. If this violence is portrayed as senseless, the implication is that a continued (or returning) Dutch occupation, in which the native population is considered subhuman, would have been preferable, for an indeterminate amount of time, over the flash of the independence struggle. The collaborationism of Soekarno with the Japanese occupation here is almost incidental. That connection was predisposed for success, simply because it was the Japanese who originally pushed the Dutch out of the country, and it would be the Dutch who attempted to reclaim it after the defeat of the axis at the end of the second World War. Ideologically, I would have liked him to be a classical socialist as well, but that doesn't matter so much in the context of a decolonial struggle. Him and his cohorts were the ones who were available, and at the time, the Dutch were still struggling to reestablish their rule, even leaving the majority of its military operations to allied Gurkhas. The violence against Indos at the time is regretable, certainly, but not surprising. During Dutch colonial times they had been classed higher than the native population. This was a distinction that the colonizers had established, and their unwillingness to take care of a population they had uprooted from their environment through their colonial politics led to an unsurprising backlash that hit that population hard. At the same time, this violence was not what would move the Dutch to capitulate, but the military losses that mounted, often because they were heavily underfunded, as back home, the country was trying to rebuild from the war. In total, Revolusi paints the history of Indonesia as one of violence, flattening it by not going into the politics of the involved populations. I'm aware that this book is already a work of tremendous effort and I don't want to assume things about the author's worldview by reading just this work, but the understanding of the history, in my opinion suffers heavily from this indistinguished both-sidesing. Indonesia is still a heavily propagandized country and struggling against economic oppression to this day. I'm not convinced this book helps much. Do I still think the book is worth reading? It's certainly entertaining enough, and the voices of the people of the time are interesting. Perhaps if I had a better book to recommend, I would, and then it might even be a pretty good accompanying read. As it is, I'd recommend reading it with the trappings of colonial history in mind, perhaps only after reading things by the likes of Frantz Fanon first for an understanding of the mechanisms at play.