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Drag Race France Season 1 Episode 8 – Grand Finale & Dragnifique runway power rankings

August 13, 2022 by krisis

Bonjour bonjour bonjour, mes chers lecteurs!

We’ve reached the end of Drag Race France Season 1! We now have our first ever queen of French drag and I have nothing left to rank… or do I?!

If you have been reading my recaps all along this season you will know I am very pleased with our winner, but more than a little surprised with her win. That’s especially true after rewatching the episode to see just how approximate her choreography was in the choreographed lip sync challenge.

However, I think our new reigning queen drove home her story as the rightful champion in every other aspect of the episode. She had the most compelling personal chat with Nicky Doll, the most thrilling runway presentation, a strong and emotional speech to her younger self, and by far the most captivating final lip sync.

I think it’s always a good thing to be reminded that an artist can win Drag Race without having to be a perfect “all-arounder” who is brilliant at every challenge and who has an easy-to-consume approach to drag. I’d rather take someone who is truly brilliant in some areas with a real weakness in others than someone who is slightly above average at everything.

That said, I would have been happy with any of these top three queens winning a Drag Race crown, which is not something I can often say about a group of finalists. Usually even when I am equally excited for everyone, I’m still leaning towards one in particular as a winner. This time, while I did have a sentimental favorite, on merit alone I could’ve seen any of them taking the crown.

Before we wave a final au revoir to Drag Race France, shall we have one final ranking? Let’s take a look at the final eleganza looks from our 10 queens – and, please comment if you agree (or disagree!) with my rankings.

If you want to watch Drag Race France you can sign up for WowPresentsPlus to watch the many worldwide Drag Race franchises for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. (Note that if you’re in the US you will need to use a VPN to “visit” another country to see the US Franchise.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 Episode 5 – Snatch Game: Review & Power Ranking

August 12, 2022 by krisis

Welcome to my review and power rankings of the fifth episode of Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 – Snatch Game!

This was a classic Snatch Game with a clear top group of performers and a few obvious bottoms. The funniest queens were very funny, and the unfunniest queens were very bad. That lead to a shocking elimination.

Seriously: this wasn’t just any shocking elimination. This is perhaps the most-shocking early-t0-mid season elimination since Morgan McMichaels back on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 2! We had a front-runner sashay away who tanking Snatch Game but who was crushing the competition, who killed her runway look, and who gave a strong lip sync that could’ve credibly been declared a win.

If Brooke and Yvie hadn’t been granted a double-save on their Snatch Game, it would’ve been exactly this shocking.

For me this raises an essential question of what we want out of Drag Race. Should it shock us, or do we want it to be predictable?

If Drag Race is a fair competition where queens battle to survive every week, then it will sometimes yield surprising results as queens make their own luck. We’ve seen that many times over, but especially starting with Season 9 with the fall of Valentina and the lip sync victory from Sasha Velour. Jaida Essence Hall’s Season 12 dominance was another fair win, as was Bimini defying her early-season story on Drag Race UK Season 2 to come back to crush the back half of the show.

If Drag Race is instead structured story with clear heroes and villains, then the weekly ups and downs matter less and we occasionally get counterintuitive judges choices to preserve that storyline and protect queens when they falter. There’s no better example of this than last week’s finale of All Stars All Winners, where several competitive wins were voided in favor of awarding success based on storyline. While it is typically more subtle on regular seasons, we’ve seen this with blatant saves of certain queens, like the “Kandy wait” moment in Season 13.

For me, the examples from the “fair fight” category have all been more memorable and satisfying, and the moments from the “structured story” category all linger as disappointments. That means I have to learn to take the shocking along with the satisfying.

I think a major difference in Canada’s Drag Race is that it has never shied away from these “fair fight” moments in its first two seasons, where there have been several eliminations that were shocking not due to the weekly performance that lead to them, but because they violated our story expectations.

Even if it’s frustrating in the moment, it’s not a bad thing. It is part of what gives Canada’s Drag Race a certain underdog charm compared to the US franchise, and it often becomes a star-making turn for the queen who got the shock.

What do you think? Do you prefer a season with some shocks, or a season where the story is obvious from start to finish? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you want to watch Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 outside of Canada and the UK you can sign up for WowPresentsPlus to watch the many worldwide Drag Race franchises for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. (Note that if you’re in the US you will need to use a VPN to “visit” another country to see the US Franchise.)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best Queen (of the North) win!

Crushing Comics – Guide to Indie Comics & Licensed Characters

You shouldn’t have to be a comic book expert to enjoy reading comics! Find every issue of your favorite indie comics – including creator-owned titles and licensed characters – in the right reading order, including how they’ve been collected in physical and digital format. Plus, suggestions for the best places to start!

Every guide debuts exclusively to Patrons of Crushing Krisis & Crushing Comics before being released to the general public. Guide images in black-and-white with a publisher logo are hints of what’s to come in the near future. Sign up to be a Patron today for as little as $1/month to gain access to every guide as soon as it launches!

Patron’s Choice: Guide to Black Cat, Felicia Hardy

August 11, 2022 by krisis

Today I’m finally here with a guide for all Patrons of CK that I’ve been preparing for by adding guides to Heroes For Hire and Spider-Man, Peter Parker (2018-Present)! I needed both guides in place because both of those titles housed this character while she was a stray with no title of her own, but that all changed started in 2019. I’m happy to share the August 2022 Patron’s Choice: Guide to Black Cat, Felicia Hardy!

Felicia Hardy is not who you think she is.

Or, at least, she’s not who I thought she was.

That’s true whether you know her from her origins or from her most-recent appearances, because Black Cat has been at least three distinctly different characters in her comic career – so much so that her current incarnation feels completely disconnected from her debut, even if her arc from start to finish makes sense.

(I know this because I’ve now read every panel she has ever appeared in to put together this Guide to Black Cat!)

I think many folks assume that Felicia Hardy is Marvel’s Catwoman – a cat burglar villain turned vigilante through the power of her attraction to the flagship hero.

That’s not entirely wrong, but Felicia Hardy was only ever a cat burglar for her first four appearances in Amazing Spider-Man (1963) in 1979 and she was never a villain until 2015! We barely even see here do any burgling on-panel between 1980 and the mid-00s unless it’s for her job as a security consultant. Instead, she quickly gave up her life of crime due to an obsession with Spider-Man. As she was originally written, all Felicia wanted to was to be Spider-Man’s partner in adventure and in romance.

Curiously, she has no interest at all in who Spider-Man was under the mask. In fact, when Peter first reveals his apartment and identity in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1976) #74, Felicia reacts with a combination of distaste and horror. To her, the fantastical life of a hero or vigilante is a necessary escape from the dull routine of civilian existence. To think about the regular person beneath the spider-webbed mask ruined her fantasy. [Read more…] about Patron’s Choice: Guide to Black Cat, Felicia Hardy

New for Patrons: Guide to Spider-Man, Peter Parker (2018-Present)

August 10, 2022 by krisis

Today I am swinging in with a guide for all Patrons of CK that began as an unexpectedly-sticky update to an existing guide before I realized it had become a tangled web and I needed to spin some of it off into its own page. Of course, I’m talking about a Guide to Spider-Man, Peter Parker (2018 – present)!

This guide is now available to the public thanks to the spectacular support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

When I started making notes for this guide, I thought I’d simply be catching up on the collections of Amazing Spider-Man (2018), its 2022 relaunch, plus Peter David’s various flashback Symbiote Spider-Man series.

Those two things alone would make for a guide’s worth of content, but as I continued making notes I realized there was so much more – including Spider-Geddon, Tom Taylor’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Joy Kelly’s Non-Stop and Savage Spider-Man, several digital series, the upcoming End of the Spider-Verse crossover, and even more!

Marvel has released fifty Peter Parker Spider-Man series and one-shots in the past four years.

I’ve worked for many years to figure out the best way to untangle the massive bulk of my main Guide to Spider-Man, Peter Parker. Just the thought of adding all of this material to its table of contents made me shudder. About halfway through outlining I realized it was time for Mr. Parker to graduate into a second guide page for his most-moden era.

Never fear, non-Patrons – I’d never keep a major Marvel guide like this one exclusive for very long! That is not a part of my mission statement for Crushing Comics. This guide will have a brief window of exclusivity with my Patrons while I update the main Spider-Man guide and make sure they match up perfectly. It will be available to all readers in time for the debut of Dan Slott’s new adjectiveless Spider-Man series launching at the top of October.

Believe it or not, not only was I surprised this turned into its own guide page, it wasn’t even the guide page I set out to build when I planned for this week! If yesterday’s Guide to Heroes for Hire was an hors d’oeuvre, this is an appetizer to the massive reading order I’ll be back with tomorrow – which references the runs in this guide several times.

Any guesses?

Patrons of Crushing Krisis currently have access to… [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Spider-Man, Peter Parker (2018-Present)