K-Pop Demon Hunters, Gorillaz, & the mythos of virtual bands
There is no escaping K-Pop Demon Hunters. The Maggie Kang-directed Netflix animated epic has dominated every chart, broken every record, and been rewatched countless times by people who’ve never had any interest in K-pop before in their life. My partner and I have watched this movie seven times now. We haven’t stopped singing ‘Golden’ badly for months. I’m pretty sure we’ve ended up on a watchlist for harassing Netflix executives into releasing a director’s cut that doesn’t exist.
The film arrived in the middle of a shitty year for music. After 2024’s neverending barrage of pop banger after pop banger, stunning album after stunning album, 2025 has seen white bread take the centre stage of the charts. The American white supremacist political environment has allowed ‘Ordinary’ to top the Billboard charts, a song written by a guy I thought was best known for eerily stealing the style, voice, and identity of David Dobrik on YouTube before being in that Danny Gonzalez video about the Hype House Netflix show. Alex Warren was only knocked off the charts a few weeks ago, and it was by a fictional band of animated Korean cunt-servers.
I’m glad such a boring song was beat by a project that took so much love and creative labour - particularly when every major brand and industry is encouraging people to drain their artistic energy into AI prompts. Animation is an industry that’s become increasingly under threat in previous year; after being one of the few entertainment mediums able to continue production through the pandemic, job opportunities have dried up as streamers and distributors like Netflix continue to cancel well-received animated series and abandon interesting projects left and right. To be honest, positive fan reception usually doesn’t result in better funding, but hopefully the children of the world drilling the chorus of ‘Soda Pop’ into their parents’ heads will be enough to convince Sony executives to let Maggie Kang run wild for the sequel.
I’m hoping the immense international success of K-Pop Demon Hunters won’t just lead to renewed interest in animation, but also the return of virtual bands to our charts. Assuming we don’t count the Encanto cast topping the charts in 2021 (another recession indicator in of itself), the last and most successful example of fictional characters dominating popular music was Gorillaz at their commercial peak with ‘Feel Good Inc.’ Admittedly, the success of Gorillaz isn’t really best quantified by their streaming and chart numbers - while Damon Albarn throwing shit at the wall with the artists he’s into usually leads to bangers and mash, Gorillaz’ cult following equally stems from the characters, artwork, and stories created by Jamie Hewlett. The names, 2-D, Murdoc, Russel, and Noodle are as ubiquitous for nerds as John, Paul, George, and Ringo are for boomers and annoying twinks like me. Maybe soon, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey will be household names as well.
Despite the media, music, and political landscape sucking over the last few months, I’m hoping the success of K-Pop Demon Hunters (and a new Gorillaz album on the way) indicates a return to relentless creativity throughout the rest of the decade. While we might need to pretend the US doesn’t exist as we shoo the coalition out of our government, I’m hoping that the arts, music, and media industries being squeezed to breaking point will lead to a burst of weird and wonderful art from indie wonders to bigbudget projects that use each cent of production money to make something fucking cool.
K-Pop Demon Hunters has put Korean mythology at the forefront of pop culture in a way previously reserved for Norse gods and Greek twinks. The film is rooted in Korean shamanism, with the girls being depicted as mudang, mediators between humans and spirits, through their duties and appearances. Peppered throughout are various other pieces of shaman symbolism, like monsters such as dokkaebi and a multitude of environmental designs drawing from traditional paintings and imagery.
I love seeing people depict their own culture’s folklore through art and film. I’ve seen multitudes of people fall in love with Greek mythology and classics via Rick Riordan books, and will take any opportunity to recommend the Irish animated film Wolfwalkers and its predecessors created by Cartoon Saloon. Considering the fact that our government is trying to remove Te Reo Māori from children’s books and incite division at every turn, I’d love to see pūrākau depicted in a similar way by Māori teams of animators, writers, and musicians in the future.
The folklore passed down through our respective cultures are the founding narratives that make up the fabric of our societies. These tales have been changed throughout the years as history has gone by, shaping up through centuries of storytelling embedding themselves in the collective canon of humanity. Erosion of these tales, via the eradication of social sciences in schools and diminishment of indigenous cultures around the colonised world, has only ever led to the world falling into further disarray and confusion. The stories we tell ourselves are the collective philosophies of respective cultures - without them, culture and society fall apart. Hopefully K-Pop Demon Hunters has delayed that decline for just a little longer.
Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) @liamhanse.n EDITOR
Illustration By Stella Roper (they/she)
@dodofrenzy
ARTS EDITOR
Forbidden knowledge is most powerful in mythology. Pandora was told not to open the box, Prometheus was punished for stealing fire, and Orpheus was warned not to glance back. Every story speaks of what occurs when rules collide with curiosity. Today, in the underworld of New Zealand's design schools, a similar dilemma faces students: certain topics like mental illness, immigration, disability, consent are brought up as if they
One of our design students described at a recent hui how much it would mean to do her final project on her immigration story. Her research idea was discreetly steered elsewhere, and she quickly discovered there were certain things off limits. I know at other universities similar restrictions have been imposed on capstone projects. Mental illness, disability, and even social
The boundaries are also specified in the Year 3 capstone brief. In the Ethical Research section, it states: “AUT is committed to conducting research according to the highest ethical standards and ethics approval will not be given for any undergraduate projects that involve vulnerable groups. There are topics that are case sensitive and cannot be addressed due to AUTEC ethics committee and these topics are prohibited: Mental illness, Disabilities, anything that involves children (under 18s), and Immigration.” In the interest of protecting both participants and students from damage, limited leeway is provided by the language. Instead of guiding students through the exercise of how to ethically and respectfully study such subjects, the statement frames entire communities and lived experiences as off-limits.To those students who are members of those communities, the prohibition is intimate: it reads less as a safeguard and more like a silencing.
This raises an easy question: if design is there to solve problems and deal with real communities, why are students dissuaded from some of the most
Capstone projects are typically marked by panels of lecturers and occasionally industry professionals. Because of this visibility, universities tread carefully around risks. On paper, the prohibitions are related to ethics. Any research that comes into contact with participants, vulnerable groups, or sensitive topics is meant to go through a research ethics committee. These committees exist for a good reason: to protect people from harm, to verify consent, and to ensure data is
But in practice, these systems do not work within the constrained timescales of an undergraduate design course. An application of ethics can take a month or so, and students only have a single semester to complete their end-of-course projects. Instead of supporting students through the process, some courses simply discourage certain topics out-
right. What develops is a quiet but powerful culture of evasion. Students learn what words they can tiptoe around, what ideas will derail a project at the very beginning, and which stories to leave unsaid.
These boundaries are infurating to many students. It's like we’re told not to open Pandora’s box. But what if the solutions we need are inside?” For those whose own identities are tied to these topics, the restrictions sting even more deeply. Immigrant students wonder why an exploration of their own communities is considered too risky. Disabled students hear the irony that disability itself is off-limits in a field that makes access its priority.
As one student recalled, "If my life experience is too sensitive to explore, what does that say about how the university values my voice?" Lecturers are often caught in the middle. Many enjoy the benefit of engaging students with difficult subjects, but they are also subject to pressure from institutional processes and forms of assessment. If a student misjudges a sensitive subject, this can look bad for the entire programme. Restrictions are for safety, some lecturers assert. "I don't want to set a student up to fail by letting them tackle a project that's going to be too emotionally taxing or too complex within the time frame," one said. In their view, shepherding students onto greener pastures will allow them to leave with success in their portfolio that they can support when selling themselves to employers. Others believe that the avoidance strategy does more damage than good.
The irony is that design is rarely safe. By its nature, it involves entering messy problems, listening to diverse perspectives, and experimenting with possible solutions. Industry designers handle problematic topics every day: mental health in worklife apps, immigration in government-official messages, disability in product development. By shielding students from these topics entirely, universities risk creating a myth of safety; a belief that design can and should exist apart from society’s most complex challenges. Students graduate well-trained in aesthetics and prototyping, but less confident in navigating the ethical responsibilities of real-world practice.
So what might a healthier approach look like? Instead of leaving students to guess which topics are taboo, universities could clearly explain the boundaries and why they exist. Ethics approval processes could be streamlined for undergrad research, or undergraduate students could be given mentors to help them navigate difficult areas responsibly. Universities could accept that for some, those "sensitive" areas are lived realities, rather than merely research categories. Involving students in shaping the guidelines would make the rules feel less like prohibitions and more like protections. Rather than banning complex themes, programs could allow space for students to practice ethical design skills.
Rules are never strict in mythology. Stories of Orpheus looking back, Prometheus defying Zeus, or Pandora opening her jar suggest that courage and curiosity frequently cause chaos but can also be clarifying and redemptive. For design students, the message is the same: engaging with sensitive themes requires care and empathy, but it also requires trust. Students must be allowed to explore challenging questions responsibly, and not taught to avoid them in the first place. The intention isn't to encourage disregard to ethics, it's to emphasise that understand-
ing, empathy, and courage are central to design practice.
If design education closes the box before it has been opened, students are left susceptible to being taught to prioritise safety over insight, avoidance over problem-solving, and silence over storytelling. The real lesson should be learning how to navigate sensitive topics: how to research thoughtfully, how to listen without bias, how to design solutions that respect lived experience. By giving students guidelines rather than limitations, universities can turn potential "chaos" into hope by allowing students to tackle meaningful problems in society, learn from them, and leave their own mark responsibly.
Ultimately, students should graduate having discovered that ethics and creativity are not opposing forces. The most authentic work of design is a product of curiosity, courage, and careful reflection. When students are trusted in universities to engage with complexity instead of evading it, the myths we tell in the classroom can turn into stories of possibility instead of silence.
dystopian level natural disasters, wars, presidencies, governments and systems that are pushing us socially towards the Dark Ages.
I want to share ways that I have been coping, helping and striving to continue throughout everything that is happening. Ka tahi, though it may seem bleak, there are always ways we can help. Boycott com panies that fund violence, vote at your local elections, show up to protests and rallies and continue to advocate for one another. He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. Con tinue to encourage Te Reo Māori conversations, phrases, traditions, greetings. Make it impossible to deny that Māori culture is integral to Aotearoa, this beautiful country we call home. There are so many good things happening to combat the bad - get involved, have your voice heard. Advocate for yourself and others, no matter how hard it seems.
Ka rua, take time to separate yourself from the internet. Read this epic magazine, touch some grass, make some music, see some friends. As a species, we weren’t engineered to have this much ac cess to so much information at all hours of the day. Whenever I find myself getting overly critical of things I’ve posted, overly worked up at other people’s opinions on movies, or trivial shit that genuinely doesn’t matter, I go “Welp - that’s all the internet I can handle today.”
Ka toru, a continuation on from ka tahi - take care of what you can but cut yourself some slack. The intense pressure to consistently be feeding into online conversations on this, that and the other is wild. You won’t always have the perfect answer, nor will you always have all the information to create an informed opinion. Give yourself the space to learn, to grow, to educate yourself and others. Take care of your ngākau and your hinengaro, e korero ana au anō, anō, anō. Kia kaha e hoa ma, turangawaewae koe i te ao. You’ve got this.
I te mutunga iho, it feels difficult to prioritise whimsy and wonder amidst all this chaos. Take care of yourself e hoa ma, reach out to one another and check in where you can. Hopefully we are inching towards change, peace, and stability, but in the meantime, ake, ake ake, āmine tātou.
The Mythical AUT Service You Never Knew About
Every university has its fair share of myths: spaces you only hear about through word of mouth, opportunities that feel more like rumours than reality, and services you’re never quite sure how to access or who to ask about. Here, AUT Ventures is one of those... and that’s exactly why we’re here to talk about it.
Tucked away in the WO building but working across every faculty, AUT Ventures is the university’s “tech transfer office”, helping students, researchers, and staff take their ideas beyond the classroom and into the real world.
Our core mahi includes commercialising research, managing intellectual property (IP), consulting to industry, and supporting startups through funding and advice. You don’t need a scroll of ancient knowledge (or a polished pitch deck) to reach out, just a spark of curiosity and the seed of an idea.
If that still sounds vague, it might be because AUT Ventures has long lingered in the background of academic lore. Since 2005, we’ve helped the AUT community bring their startups to life, quietly winning victories and overcoming the trials and tribulations of commercialisation behind the scenes. Undergrads, however, have remained rare adventurers in our realm. But here’s the truth: many of those same founders started out just like you, students with ideas they were still figuring out.
One of the biggest misconceptions about AUT Ventures is that it’s only for a certain kind of academic –the genius-in-a-lab-coat type. In reality, we support anyone with a business idea that has the potential to create real-world impact. For example, if you’re a student with an entrepreneurial project, we’re here to help point you in the right direction. Innovation isn’t tied to any one degree, we believe everyone with a good idea should know where to go next.
That’s why this year we’ve been working to demystify what we do –showing up in student spaces and teaming up with platforms like Debate. After all, if students don’t know we exist, we can’t support them. We’re proud to have already backed a range of student and staff-led ventures from AUT alumni, including CONICAL by Alejandro Davila, Dot Ingredients by Dr Jack Chen, and Woo-lace by Jacob Smith. And yes – we’re ready to help the next generation of ideas take flight.
So, if you’re holding onto an idea that feels a little otherworldly, just waiting to be seen... AUT Ventures might just be your blessing in disguise. Except we’re real – and we’re ready to help make your myth a reality when you are.
Written By Rose Scott CONTRIBUTING WRITER
SHARE THIS IMAGE OR HE’LL BE IN YOUR ROOM AT 3 AM (NOT CLICKBAIT!!).
Picture this.
It’s 2008, and you’re sitting at the family computer, which is practically a brick, with the classic Windows XP rolling hills in all of its pixelated glory. It’s your turn to be on the computer, and you spend your time scrolling through MySpace blogs to see what everyone’s up to. Or maybe you’re looking through the Twitter timeline, checking out celebrities’ tweets that surely won’t be problematic in the future. It’s the perfect night.
Until you receive an email from a stranger and click on it, it’s a saturated, bright white picture of a creepy face with bulging eyes and a wide smile. You’re fully convinced now that you’ve been cursed, like some fucked-up version of The Ring, where instead of VHS tapes, it’s Yahoo emails. Do you have to curse someone else to be freed? You spend the entire night wide awake, expecting the man to just show up in the corner of your bedroom to murder you in your sleep.
My dear friend, what you just experienced was the origins of a creepypasta now famously known as Jeff the Killer. Originally, it was a famous Internet image that initially circulated on Japanese internet forums in 2005 and then gained popularity again in the 2010s as a means of “internet curse” to create fear-mongering, as social media became more common in households. The image of Jeff the Killer didn’t have anything tied to it--just a means to scare people, similar to how someone would show you the classic K-Fee car commercial and tell you to sit right at the computer screen in an innocent voice (maybe speaking from personal experience…)
Then, 2011 rolled around, and DeviantArt user GameFuelTV created the infamous Jeff the Killer story, inspired by the image. The story is about a boy named Jeffery Woods, who was attacked by bullies. Eventually, he planned revenge and killed the bullies. However, he ended up dousing himself with alcohol and was set on fire. This created the look seen in the famous image. Long story short, he ends up
losing his sanity. He becomes a serial killer, known to whisper the phrase “Go to sleep …”
Let’s also not forget about the other infamous photo that practically haunted forums during the 2010s: a black-andwhite photo of a faceless man lurking behind children. What ultimately became the result of the internet’s famous horror stories, Eric Knudsen entered a “Create Paranormal Images” contest. He submitted two photographs that had been altered to appear as though they were lost media. Other forms embraced the character and expanded on its story, giving these photographs a backstory that made the concept of a faceless man more than just a Lovecraftian entity. What was meant to be a contest entry became the Slenderman mythos.
These characters became the Internet’s attempt at digital horror mythology.
Deemed as creepypastas, no, not actually creepy pasta. It’s the horror media that became massively popular in the golden age of the 2010s, where chokers, The Harlem Shake, and Lady Gaga’s controversial meat dress were the talk of the town. Producing well-known characters such as, of course, Jeff the Killer and Slenderman. But there were also others, such as The Rake, which was an entity with glowing eyes caught on footage like Bigfoot; Smile Dog, a photograph with red grains of a husky grinning ear to ear with human teeth; Ben Drowned, a concept inspired by a supposed haunted copy of Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask; and of course, my favourite one when I was a teenager, Ticci Toby, a character with a tragic backstory that led him to become a Proxy―former victims of Slenderman that he then claims as agents and puppets. These are merely the well-known ones that are talked about, but others slip under the radar, such as Dr Smiley, Bloody Painter, and The Puppeteer.
These were forms of art that influenced interest in horror, continuing to spawn derivative media as each piece
An ode to the urban legends of the internet and to the cringe teenagers who get it.
of creepypasta was continuously added to. Often taking the form of not just urban legends, but also inspired by themes of serial killers, “lost episodes” of television shows (e.g., Candle Cove, another personal favourite of mine), or even supposed paranormal encounters. Each lore piece of a character was constantly being developed and added to, until eventually, a fully fleshed-out universe of fictional modern-day urban legends was being spread online. Not only are fictional horror stories shared online, but fanfiction, cosplay, and fan art are also driving forces within the fandom.
This is how Creepypasta became the modern age of urban legends and folklore. Instead of being spread orally, they are disseminated digitally through various platforms. The term “copypasta,” a block of text that originates from the internet and is repeatedly copied and pasted across platforms, perfectly captures the rapid online integration that allowed these stories to spread. They function in the same way that modern myths do, by spreading as stories, but with the added power of the internet.
For many, Creepypasta served as a gateway into the world of horror media. However, it also had a darker side. The 2014 Slender Man stabbing in Wisconsin, where two 12-yearolds attacked their friend to appease Slenderman, is a stark reminder of the potential adverse effects of these stories. It’s the element of storytelling that can convince impressionable minds that there is a powerful entity that reigns over the universe, when in actuality, it’s an urban legend created purely to entertain and treated as a campfire story.
But they are just that. Creepypastas. It’s an underrated form of internet mythology that most wouldn’t assume is actually a thing. What started as a gateway for Tumblr and Devinart teenagers in the 2010s created a whole world of screams and cursed emails in the depths of the night.
Also, shout out to the people who took my Which Creepypasta character are you? Quiz on Quotev, you’re a real one.
Written By Tahlia Coward (she/any)
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
part two
Urchin (2024)
Directed by Harris Dickinson Homelessness remains a feature, not a bug, of capitalism and intentionally failed neoliberal reform. For immigrant workers, for working-class families, and for precariously homeless adults and children ‘urchins’. Rising actor and creative Harris Dickinson’s feature film debut swings for the socially critical fences. Centring on Frank Dillane’s excellently played Mike with a colourful and flawed set of supporting roles, including Dickinson’s Nathan as Mike’s foil, Urchin is a manifestation of how frustratingly under-supported and hostile London’s social safety system remains for those most in need. The film opens with Mike waking up on an urban sidewalk as he grows frustrated with a preaching street pastor. He hustles for money and his next warm meal while struggling with his personal demons, eternally trying to find belonging and security through whatever means necessary. Without lived experience, I cannot ascertain the film’s presentation of homelessness compared to reality and how it dismantles or reinforces harmful narratives. However, the audience and I felt the rage, despair, and complexity of Dickinson’s vision.
A Greek tragedy, we rose and fell with Mike while he navigated through fatal flaws prevalent across oppressed, precarious communities from addiction and sobriety to intimacy and the vicious cycle of social services. There is also bittersweet humour in the absurdity around Mike. Precarity can turn first dates into living space shopping. Showing personal growth for a rehabilitation programme can fill impersonal transitional housing with a dated recording of self-help instructions. There is beauty, visual and sociological, in delving as deeply as a sub-100-minute film can for a realistic character study of housing precarity and substance sobriety. Dickinson demonstrates immense promise as a director, even if there is amateurishness evident, further injecting spiritual surrealism into these realist pictures. Sprawling tree
roots. Light-filled caves. DNA strands. The film is bookended by a motif of God and the trilemma debate. If God exists, is she not all-knowing and good? And if so, how can she let evil exist? Mike and his story in Urchin ends in the liminal space between chilling, Mike Leigh-esque realism and religious drug-abetted surrealism, falling, barrelling, lost.
Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) (2024)
Directed by Rohan Parashuram Kanawade
A last-minute addition to my festival schedule, I sprinted (literally) to see queer Indian drama Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) only for my sweaty, stress-ridden state of mind to be met by this film’s opening sequence. 30 year-old city-boy Anand, played outstandingly by newcomer Bhushaan Manoj, rests eyes closed in a long, silently still close-up portrait shot. Anand’s father had finally passed away after a long period under Anand’s dedicated care. Compelled by entrenched customs in India and his chiding mother, they make the journey back to their rural hometown for ten days of mourning. Meditative, the film is beautifully shot and each supporting character has the naturalistic demeanour of non-professional actors playing themselves or someone they know to an incredibly compelling effect. The first Marathi language film to ever premiere at Sundance, debut director Rohan Kanawade hones in on Anand’s time there. His unspeakable loneliness as an impoverished son who left for the city, away from those he knew. His soulful grief for his father, accepting enough of his son’s queerness and clearly beloved by his community. Most of all, his unravelling when met with his childhood friend Balya in their hometown. Their separation, apart from time and cultural stigma rather than any agentic choice, is also met with magical closeness and a kind of chemistry that persists despite the nuanced intersectionalities active in their relationship. Compulsory heterosexuality runs abound while relatives bombard them with constant homophobic expectation of when they will find a female partner and start their lives. As remains common for many, if not most queer non-diaspora Asians, the pair are selectively closeted. Their other priorities pry their attention from each other whilst they always orbit each other in difficulty and in happiness. Balya
grieves for Anand. Anand grieves for Balya. Support and be supported. Connect and disconnect. Love and be loved.
Twinless (2025)
Directed by James Sweeney
Everyone lies. By omission. Partial truths. Little white lies. And it’s harmless, usually. To make someone’s day. To save your skin. To smooth over awkwardness. To a teacher, a recruiter, a stranger. But sometimes a lie gets carried away. You forget what you said. You lie to cover a lie. Consequences build load-bearing pillars of a relationship. Dishonesty lingers; rotting butterflies into a pit in your stomach. To your mates, your loved ones, your other half. So you fess up and amend any damage done. Transparency and forgiveness. Or… you become a freaky pathological liar sucking Dylan O’Brien’s toes as bereavement bonding.
Directed, written, and co-starred by James Sweeney (playing Dennis), Twinless is a must-see, breezy queer dramedy about two lonely souls who have lost their twin. O’Brien soars in his most complexly written character to date as twins Rocky and Roman. Rocky, the (spoilers: freshly dead) golden child of gay promiscuity and self-assuredness; Roman, the straight fuck up bereft with grief. O’Brien and Sweeney’s chemistry, in all its heartachingly beautiful and viscerally disgusting forms, works movie magic for this Sundance film. What Twinless somewhat lacks in depth or substance, it compensates for in style and creative writing. It’s stealing Pokémon from your lover’s childhood closet. It’s accidentally killing your self-insert in Sims. It’s about parasociality and young Americans’ cultural deficiencies in a time of immense individualism. But it’s really about a lie. The most destructive, mythomaniac, and ridiculously camp lie when Roman and Dennis become Twinless
Lesbian
Space Princess (2025)
Directed by Leela Varghese & Emma Hough Hobbs
Lesbian Space Princess is a camp, chaotic, and comprehensive rejection of Australian and Anglospheric cultural conservatism. Directors Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs set the tone
of the “Queer as F*CK Sci-Fi Comedy” film with their in-person introduction at The Civic’s Aotearoa premiere by quoting the queen of drag, RuPaul Charles: “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else, amen”. The lower-budget indie 2D animation, like the audience judging by their raucous energy throughout, felt like a steadfast community of pleasant progressivism with a dying strain of social conviction rooted in playful optimism. Lesbian Space Princess is a true bundle of queer joy and creativity that’s far too rare in cinema, and especially in Australasian cinema. Up-and-comer Shabana Azeez delivers an outstanding voice performance as the titular Princess Saira, showcasing an impressive range that includes singing. I look forward to what Varghese and Hough Hobbs do next, and I join the audience in manifesting more queer, and especially sapphic, cinematic artistry by, about, and for Lesbians in this heteropatriarchal hobby and industry.
Unfortunately, I enjoyed the film less than my peers in the audience and online. More often than not, it undershot the viewer’s readied eagerness to get on board with a bit. Evil penis lairs, vagina extras, deceitful drag queens, and undetectable clitoris planets are fun, but one-note and end up indicating the boundaries of the film’s social critique. A layer or two of irony is missing when the straight white men turn into polyamorous bisexuals, and there is an unacknowledged and likely unintended implication of gender essentialism. Delightful adventures into under-tapped queer creativity also mean potentially undue hyper-awareness about missed opportunities and, in my case, insider-outsider group criticisms. Regardless, Lesbian Space Princess remains a wholly unique and wonderfully fun queer romp.
Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best (2025) Various Directors
It would not be Whānau Mārama (New Zealand International Film Festival) without its competition programmes for short films made in Aotearoa by and about all of our tangata whenua, tagata moana, and tangata tiriti. Formerly, these were respectively the Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika Shorts and New Zealand’s Best Shorts programmes. For the first time ever, these two programmes have merged into Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best 2025. This being in my third year in attendance, I am delighted to review the 13-strong finalists that screened across two programmes at the SkyCity Theatre. From strengths and weaknesses to speeches and cash prizes, let’s see what Aotearoa’s established and up-and-coming creatives in film have to offer in 2025.
Cannes-selected bildungsroman When the Geese Flew, directed and written by Arthur Gay, opened the first programme and tells the story of a boy’s coming-of-age as his older sister gets pregnant and prepares to move out of the family nest. Unwilling
to let go, he fixates on doing one last good deed for her, taking back her stolen motorbike from the local bikers. Set in a crisp mountain valley town, the film treads a familiar narrative path but more than compensates in visual storytelling. Grainy film (simulated or not) accentuates the cold, quiet setting, and the colour grading stunningly adds to the mix of artificial and natural lighting. Its gorgeous cinematography deservedly earns the Best Artistic Contribution Award for Cinematographer Michael Cong.
Co-Winner of the Letterboxd Award for Māori Pasifika Talent is one of my personal standouts, Picking Crew, directed and written by Tanu Gago. Identifying and resisting racialised masculinity, the Samoan main character joins an apple farm picking crew, working, sleeping, and praying at the farm. As helpfully identified in the Q&A afterwards, “loneliness in Pacific men is exposed in a meaningful way”. Loneliness by compulsory machismo against softer forms of masculinity. Towards a Samoan form of the heteropatriarchy against queer masculinity, whilst remaining grounded in the characters’ lives and experiences despite the film’s runtime constraints. Coherently, freshly fallen apples and their apple trees become a metaphor in this commentary. For the main character, like father, unlike son: “love him, don’t want to be him”.
The first programme continued with a series of short films (un) intentionally depicting womanhood in contemporary Aotearoa to mixed-to-great outcomes, including motherhood, young womanhood, and queer womanhood. Chrysanthemum, directed and written by Jolin Lee, depicted an Asian mother’s grief and how it could manifest in the strangest of circumstances an undying shop-bought Chrysanthemum plant. Lee described the promising film in part as “how grief haunts you and shows up out of nowhere”. By contrast, Our Party, directed and written by Joshua Prendeville, is a class commentary drama starring actors and sisters Davida and Thomasin McKenzie. Unfortunately, I found their bourgeois Parnell-resident characters less than sympathetic, and the screenplay underswung its deliberate use of flawed characters to miss some needed nuance and criticality. Most memorably, and opening to possibly the loudest hoots and hollers and of the Sunday afternoon was queer tragicomedy Wild Nights, Wild Nights! directed and written by Alex Farley. Bluntly summarised, a gay girlfailure struggles to leave her toxic relationship with a newly engaged closet case who wears her ring out clubbing and laughs along with lesbianphobic jokes from her straight mates. Despite some inconsistent writing and a limited budget, I find Farley’s intention admirable in showing that “women are allowed to be complex and messy in love”.
However, my favourite foray into womanhood in the first programme was Stella Reid’s Stage Challenge starring an ensemble cast of diverse young women as part of Toi Whakaari down in Welly. A high school comedy, the film is inspired by the pandemic, when the girls gather after school to prepare for a ‘Stage Challenge’ dancing performance competition. Chock full of camp and heart in equal parts, the film accurately captures the priorities and anxieties of youth and young women in 2020s Aotearoa. The girls panicking at an emergency mobile alert. A girl in a globe costume vaping. The girls’ silly self-seriousness when incorporating oil spills into their dance “about the future”. A girl suffering the grooming of a music teacher reminiscent of Epsom Girls Grammar headlines last year. This film is a true standout, and I am ecstatic that it won the Wellington UNESCO Creative City of Film Emerging Talent Award.
After a half-hour de facto intermission, the second programme felt like the first’s darker, more dramatic sibling. These dramas included character study films Growing Still, directed by Alyx Duncan, Nausea, directed and written by Elliott Louis McKee, and I Am Not Your Dusky Maiden, directed by Vea Mafile’o. Growing Still, what I found to be the slightly less captivating of the three, focused on an elderly woman in rest home care and her inseparable connection to nature. Winner of the Auckland Live Spirit of the Civic Award, the film delved into surrealism and highlighted the lonely and unsafe insufficiencies plaguing rest homes and palliative care facilities, including tacit reliance on unreliable and unpaid relatives to pick up the slack of overworked and understaffed rest home workers.
In turn, Nausea was shot 14 years ago; its significantly delayed release a testament to the need for further film industry investment and mental health crises in Aotearoa. Dedicated to loved ones Arlo MacDiarmid and Mick Innes, the film earned a Special Mention from the Jury. Set in the south, it beautifully highlighted what the Q&A noted as the “corporatisation of farming and the dissipation of what masculine southern men value” when confronted with men’s mental health.
My favourite of the three, I Am Not Your Dusky Maiden is a psychothriller drama elevated by Nora Aati’s stellar performance as someone with dissociative identity disorder. Taking place exclusively in a therapist’s room during a therapy session, Aati convincingly and fluidly engages and disengages from her character’s various selves as she processes an abusive relationship. Without spoiling its ending, Nora Aati more than deserves her Jury Best Performance Award.
More than retaining and expanding on Māori cinema and emerging Māori creatives post-merge, there were three shorts that unconventionally presented Māori life in contemporary Aotearoa. Allan George’s Mirumiru, an end-of-life fantasy drama and the sole animated short of this year’s selection, focuses on a kuia and koro at a healthcare facility. While she’s losing her memory to dementia, including their memories together in a creatively depicted relationship, he gathers their memories into their whānau waka and recounts them to her. Simple and dialogue-less, the film was wonderfully thoughtful and was the Co-Winner of the Letterboxd Award for Māori Pasifika Talent.
Puti, directed and written by journalist and creative Aroha Awarau, similarly worked with its somewhat limited budget by screening in black and white and shooting in public around Wesley, Tāmaki Makaurau. The titular Puti is a single, struggling Māori mum and, as intentionally indicated by Awarau, represented not a movie or news story but reality.
Finally, Womb, directed and written by Ira Hetaraka, stood out as an expertly directed drama about a Māori girl adopted into a white family and how a Māori nanny complicates discourse about cross-cultural and colonial adoption practices. Winning the Umbrella Entertainment Best Short Film Award, the film imbued soulful significance into understanding and speaking reo Māori. Notably, the film opened with a live horse birth, achieved with great patience according to the Q&A, with horses remaining thematically important throughout the film. From cradle to grave, Māori lives and stories matter in all forms and nuances Toitū te Tiriti.
Ending the 13-film screenings was one of my favourite films of the day, Cantonese action romcom Let’s Settle This. The film, directed and written by Jack Woon, played to the audience, including myself, and is wholeheartedly deserving of the Audience Award, which was given to audience attendees, including myself, as a ballot voting system after each programme. Focused on romantic ‘yuanfen’ or ‘fateful red string theory’, the kung fu film is set in an Auckland Cantonese restaurant. The central pair arrive for a first date, and after some back-and-forth, engage in a delightfully eccentric battle over the bill. Cultural dining practices abound, particularly endearing to me since I follow these practices with renewed loyalty, this film’s attention to detail was magical to experience. Its audience award was earned with every tightly choreographed kung fu sequence, every witty exchange of Cantonese dialogue, and every self-aware indulgence in C-drama tropes.
Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best 2025 was an outstanding experience of Aotearoa’s diverse creativity, from people turning into trees and kung-fu masters to personal firsts in Māori animation and Pasifika gentle masculinity on screen. I highly recommend that you come see what Aotearoa’s indie film creatives are capable of and choose the next recipient of the Audience Award for years to come. It is only fitting that my review of this outstanding pillar of Whānau Mārama closes my coverage of the 2025 film festival.
From cosmogony and religion to mythology and legend, every culture echoes with stories that shape who we are. But what happens when you never see yourself in those stories?
I grew up religious — 7am Bible study religious. As a girl, I never saw myself in the stories. The women were always framed around men, moving through the pages like diligent cattle. And the few wāhine we can name? They carried the blame. Eve ate the fruit, Sarah laughed in Abraham’s face, Mary… well, enough said.
Not in Te Ao Māori though. Wāhine here are creators, destroyers, healers, storm-bringers — baddies in every sense. Say what you will about the “pagans,” but they always recognised the female essence of nature — the way plants spring from soil, the life-bearing powers of wāhine. In Te Ao Māori, women are the portals of life.
It was Peter Gossage’s books that introduced me to my favourite ātua wāhine, as I quietly thumbed through the glossy pages in the library. Mahuika with her burning manicure, Taranga wrapping Maui’s in her tresses, and Pania with her purple lips and sea green hair.
These wāhine embodied aspects of the natural world. They are forever part of the infinite push and pull, and frankly? They weren’t just baddies, they were the blueprint.
Here are some of my favourites (and some my friends thought deserved the crown).
Hinenuitepō/Hinetītama
Obsidian teeth in her teke; Need I say more?
Song: Deathbeds by Bring me the Horizon / Work Song by Hozier
Hinenuitepō is the ātua of death, and she gives off major emo vibes. Think liquid black eyeliner, a septum piercing, and a playlist titled “SADGIRL HOURS.” But, she wasn’t always that way.
She began as Hinetitama, the dawn maiden - the first woman born, and the child of Tane Mahuta and Hineahuone.
Tane, being deceitful and frankly, a major creep hid her parentage from her, and made her his wife. When she found out, she declared nah FUCK THAT ( valid crash out) and gapped it to Rarohenga where she lives still, guiding the souls of the dead.
Death remains the ultimate final boss: she will eventually claim everyone. Hinenuitepō even has Maui on her kill count. Maui heard that he could defeat death by entering via her coochie, but when a pīwakawaka awoke her she crushed him with the obsidian teeth in her teke, and the strongest thigh grip in the universe.
Mahuika
Red flame. No acrylic, no gel.
Songs: Sweat (A La La La La Long) by Inner Circle / Escapism by RAYE
Mahuika is fire embodied. She lives in the heart of a volcano at the end of the earth. I imagine she has a collection of vinyl records, and spends her days smoking and manicuring her nails. Mahuika, like any baddie, just wants to be left alone. But, when
Maui came knocking (bloody mischief again, have some respect for your aunties) she gave him each of her fingernails of flame, which he placed in the trees to make fire. And he kept coming back, ten times, until she unleashed her fire on him.
And did she obliterate him on the spot? No, she showed restraint. Mahuika is a patient ātua, but like most wāhine, push her too far and she will mess you up.
Whaitiri
Very Freaky Gal
Song: Looking for the hoes (Ain’t my fault) by Sexxy red / TYRANT by Beyonce
Whaitiri is the deity of thunder and storms, with a skin like the wind and a heart as cold as snow. And, she’s somewhat unhinged. She’s definitely the type to slash your tires for looking at another girl; get into fights in the club, and if it all else fails - eat you. Yes, so what if she was a cannibal? A girl’s gotta eat.
Whaitiri had her eye set on a tāne named Kaitangata. When she married him and found out that he was not in fact on that Armie Hammer freak shit she threw a huge fit and stormed back off to the sky. Sometimes, you just gotta be a little bit dramatic.
Hine Kōrako
Pro-Choice Queen / ANTI weaponized incompetence
Song: People by Libianca
Hine Kōrako is a taniwha/mermaid/ marakihau/water spirit who lives in a studio apartment under Te Reinga Falls. A nature girly through and through she spends her days swimming and sunbathing by the falls. She’s the one who guided the Takitimu to our shores.
Like many mythological baddies, Hine Kōrako was cursed, spiritually bound to her form. She met Tane-Kino, a human, and they fell in love. She eventually had a child, but due to her nature she made Tane-Kino promise her that she wanted nurse it, wash it, or care for it. So Tane-Kino was changing nappies and bottle-feeding (as he should) until he couldn’t take it anymore (typical) and Hine Kōrako fled back to her studio apartment in Te Reinga.
Papatūānuku
It’s giving MOTHER
Song: Me & U by Tems / Woman by Doja Cat
Papatuanuku was a very busy lady, but she always had time for her mans. The mother of the earth, she was wedded to Ranginui the sky father, and they were locked together in an eternal embrace. They went on to have SEVENTY CHILDREN who were trapped between their bodies in the darkness. No wonder our girl was tired.
Tane Mahuta, the God of the trees eventually separated them. Not that Papa doesn’t have stuff to do, like oh I don’t know, give life to all things, but sis has been longing for her mans ever since. They still face time every night though.
Hinekauorohia
Diamonds and Divine Feminine
Song: So Fresh, So Clean by OutKast
Peak spiritual baddie. She swears by her crystal collection, CBD oil, and mirimiri. She refuses to stray from the maramataka. Anti-capitalist but pro-drip, she’s got a weakness for the finer things. Her name literally means “to adorn,” so of course she would be the freelance yoga instructor, rongoā expert, and stylist everyone wants in their corner. The tohunga take her seriously — she’s on their speed dial.
And in pūrākau? She’s not just vibes. When Tāne Mahuta climbed to the heavens in search of the kete of knowledge, Hinekauorohia was the one who cleansed him with the divine waters, making sure he was ready to carry that wisdom back down. That’s her: always healing, always flash, always lifting others into their own mana.
Rohe (wife of Maui)
Face-card that never declines
Song: Hot Girl Summer by Megan Thee Stallion
Rohe is an underrated baddie, with a face-card so lethal that her husband, Mauī tried to steal it. She was the sister of the sun, so you know her glow was next level. I like to think Rohe spent her days lounging by the pool, modelling, and rolling her eyes at Māui’s exploits.
Rohe is most commonly associated with Moriori tradition; the indigenous people of Rēkohu (Chatham Islands). Legend has it that Mauī knew he was punching so he tried to steal her face. Rohe refused, so he killed her using black magic, introducing evil into the world. She returned in spirit just to kill him, and claimed her throne as ruler of the underworld.
Now she spins under the name DJ Eclipse at the Rarohenga Nightclub, serving looks and beats that remind everyone: even death itself is on her side.
Acknowledgements: Suggestions from some other baddies of Te Ao Māori: Rihi Salter , Kristina Cavit, and Te-Amo Fox.
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The Highlights from Cannes at NZIFF
Cannes is a prestigious international film festival held in the French Riviera. It’s a, if not the, key event at the start of the cinematic year. Films that premiere at Cannes are often early frontrunners for Academy Awards.
The New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF) is the first time we can see Cannes premieres in our theatres, coming ahead of theatrical releases or even North American openings in some cases. This year, there were plenty of Cannes favourites on offer. This includes the opening night film, It Was Just An Accident, which was the Palme d’Or (top prize) winner at Cannes. While I was nearly overwhelmed with films to see, with a few devastating clashes, these are a few highlights from Cannes that I was able to watch.
It Was Just An Accident Director: Jafar Panahi
Iran, France, Luxembourg
Palme D’Or Winner
It was refreshing to see a Cannes favourite with so much nuance, particularly at a time when Iranian voices are being flattened in the West. It Was Just An Accident follows an Iranian man who was complicit in torture, however, it also centres on Iranian men who are kind and loving family members. It shows women who are fierce in their resistance, and the women who choose, decision by decision, to uphold such an oppressive regime. The film lets you figure out its tone and who plays what role for yourself. It eases you with moments of black comedy, then hits you with a gut-punching monologue. It feels authentic - although it’s filmed so seamlessly,
it’s hard to imagine it was filmed in secret, illegally. When you feel the very human push-and-pull between forgiveness and revenge that anchors the storyline, you can see exactly why Panahi’s work rocks so many people.
Eddington Director: Ari Aster United States
It’s hard to convey why I like this film so much without spoiling some of the themes that emerge with the ending. However, if ‘just trust me’ isn’t enough to convince you to see it and you don’t mind soft spoilers, then keep reading. This film is an exploration of people's responses to COVID-19, but it’s also a criticism of corporate power. Especially when it comes to corporations’ lobbying power (no matter what “side”) for their own interests. In this - intentionalconfusion, Eddington urges us to reckon with the slippery few taking advantage of people's distrust and uncertainty. This is not a centrist, “both sides are bad” film, but one that uses outspoken voices (Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal) to poke holes in the American political landscape. It’s also a true Western, there are guns and murder, and it’s unexpectedly funny. Even if it isn’t without flaws.
The Mastermind
Director: Kelly Reichardt United States
Kelly Reichardt is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Her films generally offer refreshing takes on tried
and true genres. The Mastermind, the Reichardt version of a crime/heist movie, is no exception. While this is definitely a heist movie, it is not an action film. Josh O’Connor (still riding the high of Challengers’ cultural impact) plays the lead, James Mooney. Mooney is a criminal, but not a criminal mastermind. He is a burnout father bumbling his way through life as a lousy family man. Despite the glaringly obvious backdrop, he also ignores the reality of American life in the early 1970s - including the Vietnam War. The film captures the day-by-day creep up of both family responsibility and the political climate to Mooney, culminating in an excellent conclusion.
O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent) Brazil, France, Netherlands, Germany Won Best Actor, Best Director
Brazilian cinema is at a captivating moment, becoming an even larger global force. Fresh off a Best International Feature win with last year’s I’m Still Here at the Academy Awards, it was exciting to see Brazil profiled at NZIFF. It was even more exciting to see another film reckoning with the horrors of living under Brazil’s 1970s military dictatorship. Notably, The Secret Agent is not a straightforward, tragic drama with some political undertones. It is a vibrant exploration of the impact of an oppressive government on families, told through a father trying to protect his son. It is ideologically driven as much as it is driven by a nostalgia for Brazil’s cultural past. While not perfect, it is exactly the kind of film I’d hope would get people talking. Wagner Moura is incredible as the lead Marcelo, firmly cementing himself as an actor who deserves the label of a star.
Put Your Soul In Your Hand and Walk Director: Sepideh Farsi France, Palestine, Iran
Put Your Soul In Your Hand and Walk is a significant documentary film. It follows Fatima Hassona, a photojournalist in Gaza, in a year-long series of video calls with director Sepideh Farsi. It chronicles Hassona’s life during Israel’s war on Gaza, and her desire to document what is happening. While many of us see lots
it’s rare that we are able to follow the story of one person for so long, and in such a humanising light. Israel is clearly afraid of the impact a film like this can have. They murdered Hassouna and her family in a targeted strike the day after this film was selected for Cannes. I didn’t agree with every creative decision or question asked by Farsi, but it’s overwhelmingly still more important that the film was made at all. Hassona said on social media that if she died, she wanted a loud death. This film makes that possible.
My Father’s Shadow Nigeria, United Kingdom
My Father’s Shadow is the first Nigerian film to ever premiere at Cannes. It is a semi-autobiographical drama, written by director Akinola Davies Jr, along with his brother Wale Davies. The film takes place over a single day, following a father and his sons amongst growing political unrest in Lagos. The film is shot from the perspective of the sons. We only learn what they know, and there are scenes overlaid by their ideations and interpretations of the world. The casting of real-life brothers Chibuike Marvellous Egbo and Godwin Egbo lends the relationships more authenticity, particularly as the brothers have both a real bond as well as huge talent. The overall result is a heartfelt exploration of their father/son relationships, and a beautiful tribute to a flawed, but respected figure of the sons’ imaginations.
Top 5 Campus Cryptids
BIGFOOT
An athlete since his youth, the basketball prodigy Bigfoot (he/him) is pursuing his studies in Environmental Science and Conservation - but his real passion and pursuit is a career in basketball. When he’s not chatting up baddies over a beer or 4, you’ll find Bigfoot working on his jump-shot and emulating his favourite characters from the popular anime ‘Kuroko no Basketball’. While he does have a sincere love and care for the environment and deeply wishes to contribute to its conservation (in the vein of his hero David Attenborough), he is often sidetracked from his studies by his basketball training, anime watching, and habitual puffing on the devil’s lettuce.
Starsign: Sagittarius
Cafe Order: Large iced mocha with an extra shot of espresso, whipped cream on top, and a chocolate drizzle.
MOTHMAN
Described by his few university friends as a bit of an intense and brooding character, Mothman (he/him) is embarking on a study of Structural Engineering with a particular personal focus on bridge construction (and demolition). An aspiring E-sports champion (ranked in the global top 100 for both League of Legends and Starcraft 2), Mothman is also a bit of a film buff with an impressive physical media collection of DVDs and VCR tapes from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. His favourite film of all time would be a tossup between Psycho (1960), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and Donnie Darko (2001).
Starsign: Scorpio
Cafe Order: Cold brew — strong
CHUPACABRA
Chupacabra (she/her) has been at the top of every class academically since she was just a little bloodsucking demon girl. With school marks that would ensure entry into any course of study she wanted, Chupacabra eventually opted to hone in on her ADHD hyper-focus of Phlebotomy. If she’s not analysing blood samples in the university lab or chatting online with her long-distance partner Bunyip (working overseas in the Australian mines), she’s playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons with her pals - vicariously living out fantasy adventures as her dark-elf mage character Mr Schneebly.
Starsign: Virgo
Cafe Order: Matcha latte with oat milk, lightly sweetened, plus a chia seed pudding on the side.
an extinct line of ancient sauropods herself, the plucky Palaeontology student is obsessed with all things dinosaur (but don’t ask for her opinion on the Jurassic World films). She is also known locally as the singer of a doom metal band called Precambrian Ejaculation! Her favourite video game is retro Quake, for which she hosts multiplayer LAN parties with her friends where they stay up all night listening to heavy metal and drinking beer - but don’t worry, Mokele-Mbembe ALWAYS stays on top of her university studies.
Starsign: Capricorn
Cafe Order: Double hot chocolate with whipped cream, plus a slice of vegan chocolate cake.
LOCH NESS MONSTER
The Loch Ness Monster (they/them) is, first and foremost, an artist. Eschewing the traditional family study path of Marine Biology for a degree in the Fine Arts (much to the chagrin of Loch Ness Senior), the artist who goes by the professional moniker LNM is one of the most innovative and dynamic sculptors to emerge from the creative arts scene in recent years. If they aren’t conceptualising their next award-winning visual arts masterpiece, you’ll find LNM writing and performing introspective and political slam poetry in various local indie music bars and underground haiku venues.
Starsign: Pisces
Cafe Order: Lavender honey latte & an almond croissant.
MOKELE-MBEMBE
There’s not a cryptid alive who knows more about dinosaurs than Mokele-Mbembe (she/her). Descending from
Written By Stu Paul (he/him)
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
DOPE LEMON:
A Night of Cat Masks and Fedoras
Images By Chloe Tredgett (she/her)
Angus Stone brings his project Dope Lemon to the Auckland Town Hall.
Before the 8th of August, 2025, my knowledge of Angus Stone's psychtinged indie project Dope Lemon was pretty unremarkable and perhaps a bit ignorant. I had only known a song or two back when my 2019 "summer vibes" playlist was my pride and joy. Since then, I've gradually soured (no pun intended) on that surfy, beach bum indie rock era of music, with its spring reverb slapped on every guitar. It's just not what I listen to anymore. So my assumptions about Dope were, for the most part, quite dismissive. For the number of times I'd heard his name brought up, seen his tracks featured on my mates' playlists, or caught a glimpse of a tour poster from the corner of my eye, I never really bothered to delve into Dope's music. That is, until I saw him perform for the first time at the great Auckland Town Hall.
For a bit of background, Sydney-based musician Angus Stone (known from his brother-sister duo Angus & Julia Stone) has been working under the Dope Lemon moniker for almost a decade. The project has garnered a passionate fanbase through his blend of indie rock, psychedelia, and rootsy folk (think Kurt Vile, but for the Triple J-obsessed). Angus's debut album as Dope Lemon, Hustle Bones (2016), was an instant success, resonating immediately with a generation of young millennials (who are now probably van-life influencers). Since then, Angus has been steadily touring and releasing albums. His most recent album, Golden Wolf (2025), has been described as the next chapter of Dope Lemon, with Angus lyrically delving into more mature subject matter, though still maintaining his signature carefree attitude in the process.
As mentioned before, I had some hesitancy when it came to Dope Lemon, and that was no different for the forthcoming show. I knew he would kill a set at Le Currents or Splore, but...the Auckland Town Hall? Isn't that where the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra plays? It didn't help that the artist known for summery, quasi-hippy indie jams was playing amid a particularly dreary mid-winter night in Auckland. Regardless, my partner and I made our way down Queen Street and queued up behind a line that almost stretched its way to Sky World.
Once we'd shuffled our way into the lavish interior of the hall, we were greeted by blue lights shimmering across the room, transforming an otherwise elegant building into an aquatic acid trip. The crowd was a diverse mix of long-haired surfers with flat caps, cool dads, and a few who dared to sport Hawaiian shirts in 10-degree weather. Soon after we took our spots, the opener took the stage: a Sydney-based duo named PAMELA. The crowd cheered, albeit hesitantly, as I suspect - like me - they had no idea who they were.
They kicked off their set on a slick and sensual note. Guitarist Josh Kempen laid down some spacious, reverb-soaked chords as vocalist Sarah Ellen sang in a hushed and feminine tone that reminded me of The Marías and The xx. As they delved further into their setlist, the duo ran through a gauntlet of tried-and-true indie-pop sounds. Halfway through, Sarah explained that all the songs they were performing were unreleased, and that they were still relatively new to the gigging scene - though it was no surprise they had been tagged to join Dope Lemon on tour, as many of their cuts harkened back to the sounds of Angus & Julia Stone's earlier work. Their performance, though maybe a bit stiff at times, ultimately came together in its final moments - Walk to the Sky being a particularly driving and upbeat highlight. In the end, the band left the stage victorious, winning over the crowd as PAMELA received emphatic applause during their exit.
After PAMELA finished, the stage was set for Dope Lemon, the crowd growing more and more antsy by the minute. Eventually, in a warm haze of orange, Dope's backing band walked on stage one by one, accompanied by a spaghetti western theme song - many of them sporting widebrimmed fedora hats and country boots. Angus was the last one to enter,
wearing his iconic shades and a black blazer, an outfit he's been rocking throughout the entire Golden Wolf rollout.
They immediately kicked into the first song, Stonecutters. Warm, fuzzy guitars rang out across the hall as the drummer laid down a thumping mid-tempo beat. Heads immediately started nodding as Angus began to sing in his usual ponderous drawl. For someone who hadn't heard the track previously, I was taken aback by how bluesy it sounded, with duelling guitar licks building a wall of sound that intensified during its final moments. How Many Times doubled down on the blues rock sound, this time with a more lumbering and foreboding groove. As the band chugged along like a coal-powered engine, I found myself becoming ever more entranced by the psychedelic effects and distorted harmonica wails. Quite frankly, it was an unexpected yet explosive start to the show that blew my presumptions about Dope's music right out of the water.
“John Belushi”, the first song played off the new album, only surprised me further, as two people awkwardly shuffled on stage wearing comically oversized cat masks. The two started dancing like they had just smoked a joint before going on stage, hilariously giving minimal effort to impress the crowd. Though in any other show it might have been a bemusing gimmick, the cat dancers were perfect for Dope Lemon's spaced-out demeanour. The cats then exited (albeit with the help of the crew) to transition into the next song, “Marinade”, Dope's biggest hit. A woman immediately shoved her way past me to get up front, and as I looked around, almost everyone in the stands was on their feet. The track went off without a hitch, and even as someone who never had an emotional connection to the song, I couldn't help but feed off the immense bliss radiating from the crowd.
The show went full slacker mode with “Slinging Dimes”, a newer cut with idealistic lyrics about flowing down a river with "a big bear named Moe." The lax sentiment was the perfect comedown before finishing off the show with some of Dope's biggest hits. “Honey Bones”, which saw Angus switching out his electric guitar for a sitar, ambled in its psychedelic serenity, aided by bongo taps and the drones of Angus's aforementioned sitar. The band came to a raucous climax, jamming over a wash of delayed vocals and Hindi-inspired melodies.
“Rose Pink Cadillac “was another song fans were eager to hear, with its tight, upbeat guitar rhythm lending itself to one of the grooviest moments of the night. Then there was Uptown Folks, the most urgent-sounding song of the entire night. While Angus played it pretty low-key for the majority of the performance, this was the moment I most felt his presence as a frontman, showing that he could sound just as good when he was giving it his all. The song's final moments saw him triumphantly holding up his guitar to the audience as the band crescendoed to a grand and powerful finale.
The band and Angus then made their exit, waving to the uproarious crowd. Yet it wasn't long before they made a swift entrance back onstage for the encore. The keyboard player busted out the all-too-familiar "da-da-da" chant from Slice of Heaven. The crowd followed suit, ushering a dancing Angus back onto the stage for the final track of the night, Home Soon (my personal favourite Dope Lemon song). It was a jubilant closer, the hall lit up with everyone's best moves. The big cat heads reappeared once more, filling the stage and turning what should have been a chilly winter's night into a jubilant summer dance party.
As the show wrapped up and I found myself strolling back out onto Queen Street, I couldn't help but feel delighted at how wrong my presumptions were about Dope Lemon. Once simple-minded about Angus' music, his Town Hall performance proved the man can deliver on all fronts, from Blues Rock bangers to blissful and groovy indie pop. With just enough surprises, the night was an unforgettable experience, despite some performances being a bit too easygoing for my liking. Still, I was thoroughly entertained throughout the night, as I'm sure the rest of the crowd would agree.
Written By `Jed Scott (he/him)
If, like me, you were a preteen or teen in the 2010s, you’ve probably heard of at least one vampire-themed book, movie or TV show. Whether it’s Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Hotel Transylvania, or perhaps something else entirely, if you haven’t watched it or read it, you’ve at least seen people talking about it.
In 1819, the world was introduced to the concept of vampire media, with its origin often attributed to John Polidori’s short story, "The Vampyre." With the introduction of the elegant and charming aristocrat Lord Ruthven, who preyed on unsuspecting individuals in high society, the sophisticated vampire trope was born. His ability to seduce the innocent was a major change from previous vampires, whose main aspects were purely physical horror. 1897 is also noted as an important year for early vampire media, with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dracula was the first vampire book to ever gain such iconic notoriety, serving as the foundational text for subsequent adaptations such as Nosferatu (also believed by some to be copyright infringement) and the book Interview with the Vampire, both in the 20th century.
This now brings us to the modern age and the height of vampire media: the 2000s. Unlike their predecessors, these vampires were written as teens and young adults who were trendy and fun nothing like the sophisticated trope of yesteryear. With the success of the book series The Vampire Diaries by LJ Smith, and television network, The CW, having greenlit its TV show adaptation in 2009, the lives of vampires, werewolves and witches quickly had youth on the edge of their seats. When I was 12 and 13, I couldn’t go more than a week without people talking about who they preferred out of the show's two male leads, Damon and Stefan. One girl I knew insisted she looked like the actress who played the female lead, Nina Dobrev. During that time, I, too, binge-watched The Vampire Diaries, imagining I was one of the edgy, cool characters, unlike the real me, who constantly wore pink and was part of the drama club.
In a similar vein, the 2000s-written (main) Twilight (20052008) book series spawned several movies, becoming a hit phenomenon with girls everywhere. The success of the books' live-action counterparts meant that even in the mid-2010s, people were talking about Twilight and The Vampire Diaries almost over ten years after their initial releases. Admittedly, I didn’t watch Twilight during its initial release, as I insisted I was too cool for it, being a Vampire Diaries supremacist and all. Despite that, last year I decided to watch the Twilight movies for the first time, and they were seriously a fun watch! I think a key reason why I didn’t watch it was because I thought it was too cheesy, which, I mean, it is…but that’s a part of the fun. Alongside the surge of popularity with vampire media, the 2010s also made online-based fandoms mainstream, connecting people of mutual interests and being the source of several memes, such as “This is the skin of a killer” and “Bella, where have you been, loca?”. Even to this day, there are still Twilight TikTok memes in active circulation, as well as many brands having released collaborations with the franchise over recent years. With its 20th anniversary this year, who knows what merchandise die-hard fans are in store for?
In an IJELS journal article titled, Popularity of Vampire Fiction among Teenage Masses, it states, “Teenage is a period of growing minds and hearts … during this age, they grow some kind of unknown fascination for the fantasy world. In the modern day, they are obsessed with vampires. Edward Cullen, is that dreamy guy whom every girl desires, despite the fact that he is also the harbinger of death.” Basu also comments that, as life and living is a teen's only wish, “Most of the girls want to be bitten once by Edward after reading the novel to attain an immortal and young life.”
Despite this analysis and it being true for some fans, I never cared that much about the guys in vampire media. Yeah, they’re attractive, but I greatly preferred the girls, with their major main character syndrome and fun outfits. I would be lying if I said I didn’t wear Vampire Diaries’ Elena-inspired
outfit, featuring a red top paired with a black leather jacket and skinny jeans. In this new era, women in vampire media weren’t only fashionable, but badass heroines too. No longer restricted to damsels in distress or seductresses (but instead with actual personalities), characters like Sarah from My Babysitter's A Vampire (2011) and Mavis from Hotel Transylvania (2012) were created with knowing how to kick serious butt in mind. In Monster High (2010-2017), vampire character Draculaura rocks both girly pink and dark, gothic outfits. Breaking norms and challenging traditional vampire stereotypes in such fashion I’d say she definitely inspired some of my style growing up.
The release of both My Babysitter's A Vampire and Hotel Transylvania left preteen me in a complete state of awe. These movies weren’t brooding dramas; instead, fun comedies with a dark edge. In My Babysitter’s A Vampire, Ethan, upon starting high school, meets his preteen sister's babysitter (and recently turned vampire), Sarah. To ease his suspicions and find out what’s really going on with the babysitter, Ethan pairs up with his friends Benny and Rory with wacky shenanigans to commence. This movie, like several others in its time, has a certain slapstick humour of undeniable likability. Think Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010), but with vampires in it. This new spin on the vampire genre created a more entertaining side to vampires, fit for both younger and older audiences.
Both Hotel Transylvania and My Babysitter's A Vampire parody Twilight to some extent, with the former showing a short clip of an animated version of Twilight on a television screen, with Dracula expressing in disbelief, “This is how we’re represented nowadays?”. In My Babysitter's A Vampire, the Twilight movies are called “Dusk”, with funny Easter eggs of Dusk inserted throughout, and the location of the film’s climax at a screening of Dusk III Unbitten.
Aside from girls crushing on Edward from Twilight, I think one of the key reasons why vampire culture was so prev-
alent in preteen and teen media is that it’s both fun and a form of escapism. Consuming vampire media, whether book or film, helps us feel cooler and edgier, and aside from myself, I’ve met several others who can say vampire media introduced them to certain music and fashion subcultures. Despite the personality and portrayal of vampires changing over time, they have always been prevalent in people's hearts. And with Twilight recently announcing that the whole saga will come back to cinemas soon, that begs the question: will the love for vampires ever truly die or stay immortal?
Written By Caitlin Gill (She/Her)
WRITER
Q: 21 She Her Hi Tashi!
Okay so I’m dating literally the best guy I’ve ever been with. Like, I mean it. He’s kind, funny, smart, emotionally available (??? I know), we talk for hours, we’re weird in the same ways, the sex is amazing, and I feel actually safe and happy for the first time ever. He even listens when I talk about my feelings. Like this is the type of man you keep.
So why am I writing to you???
It’s just... okay. He lives with two flatmates, and we hang out at his place a lot (since I still live at my parents’ house with both of my siblings!). And it’s totally fine. They’re chill. It’s fine. But one of them... one of them is this annoyingly attractive gym guy with a perfect jaw and, like, a calm vibe. He’s the kind of person who makes you feel like everything’s okay just by handing you a cup of tea. We watch the same dumb shows, he always remembers little things I say, and he’s just... there. All the time. Being all nice and warm and hot.
And the way he is with his dog?? I can’t. He talks to her in this soft voice, like full baby talk, and she loves him. He always knows exactly what she needs, food, a walk, cuddles, without her even making a sound. Like he’s emotionally in sync with his dog?? It’s illegal levels of attractive.
Anyway. I’ve started fantasising about him. A lot. Like way too much. Like, vivid, not-just-a-passing-thought fantasies. And I hate it. I feel so guilty and gross and confused. I love my boyfriend. I don’t want to be with anyone else. But my brain won’t stop and now I feel like I’m cheating just by thinking.
How do I stop obsessing over someone I literally don’t even want to date??? Why is my brain like this??? Please help before I spiral further.
A: Firstly, congratulations on finding a kind and funny guy who’s good at sex and listens when you talk about your feelings. That’s basically like finding an affordable flat close to the city with functioning heat pumps and natural light. Rare, precious, hold onto that.
Now, onto The Flatmate. Our minds work in peculiar ways, but the experience you’re describing is as common as mosquitoes on a summer night. I know my heart would throb a little if I were faced with a dog-loving, tea-making gym boy smouldering at me from the kitchen. Your brain is just doing what brains do, collecting stimuli and spinning out horny daydreams like an over-caffeinated Wattpad author.
But here’s the key point: fantasy ≠ betrayal. Humans are messy. We’re full of contradictions, tug-of-wars, and projections. Attraction isn’t linear or logical; it’s rooted in early longings, attachment needs, and unconscious wishes. This means your mind sometimes latches onto a Golden Retriever Man and tells you a raunchy romcom story without you asking for it. And romcoms exist for a reason: they tap into the universal wish to be perfectly seen and understood.
When I read your letter, the part that stood out to me most was your mention of the dog. I think the dog is important here. Before you get insulted, bear with me, I will explain my work.
You’re not just noticing the Flatmate, you’re identifying with the dog.
The way he intuits her needs without words? That’s a universal fantasy. We wish all of our needs could be immediately met without having to ask. We all want to feel perfectly understood, doted on, and loved unconditionally. The issue is, you’re not a dog.
I don’t think your fantasy is about actually wanting him; it’s about what he represents.
So how do we stop you spiralling further? First things first, name the projection. What you’re feeling isn’t really about him; it’s a fantasy of being wordlessly understood.
Secondly, you need to quit feeding the fantasy beast. If you catch yourself mentally scripting a novella starring you and Dog Dad, try to redirect your mind. Don’t berate yourself in the process! Negative reinforcement is not a healthy learning method. Try to be kind while attempting to swap out your daydreams.
Thirdly, watch for the cracks. Attractive people are, I shit you not, just people. Next time he leaves dishes in the sink or wears socks with holes in them, notice it. Remember that he may be fit and good with dogs, but he might also be a selfish lover. Build a counter-narrative to combat the illusions.
I’d also like you to try to reframe the guilt you’re feeling. You’re not cheating, and you’re not planning on cheating either. You’re a human animal with a giant, contradictory brain, which is coincidentally our largest sex organ, and sometimes it projects happily-ever-after stories onto the nearest chiselled jawline.
I want to congratulate you on the wisdom you’ve already displayed: you’re able to recognise that your wishful fantasy is different from what you really want and value in your current partner. Your boyfriend isn’t a trope; he’s a person who makes you feel safe, comfortable being weird around, and who makes you happy.
Remember, you’re not “gross” or “bad” for having these thoughts. You’re a human. Enjoy your amazing boyfriend, pat the dog, and let the rest dissolve like candy floss in the rain.
The Gods Trapped in My Uncle’s Paintings
Social Media Coordinator’s Note: Kia ora! It’s still me, but I have begun the process of legally changing my name from Cameron to Maebh.
You can find me on the internet as LEIGH (For my music & art) or as Maebh everywhere else.
Art of Gods
A redraw by Maebh LEIGH McCurdy of:
“The Táin: The Morrígan in bird shape” by Louis le Brocquy, 1964.
There is a God on my arm. The Morrígan, a goddess from Irish-Celtic mythology. Three sisters trapped in one shapeshifting being, often taking the form of a raven or crow. Her existence and her worship can be traced tangibly as far back as the 7th Century. But these days she is mostly prayed to by followers of post-Christian paganism. I’m not a witch (As cool as that would be), and my reverence for her is far more tied to my worship of art and the human practice of mythologisation. The Morrígan was something I found when I went looking for a metaphor.
I had the luck of getting my first two tattoos from my favourite tattoo artist, Veronica Grace Brett. I picked my self-designed first D&D character’s Thieves’ Guild logo (My first experience getting “she/her”’d), and Louis le Brocquy’s painting of The Morrígan in crow form (To celebrate my transition, my album, my band, and the modern witchcraft that is hormone replacement therapy).
A redraw by Maebh LEIGH McCurdy of: “Freya” by Johannes Gehrts (1901), “Artemis” by Jen Zee (2019), and “Lilith” by John Collier (1887)
“May I have your name?” Asks the fae when you meet her.
“Cameron”, you say innocently, as if you were only making acquaintance and not entering into a pact with an otherworldly being. Even as you say your own name, you find that it isn’t yours anymore. You will never be able to say it again. The fae, however, adds it to her collection, and leaves you in return with something you didn’t know you had been looking for.
Last year I wrote a song using this concept as a metaphor for gender transition. The process of a fae stealing your deadname, and in turn granting you safe passage to “the other side”. This was when I stumbled upon Uaimh na gCat (Cave of the Cats), the mythological home of The Morrígan, who guarded it as a passage between this world and Tír na nÓg, or “The Otherworld”, where the Irish Gods of old live. The real-life cave is near a standing stone worshipping the historical “Queen Medb”, a name I had been circling, and have taken like a fae for my own.
The song “FAE: Tuatha Dé Danann” came out in June, along with 12 others, and The Morrígan appeared all over the album’s lyrics. I started referring to myself and my three-headed live band (Jessie, Kieren, and Josh) as “LEIGH & the Morrígan”. In late August,
But I don’t worship any God. I treat all religious texts the same way I do a book of Irish Celtic mythology, or learning about the Olympic Gods through Percy Jackson and Hades. The human ability to mythologise the world around us is one of my favourite things in the world. I feel kinship to some Gods or religious/ mythological figures, and reverence for others. Freya from the Old Norse, Artemis from Ancient Greece, and Lilith (Adam’s first wife) from Mesopotamian and Jewish Mythology.
But the deities that occupy most of my mind aren’t deities at all. Or at least, not formally. The deities that inspire me and that I think of daily are the beings trapped in my uncle’s paintings.
Uncle Algernon
A redraw by Maebh LEIGH McCurdy of: “Inquisitor.” (2016) & “veteran.” (2020) by Stephen McCurdy.
My uncle, Stephen McCurdy, is an ex-composer and producer, having composed the theme for the 1980s TV show Gloss; composed a song for the Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
soundtrack; and produced Shona Laing’s 1988 album South. It wasn’t until his fortieth birthday, when my cousins bought him a set of paints, that he took up painting. And boy did he paint.
To me, as a child, he was “Uncle Algernon” (Although neither of us can quite remember why). My first musical moment was a note out of his trumpet at the age of two, and he used to sing me Tom Waits as bedtime lullabies. Since I was a little girl, his house has been filled with canvases. Hundreds and hundreds of paintings, in a seemingly never-ending stream. They’re not easy things to look at for most people, but every single one is beautiful. Should they catch your eye, his website is an archive of them all.
When I’m not making music as LEIGH, or running the website/ social media for Debate Magazine, I’m making comics. One of which is a fantasy series called Mixtumq. When creating a world from scratch, one of the hardest things to create when worldbuilding is an original mythology. There are things that live in my uncle’s paintings, tortured and beautiful souls. A power that looks back at you. I found that I’d already found my deities; I just had to work out their domains.
veteran.
“veteran.” (Previously titled “revenant. Veteran.”) Acrylic on board by Stephen McCurdy (2020).
“The Journal’s Dream-Watcher in Morfikdell” from Mixtumq #1: Artois by Maebh LEIGH McCurdy (2023)
“Veteran.” was a painting I first saw on my uncle’s website in 2020. We called during the first level-four COVID lockdown and talked about it. He first named it “revenant.”, French for “the returned”. And then it looked to him like a veteran. It looked like somebody with PTSD, coming back. Since 2020, it has hung in my bedroom. Earlier this year, it moved into the living room, where it stares into Feature Editor Tashi Donnelly’s soul while she gets high in the evenings. When I look into this painting's eyes, I see the ghost of a husband, returning scarred from WWII, who carries a cello in his hand, just out of frame.
The Journal
Always wandering, always watching, always taking note. This deity of peace and war, life and death, past and present - has walked The Material Plane since its beginning. Most, by the end of their lifetime, have spoken with it. Most, by the middle of their lifetime, have seen it. All, at the beginning of their lifetime, have heard of it. A tall, stone-skinned humanoid, face like a mask, expressionless, wearing its long military-style coat, and always with a drink and a book in hand.
It is the observations of The Journal that The Inquisitor bases its judgements upon. It is the punishments of The Traum that The Journal bases its observations upon.
inquisitor.
Acrylic on canvas, 46cm by 61cm, by Stephen McCurdy (2016). “This is a painting that wasn’t planned. It took shape on the can-
vas quite quickly and without much conscious consideration. Once this character appeared, he felt distressingly familiar. His mouth resulted from experiments with teeth; his absent eyes are a happy consequence of admitting my failure to paint anything that worked. A few people seem to like this painting a lot. More don’t.” I’m a part of the “like this painting a lot” camp. It has hung above my bed for the last five years, and I find great comfort in being in its presence. I recognise that it is terrifying, but it is a worthy price to pay for the inspiration it gives me.
The Inquisitor
Always still, always watching, always taking judgement. This deity of fact and fiction, death and rebirth, present and future, has maintained limbo, The Transient Plane, since its beginning. All, at the end of their lifetime, speak with it. Most, by the middle of their lifetime, have made peace with it. All, at the beginning of their lifetime, fear it.
A tall, robed figure. Blue-skinned, tufts of clumps of sharp hair protrude from a head that escapes from the shoulder like a tortoise's. An eyeless, bandaged face, bearing a wide, grate-like, toothy grimace.
It is the observations of The Journal that The Inquisitor bases its judgements upon. It is the judgments of The Inquisitor that The Traum bases its punishments upon.
revenant.
Acrylic on canvas, 56cm by 71cm, by Stephen McCurdy (2022).
Lastly, “revenant.”, a sister-piece to “veteran.” I ended up writing a duet from the perspective of the two paintings, as a husband returning from WWII to find his wife a lesbian (Check out the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra in November if you’d like to hear it), before I realised that she fit the third deity in the mythology perfectly. Eyes that have seen this, eyes that have come back from them, eyes of someone who does what must be done.
The Traum:
Always tempestuous, always watching, always doling fair dues. This deity of crime and punishment, honour and duty, chaos and fear - has fuelled The Voidal Plane since its creation. All, by the end of their lifetime, will face punishment. All, by the middle of their lifetime, have forgotten that they must answer for their decisions. All, at the beginning of their lifetime, will pass through its plane. A feminine humanoid figure, one eye cold and stone to the suffering of humanity, the other eye warm and empathetic to the humanity of suffering.
It is the judgments of The Inquisitor that The Traum bases its punishments upon. It is the punishments of The Traum that The Journal bases its observations upon.
If there were to be a real religion based around my uncle’s paintings and the deities trapped within them, this would be my pitch. My cousin asserts that every painting his father paints contains a penguin hidden just outside of the frame. If you could zoom out, you would find it there, minding its own business. So I say this: Good morning! Do you have a spare moment to talk about our eternal lord and saviour, Penguin-JustOut-of-Frame?
To see more of Stephen’s paintings, visit www.stephenmccurdy.com
Written By Maebh LEIGH McCurdy (she/her) |
