Review of Square One by JayPea
18 November 2024
This review contains spoilers
Yeah this is an interesting one.
On the one hand, the time loop stuff is really interesting, I like the motivations of the main antagonist being wanting to do the right thing but for all the wrong reasons, I like the murder mystery aspect of it, especially with there being so many different things going on all with different explanations so it's one red herring after another. I like the reveal of what's really going on with this conference in the end.
And then there's the misogyny. On the one hand, (at least most of) the explicit misogyny is from explicitly vile characters, and is never treated as a good thing which, you know, it shouldn't be. If you're going to have ex-o-tic dancers being called sluts and bitches in a story like this, it should be shown as a bad thing. But then there's the implicit misogyny. Leela is forced into this role as an exotic dancer against her will, forced to perform for the whims of others, and while she feels uncomfortable doing so and the misogyny directed towards her as she does is explicitly bad, it's still framed in an almost tantalizing way. If this were on TV, you can tell they'd be using Leela in this story as, to paraphrase a well known JNT quote, something the dads will enjoy.
I really want to like this story, and I think without all that it'd be an 8/10, but with it, I have to give it a 6.