In 2025, Please Make Me Like This Genre
I tend to keep new year’s resolutions pretty realistic. “Practice Tamil.” “Work on scripts.” “Perform more.” But perhaps my most challenging resolution in 2025 will be, “Watch more sci-fi.” Because I don’t like it.
BEFORE YOU YELL AT ME LET ME EXPLAIN. Sci-fi’s fanbase can sometimes be rude. There are a lot of assumptions about what you “should” know and the movies you “should have” seen. I can only hear “YOU HAVEN’T SEEN STAR WARS?!” so many times before I start to feel intimidated and like I’ll never catch up, even if I watch all of them.
Also, I love SMALL stories. Tiny glances, petty fights, comparing yourself to someone else… and sci-fi tends to be big and epic with those smaller stories woven in, so I feel like I’m sifting through Giant Worlds to find my little kisses.
Also, I don’t know if this is fully to blame, but it’s my newsletter so I’ll blame whatever I want: I am the child of introverted immigrants, and no one in my family has ever said, “Let me show you this movie” about any movie. My family didn’t come here to watch movies, they came here to work and never retire.
So all of this means I never got super into sci-fi.
Now, if you’ve been reading my newsletters, you know that I — strangely — wrote a sci-fi movie. It was just the genre that fit my story best. Hence, why I want to watch more sci-fi in 2025! Because the great thing about writing is that you can explore an unfamiliar genre. The walls of intimidation fall away, because I’m the one in the driver’s seat crafting the story. I actually challenged myself this way ten years ago for the first Big Project I did called Hustle, which was my ode to Scott Pilgrim (feat. Bowen Yang, Jordan Myrick, Brooks Allison, and many more!). I’m not a capital-G gamer, I just like video games, so I was worried BIG gamers would watch my series and think I was an idiot. And they probably do! BUT it was freeing to know I could always retort: “You can’t correct me because I made up this particular world.”
There is something freeing about doing this exploration process again. I get to write the perfect sci-fi movie for my non-sci-fi-lover self. I mean, “a sci-fi movie about grandparents and food with an Indian woman protagonist” would get me into any movie theater. (Oh, and if this movie exists, tell me, because that’s what my script is about.) Thinking about it, this is exactly what my journey was like with DnD! I took characters I wanted to play and worked them into a medium/genre that was intimidating to me. And the result? Was pitch-perfect DnD with no mistakes! So that’s kind of cool.
And speaking of DnD: do you have any questions about my Dimension 20 seasons or Desiquest? THEN REPLY TO THIS EMAIL and I’ll do my best to answer them in the next newsletter!
Talk soon -
Rekha
And if you want to see me LIVE, then check out:
01/08/25: Art Begets Show at 7p PT (hosted by ME and Sandeep Parikh) @ UCB Franklin (for those not in LA, livestream tickets ARE available!!!!!!!)
01/15/25: The Multitude at 7:30p PT (hosted by Priyanka Mattoo) @ The Elysian