This week, we come in hot — starting with wuxia vibes, holiday chaos, and cursed Christmas remixes of “September” — before diving into music stats, Taskmaster binges, Eden’s Wuxia/Baihe adventures, and Peter’s latest reading spree (including Gödel, Escher, Bach). Eventually, we embark on the Most Important Cultural Work of Our Time: a fast-food and fast-casual tier list. Along the way, we crown unexpected champions, bury some long-held myths (looking directly at you, In-N-Out), and declare Waffle House the beating heart of American civilization. It’s unhinged, joyful, occasionally shameful, and fully definitive.

Opening Shenanigans

• Eden opens with an incredible wuxia monologue introducing Beauty’s Blade, the Baihe novel they’ve been reading.
• Peter tries (and fails) to match the energy.
• Thanksgiving recaps: delayed flights, Target wandering, and the absolute war crime that is “Do You Remember…the 21st Night of December” playing over store speakers.

Life Updates & Media

• End-of-year malaise, work overload, and winter dread.
• Apple Music Replay breakdowns:
  • Peter: another year, another Slow Forever domination.
  • Eden: a deeply chaotic top-albums list featuring Rebecca Black, Japanese jazz fusion, KPM library music, and Tron: Legacy.
• Taskmaster binges continue.
• Peter’s current reading includes Three-Body Problem and the 900-page Gödel, Escher, Bach.
• Eden is deep into Where Winds Meet (“What if Assassin’s Creed but Wuxia and optionally an MMO?”), and fully living in Jianghu.
• Manga corner: Kaiju Girl Caramelise is adorable and unhinged in equal measure.

🎖️

The Great Fast-Food Tier List

Certified THE BEST

• Domino’s – the undisputed king of delivery pizza.
• Five Guys – elite burgers, elite fries, elite price tag.
• Portillo’s – Italian beef nirvana.
• Schlotzky’s – elevated to divinity thanks to Peter and Alyssa’s first date.
• Taco Bell – delicious, shameful, transcendent.
• Waffle House – an American institution and FEMA-indexed miracle.

Strong Contenders (B-Tier)

• Dairy Queen – chicken strip baskets, Texas toast, and blizzards: a holy trinity.
• Long John Silver’s – Eden’s forbidden love.
• McDonald’s – the fries that define civilization.
• Panda Express – orange chicken supremacy.
• Skyline Chili – Eden-approved, Cassie-reviled.
• Wendy’s – consistently solid.
• White Castle – cheesy sliders hit just right.

Perfectly Fine (C-Tier)

Places we’d go to with zero enthusiasm and zero complaint:

A&W, Bojangles, Burger King, Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s, Firehouse Subs, Jersey Mike’s, Jimmy John’s (fast only), KFC, Little Caesars, Noodles & Co., Panera, Quiznos, Whataburger, Wienerschnitzel.

Ehhh (D-Tier)

Arby’s wet paper towel meat, Culver’s overrated custard, Del Taco’s value plays, Denny’s at 2am, Papa John’s overpriced cardboard, Pizza Hut nostalgia only, Popeye’s here-but-not-here, Qdoba mid-Mex, Sbarro mall sadness, Sonic for drinks only.

Absolutely Not (F-Tier)

• Chick-fil-A (for reasons both ethical and culinary)
• Chipotle (poop-from-a-butt energy)
• In-N-Out (the most overrated chain in America; fries taste like unwashed ass)
• IHOP (international house of poop)
• Stake & Shake (weird political tallow energy)
• Subway (fell from grace when they stopped cutting the V in the bread)
• Wingstop (wings overrated; nuggets forever)

Closing Thoughts

• We discover we are not fast-food people…except for when we are.

This week, we finally dive into the cultural behemoth that is K-Pop Demon Hunters—six months late and fully confused. We talk through how this extremely catchy, hyper-animated, wildly popular kids’ movie managed to conquer 2025, even though it’s… fine? We break down what works (the faces, the music, that glorious fat tiger), what doesn’t (the pacing, the unearned romance, the baffling reconciliation), and why we’re still not convinced it deserves the cultural chokehold it has. Plus, we catch up on everything we’ve been checking out lately—from doom metal to City Pop to WOJIA novels—and wonder how we went from Spider-Verse to this.

Episode Notes

• We kick things off with hard root beer, ingredient confusion, and the audacity of “beer, sugar, caramel color” as an ingredients list.
• Thanksgiving rant: we complain about Christmas invading everything earlier each year, praise gratitude as a practice, and call out the consumerist creep of “Black November.”
• Eden shares the saga of the family WhatsApp gratitude initiative and why performative gratefulness ain’t it.
• New Year’s resolutions? Terrible. A system designed to fail—except for gyms and planner companies.

What We’ve Been Up To

Eden

• Not much… exhaustion + scrolling + arguing with Reddit.
• Reading more Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady.
• Secretly going full Wuxia-pilled but not ready to talk yet.
• Deep in digital accessibility at work (contrast ratios forever).
• Listening almost exclusively to City Pop to summon 80s vibes.

Peter

• Heavy music roundup:
  • Shores of Null / Convocation split.
  • A Sun of the Dying – Throne of Ashes.
  • The Reticent – Please (mental-illness-theme concept album).
  • 1914 – Viribus Unitis, a blackened death metal concept album about WWI.
  • Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin – Stygian Bough Vol. 2, the lightest album of the three (which says something).
• Finished all seven Murderbot books and reflects on the genuinely human core beneath the action.
• Game updates:
  • PowerWash Simulator 2 — massive improvements, more forgiving completion, soap freedom.
  • Ball Pit (Ball×Pit) — breakout + roguelike + city builder; surprisingly great, Devolver-approved.

🎤 Main Event: K-Pop Demon Hunters

Initial Reaction

• We both expected very little.
• It was… more fun than expected, but nowhere near deserving the cultural omnipresence it has.
• Every song starts, and we both go: “Oh shit, that’s from this movie?!”

What We Liked

• The animation: hyper-expressive faces, Sony flair, Spider-Verse DNA.
• The music: genuinely catchy, culturally unavoidable.
• The creatures: the fat tiger + the crow with the tiny hat = peak cinema.
• The fights: lively weapon-specific choreography.
• Bright, colorful aesthetic in a world obsessed with desaturated grimdark.

What Didn’t Work

• Pacing is viciously fast (95 minutes, no room to breathe).
• The Rumi–Ginu romance is unearned.
• The group breakup & reconciliation happens with whiplash speed.
• Entire subplots (Celine, Rumi’s origin) feel missing — likely sequel fodder.
• The climax ultimately hinges on the boy saving the girl, which undercuts the “girl group as heroes” core.

Why Is It So Popular?

We genuinely don’t know, but we explore possibilities:

• The Frozen effect: young girls finally seeing themselves as the heroes.
• K-pop’s massive global footprint and built-in fandom infrastructure.
• Ubiquitous, TikTok-optimized songs.
• A kids’ movie that’s actually watchable for adults (a miracle compared to Shimmer & Shine).
• The novelty of a musical-action hybrid that doesn’t completely suck.

Final Thoughts

• We’re glad we watched it—mostly to understand why our nieces and the entire world dressed as Rumi for Halloween.
• It’s fun, cute, fast, and catchy.
• But it’s also feather-light and will evaporate from our brains shortly after recording.
• Definitely not staying on the Plex server.

This week on The Middle of Culture, we close out our dive into Transformers with Transformers One, last year’s animated prequel that tells the origin story of Optimus and Megatron. We rave about how shockingly good it is—beautiful animation, heartfelt storytelling, and voice performances that actually make you care about robots punching each other. Along the way, we talk about Sanderson’s declining prose, the “YA-ification” of modern fiction, the decline of mass-market paperbacks, and why we’ll always have a soft spot for dumb robot movies done well.

Episode Notes

Opening Banter

• Peter returns from travel (Boise and Napa), happy to be home.
• Eden vents about a rough week and hostile engineers during digital accessibility training, complete with an on-campus shooting alert mid-meeting.
• Peter describes an incredible dinner at Bistro Jeanty in Napa (truffle deviled eggs, beef bourguignon, and chocolate croissant bread pudding).

Books & Reading

• Peter finishes Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes (yes, the “Piña Colada Song” guy)—a darkly funny and satisfying story about the McMaster’s School of Homicide.
• Reads Artificial Condition, the second Murderbot novella, and starts Write Your Novel from the Middle.
• Discussion on how story structure midpoints define theme and cohesion.
• Critique of Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth: great worldbuilding, but noticeably weaker prose since losing his longtime editor.
• Eden speculates that the issue might extend to the whole fantasy industry—less editing, more aesthetic consumerism, and the death of the mass-market paperback.
• Broader talk on the “dumbing down” of fiction and the rise of YA and “New Adult” markets catering to comfort rather than challenge.

Music & Games Corner

• Peter dives into rediscovering Psychotic Waltz, Psychonaut, and Oramet—bands that balance progressive creativity with restraint.
• New release highlight: PowerWash Simulator 2.
• Eden tests two disappointing gacha games (Duet Night Abyss and Resonance Solstice) and finally uninstalls all HoyoVerse titles.
• Back to Final Fantasy XIV, excited about the new patch allowing full cross-class glamours.

Main Feature – Transformers One (2024)

• Both agree: it’s the best Transformers movie ever made—heartfelt, gorgeously animated, and genuinely emotional.
• Plot rundown: Orion Pax (Optimus) and D16 (Megatron) rise from the oppressed underclass of “Cogless” robots, uncover Sentinel Prime’s corruption, and witness the birth of Autobot vs. Decepticon ideology.
• Core theme: friendship, betrayal, and revolution—the tragedy of two friends who believe in justice but choose different paths.
• Voice acting highlights:
  • Brian Tyree Henry’s nuanced Megatron is phenomenal.
  • John Hamm nails the duplicitous Sentinel Prime.
  • Scarlett Johansson and Chris Hemsworth have real chemistry, even if Hemsworth is the weakest link.
  • Laurence Fishburne brings gravitas as Alpha Trion.
  • Keegan-Michael Key’s Bumblebee is purposefully annoying but fits the tone.
• Praise for the movie’s subtle callbacks to the 1986 film (“You don’t have the touch or the power”), strong emotional beats, and sense of earned tragedy.
• Both lament how poorly it performed at the box office—“we are part of the problem”—and hope it gets a sequel.
• Brief detour comparing the animated film’s depth to the shallow chaos of the Michael Bay series.

Closing Thoughts

• Transformers One feels like the first time the franchise truly understood its own heart.
• Recommendation: watch it—it’s smart, emotional, and fun as hell.