Jennifer Loring's Blog

Yes, hello, I’m obsessed with ‘s Frankenstein. If you’ve hung around this site long enough, you know that I use the Gothic as a critical lens in my work, and that monstrosity is a key concept for literally all of my analyses.

And I cannot for one second stop thinking about as The Creature. He haunts me,

There have been precious few Creatures portrayed as Mary Shelley intended, and far too many as anything but. The only other that I can think of off...

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and for the last twelve years, it’s been my wedding anniversary. But it really sneaked up on me this year, mainly because we spent the first half of the month in Europe. Between Finland, a day in Estonia (Tallinn), and then Scotland, I was completely unprepared for Halloween by the time we returned to the States. And then I became ill two days later.

I’ll write more about our adventures in a future post; suffi...

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The Hot Takes page is now updated! I’m still working my way through Expedition 33, so no timeframe on that one yet. I will say that if you haven’t played it or you’re on the fence for whatever reason, do yourself a favor and play it. GOTY contender for sure.

It’s Pride Month! While I was unfortunately too exhausted to attend our annual Pride parade yesterday, I wanted to celebrate in my own special way by posting about the queer VG characters that are near and dear to my heart. There are a ton of games I’ve loved that have LGBTQIA+ characters, but these are the ones that have really stuck with me. These are in no particular order except Astarion first because Astarion. Who are your favorites?

Busy, in a good way! If you look at the Presentations and Publications page, you’ll see a few new things have appeared. I have two more book chapters to work on (three, technically, but one doesn’t have an official contract yet), and I’ll be off to Copenhagen for a conference in August. I’ve been writing about film more than video games lately–or still–and although I haven’t even written about it yet, I’ll go ahead and blame this movie right here:

Obsessed. I saw it by myself first, could...

What’s this, you ask? Why the Finnish flag? Well, I was awarded the JYU Visiting Fellow Program grant from the University of Jyväskylä, which means I’ll be living in Jyväskylä, Finland, for a month while working on my book and collaborating with the researchers in the games and digitaliization area. Did you know that Finland has over 250 video game studios? I’m hoping I’ll be able to visit Remedy Entertainment while I’m there!

More details on the book to come; for now, all the paperwork h...

Well, here we are. It’s 2025, there’s a lot to be worried about, and while I hate what America has become, I’ve somehow, finally, sort of just…let it go. Not that I don’t care (I’m attending the Women’s March on January 18, sending lots of emails, and will be actively campaigning against traitors like John Fetterman), but I’ve realized that all this existential dread is slowly–or maybe not so slowly–killing me. The longer I remain pa...

Work on my chapter about the Ring universe continues apace. It’s been fun to watch all of the films, even if some of them are of dubious quality and logic. 2000 words to go!

I’ve been playing Death Stranding (finally) ever since Xbox shadow-dropped the Director’s Cut at half-price. I have a lot of thoughts about issues of temporality and the Gothic transgression of boundaries between life and death, which also happens to form a large part of the above Ring chapter. Anyway, the sequel is in...

Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite onryō, Sadako! My current project is a chapter for the book Recurrent Manifestations of Horror in Popular Media and Culture: Monstrous Mediality, forthcoming from Routledge and edited by Gwyneth Peaty, Ashleigh Prosser, and Lorna Piatti-Farnell. Here’s the abstract for my chapter, “’Spread It Like Sickness’: Viral Reproduction in The Ring Universe”:

Ring began as a 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki and has since expanded to four more novels, a short story collection;...