Continuing my annual tradition, here are some of my favorite things from the last year. I think this is the first year where I've had to decide not to shout out things I'm re-reading or re-watching, even if they're very good. I want to applaud the things that thrilled me for the first time.
The Best Things I Read
Fiction - The West Passage
My favorite book last year was The West Passage by Jared Pechacek, and fortuitously, it was also the book that's probably of the most interest to readers of this blog about D&D and fantasy roleplaying. Pechacek sets his entire story inside a megadungeon, a giant palace with color-coded regions, ruled by goddess-like Ladies who are each the size of a tower. The human inhabitants survive as best they can amidst the maze of passages, the proliferation of magical items, the traditions governing every facet of life, and the slow decay of all the things people actually need to live. We follow two young protagonists with urgent missions as they attempt to navigate the profoundly weird world of the palace.
My first runner up is a bit of a cheat, because it's both nonfiction and not actually a narrative, but I liked it too much to leave off. Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is an experimental work, 200 pages of sentences harvested from a decade of personal diaries, then put into alphabetical order. You can piece together a bit about Heti's life from reading this, but mostly you just enjoy the poetic flow of sentences.
My favorite book last year was The West Passage by Jared Pechacek, and fortuitously, it was also the book that's probably of the most interest to readers of this blog about D&D and fantasy roleplaying. Pechacek sets his entire story inside a megadungeon, a giant palace with color-coded regions, ruled by goddess-like Ladies who are each the size of a tower. The human inhabitants survive as best they can amidst the maze of passages, the proliferation of magical items, the traditions governing every facet of life, and the slow decay of all the things people actually need to live. We follow two young protagonists with urgent missions as they attempt to navigate the profoundly weird world of the palace.
My first runner up is a bit of a cheat, because it's both nonfiction and not actually a narrative, but I liked it too much to leave off. Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is an experimental work, 200 pages of sentences harvested from a decade of personal diaries, then put into alphabetical order. You can piece together a bit about Heti's life from reading this, but mostly you just enjoy the poetic flow of sentences.
Green Dot by Madeleine Gray is about a young woman in love with an older married man she met at work. It's not really a romance, more like an anti-romance. She tells you on the first page that you know how her story ends, because you know how this kind of story always ends, but it's still worth following her to the inevitable conclusion because of how well this version of the story is told.
I've had The Lady Matador's Hotel by Christina Garcia on a list to read someday ever since it first came out, and last year I finally did. Garcia gives us a highly structured novel, following six characters over six days, a mix of guests and workers at a Latin American hotel. Each day, each guest gets a single scene in a single location, although they sometimes see and interact with each other. And each day we get the news. Most of these characters are not very good people, but Garcia fills them with interiority, if not self-knowledge.
The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo is an alt-history detective novel. Pardo imagines that Argentina defeated America in the Falklands War in the 1980s by deploying psychopigments, colors that cause emotions. Our heroine discovers that the small-time drug counterfeiting operation she's investigating is connected to a much larger conspiracy to create an deploy a powerful new color at national scale. We get to follow both the current case and the altered history of the changed world.
Graphic Fiction - Thieves by Lucie Bryon
My favorite comic last year was Thieves by Lucie Bryon, about two high school girls who fall in love and try to return a bunch of curios they stole from classmates' house parties at the next party at the same house. It's a book about characters who have made mistakes, but are now trying to fix them. I adore Bryon's art style, and the reverse heists the girls plan to smuggle their loot back to its original owners are a lot of fun to watch.
Mickey's Craziest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas is a delightful bit of fun. The book is styled to look like a lost book from the 1960s, and allegedly missing about half its pages; it sends Mickey and Donald pinballing from one setpiece to the next, traveling the globe in a madcap quest for ancient treasure.
Otto by John Agee unfolds like a dream, sending its child protagonist on a long walk through a strange land where every bit of speech is a palindrome that reads the same forward and back. He meets a lot of odd people doing unusual tasks before eventually making it back home in time for dinner. The biggest pleasure here is seeing Agee's creative wordplay - his ability to craft much longer palindromes than I've seen before and then to string them together into a narrative.
This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki is some of the most naturalistic fiction I've ever read. You could easily mistake this for a memoir; the main distinction is that real life is never so thematically coherent. It's easy to see why this won an award. A girl on the cusp of being a teen spends summer vacation at the lake. Watching her parents' relationship, negotiating her annual friendship with a girl a couple years younger, and spying on the teens who live in the area year-round forces her to think about what it means to be a woman, and about what sort of person she wants to grow up to be.
I always feel a little nervous nominating a series when I've only read the first few entries, but Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu Nihei gets off to a good start. An evil wizard kidnaps the princess and carries her away to the titular megadungeon, and an ingenuous peasant boy joins up with the rescue mission to save her. But within these classic tropes, Nihei infuses everything with strangeness that blurs the edges of dark fantasy, horror, and even scifi. The tower is inhumanly large, the dungeon obeys some of the rules of video games, the monsters are unsettlingly weird variations on traditional foes.
The Best Things I Watched
Live Action Movies - The Assessment
I have a particular fondness for scifi stories about things like sex, dating, love, marriage, and having children. I feel like they're great for holding a magnifying glass over something real about the way that technology (or the economy, or the law) affects our relationships with other people. In the case of The Assessment, it's like all the stress of a pre-adoption interview taken to nightmarish extremes. Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel (from Station Eleven!) want permission to conceive a child, and Alicia Vikander gets to decide if they're allowed, by spending the week acting like a wayward child herself. I've been kind of in love with Vikander since seeing her in Irma Vep, and she's enthralling here, alternating between silly and affectionate and terrifying.
Gazer is a neo-noir film that pays pretty obvious homage to Memento, and to a lesser extent, eXistenZ. We follow a young mother with a degenerative brain disorder who wants to save up some money for her kid before she dies or becomes incapacitated. She's already prone to losing track of time - where you or I might pause for a second between tasks, she can get stuck for hours until some external stimulus wakes her out of it. And she's haunted by symbolist nightmares about the death of her husband. She gets offered a job that seems almost too good to be true, but what she really ends up accepting is the blame for someone else's crime.
The Green Knight is absolutely beautiful film, and I'm glad I finally got a chance to watch it. I read a version of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" in school, but found the characters incomprehensible and their motivations opaque. Beyond the chance to ogle handsome Dev Patel and some truly sumptuous cinematography, what this telling offers us is a version of the tale that makes sense. Gawain has very recognizable motives and emotions. He finds himself cast in a story about courage (and, I think, about what it means to "be a man") where he has to decide if he'll continue to always do whatever's easiest, and live, or if he'll keep his word even when it's difficult and dangerous, and probably die.
Molli and Max in the Future is another scifi story about dating. It's basically When Harry Met Sally ... In Spaaace!, and somehow that works really well. The visuals are full of spaceships, robots, and aliens, but what it's obviously really about is what dating is like today, and all the ways that smartphones and apps and gig work and the rise of woo and authoritarian politics all make it different and strange. I guess it's also a story about courage, because across all their difficulties, what Molli and Max need most is the nerve to be honest about their feelings for each other, no matter how scary that might be.
Sinners is an awful lot of fun for a horror movie. For the first half of the film, we're treated to two ambitious twin brothers trying to set up a Black speakeasy in the Jim Crow South. They're veterans of WWI and the Chicago mob, and you can tell from the start that the source of their start-up funds aren't legal. But when the law represents segregation and White impunity, it's impossible not to root for the criminals. Their venture is doomed from the start in two or three different ways, and that's before the vampires show up, but gosh, they throw a hell of a party. This is also the first of two picks for me where music is literally magic.
Animated Movies - KPop Demon Hunters
KPop Demon Hunters might be the best superhero movie that came out last year. A girl group protects the worlds from demons by fighting them off when they appear, and more importantly by singing magic songs whose power comes from the love of their fans. They're close to creating a barrier so strong that no other demons will ever make it through, but before that happens, Hell has sent a boy band of demons in disguise to steal their audience. So the fate of the world depends on a battle of the bands! But it's the execution of this story that really elevates it. The songs are good, the animation's fun, the emotions feel genuine. The extra effort pushes what could've just been a decent movie to the top of my list.
The Deer King has a plot and visual style that reminds me a bit of Princess Mononoke, but it's also very much its own story. A plague - that at once appears to be both a germ-based biological disease and a magical curse spread by ghostly wolf monsters - is spreading through the empire, seemingly originating in one of its conquered lands. The only doctor in the land who practices science instead of faith-healing tries to solve the mystery, but he'll need the help of one of the leaders of the conquered people, who seemingly has no reason to provide it.
Flow was one of the most emotionally moving films I watched last year. To escape a mysterious flood, an anxious cat, living in a post-human world, is forced to share a boat with a boisterous dog, a covetous lemur, and a surprisingly socially competent capybara. They tour the wreck of the world and learn how to get along across their differences. The colors are deliberately cartoony, but the motion of each animal is so realistic it looks absolutely lifelike, and there's a lot of emotion poured into this short fable.
The Deer King has a plot and visual style that reminds me a bit of Princess Mononoke, but it's also very much its own story. A plague - that at once appears to be both a germ-based biological disease and a magical curse spread by ghostly wolf monsters - is spreading through the empire, seemingly originating in one of its conquered lands. The only doctor in the land who practices science instead of faith-healing tries to solve the mystery, but he'll need the help of one of the leaders of the conquered people, who seemingly has no reason to provide it.
Flow was one of the most emotionally moving films I watched last year. To escape a mysterious flood, an anxious cat, living in a post-human world, is forced to share a boat with a boisterous dog, a covetous lemur, and a surprisingly socially competent capybara. They tour the wreck of the world and learn how to get along across their differences. The colors are deliberately cartoony, but the motion of each animal is so realistic it looks absolutely lifelike, and there's a lot of emotion poured into this short fable.
When I say that I watched The Hobbit, last year, I specifically mean the 1977 animated version. I probably shouldn't admit this was the first time I've experienced Tolkein's first book in any form whatsoever, lest someone confiscate my RPG blogging license, but it was, and I can admit that I see what all the fuss is about. The style of the animation seems entirely appropriate to the tone of the story, and after watching this, I really can't imagine how you could stretch the same material out to 9 hours without ruining it. This version is a delight and an inspiration.
Live Action Television - Tales from the Loop
Tales from the Loop is a miniseries based on Simon Stalenhag's art book of the same name. The series is a bit like The Twilight Zone, where each episode is about something very strange happening to someone that ultimately forces them to confront a problem in their life - a fear, a troubled relationship, a truth they haven't wanted to admit. All the mysterious phenomena are related to the same high-tech research facility and set in the same small town in Ohio, and so the cast of characters ends up overlapping from one episode to the next. The storytelling and visuals are both very good. It seems last year I liked a lot of tv adaptations of books.
Bodies is based on a graphic novel, and tells the story of four London detectives spread across four different times who all discover the same unknown naked dead body dumped in an alleyway. It quickly becomes clear that the body is a clue to a vast conspiracy spread across centuries, a conspiracy that involves a time traveler and an attempt to remake Great Britain into a fascist surveillance state. But can solving the crime stop the conspiracy? Or will each in turn detective get crushed by an opponent who knows what they'll do before they do?
Bodies is based on a graphic novel, and tells the story of four London detectives spread across four different times who all discover the same unknown naked dead body dumped in an alleyway. It quickly becomes clear that the body is a clue to a vast conspiracy spread across centuries, a conspiracy that involves a time traveler and an attempt to remake Great Britain into a fascist surveillance state. But can solving the crime stop the conspiracy? Or will each in turn detective get crushed by an opponent who knows what they'll do before they do?
Dopesick is a fictional show, not a documentary, but it tries to give a faithful account of Purdue Pharmaceuticals' release of Oxycontin, and the effect that the sudden widespread availability of an addictive painkiller had on the users and their communities. We follow a cast that includes members of Purdue's board, a typical pain patient, a doctor who prescribes the drug and later gets addicted himself, a sales rep with growing qualms about what he's pushing, and prosecutors who work backwards to uncover how Oxy spread through their community and how Purdue was able to sell so much so quickly.
The Gilded Age is a historical drama following a bit in the mold of Downton Abbey. The show in set in New York in the 1880s, and we follow two families that live across the street from each other on 5th Avenue. One is an old-money family of the sort who've traditionally defined the city's politics and social life; the other is a new-money robber baron and his wife who is determined to take her place among the city's elite. Through the web of relationships that connect these characters, we also get a view of Black life in the city that doesn't always make it into stories like this.
Slow Horses is a comedy about British spies, specifically about spies who were so bad at their jobs they've been demoted and sent to do busy work in a quiet office where they can't mess up anything else. Naturally, they keep getting inveigled in crises and scandals of national importance, and keep muddling through because at least of a couple of them are inconvenient rather than incompetent. Gary Oldman is clearly having the time of his life playing a washed up Cold Warrior with bad manners and worse personal hygiene. The show's thesis is that the greatest threat to Britain is its own supposed protectors jockeying for promotions and personal glory at the expense of the ordinary people caught up in their ploys.
Slow Horses is a comedy about British spies, specifically about spies who were so bad at their jobs they've been demoted and sent to do busy work in a quiet office where they can't mess up anything else. Naturally, they keep getting inveigled in crises and scandals of national importance, and keep muddling through because at least of a couple of them are inconvenient rather than incompetent. Gary Oldman is clearly having the time of his life playing a washed up Cold Warrior with bad manners and worse personal hygiene. The show's thesis is that the greatest threat to Britain is its own supposed protectors jockeying for promotions and personal glory at the expense of the ordinary people caught up in their ploys.
Animated Television - Pantheon
Pantheon tells a complete narrative and comes to a satisfying conclusion across two seasons, based on series of linked short stories by Ken Liu. (The disappointment of The Peripheral and The Power both giving us half-told tales has made me more appreciative of shows that are able to finish what they start.) We start with a simple question - what if it were possible to copy human minds into computers? - and spirals outward into wider and wider circles of consequences, in what I've come to think of as a paradigmatically science fictional plot structure. The show depicts uploaded minds as nimble hackers, able to easily and instinctively manipulate their software environments, but also vulnerable due to their dependency on the relatively few computers powerful enough to host them. It asks what such minds would do, and how the rest of the world, especially existing centers of corporate and governmental power, might respond.
Jentry Chao vs the Underworld is about a Korean-American girl who moves in with her grandmother in Texas and discovers she has magical (and nearly uncontrollable) fire powers as a result of her family's history of dabbling in the supernatural and making deals with demons. Here the K-pop music is limited to the intro track, which also plays during the show at a few key moments. Jentry has a lot of problems, and while they're not of her own making, they are hers to solve, and she has to figure out not only how to achieve the outcome she wants, but how to accomplish it in a way she can live with, especially since her main tool is incredibly dangerous to use.
I remember catching the occasional episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex back in college, but for a long time, I thought there was basically no way to watch it, except for buying the out-of-print DVDs. And then I somehow discovered that it's on the Adult Swim website! (Notably, it's NOT on the HBO app, despite the fact that HBO owns Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.) The show isn't in continuity with the movies, but features the same cast of cyborg police investigating computer crimes. Each season has an over-arching mystery, and I think the first season is the most successful, but each case involves a series of linked crimes where the connections between the cases are initially difficult to understand.
Lazarus is a near-future scifi story made by the director of Cowboy Bebop. Everyone in the world uses Hapna, the perfect painkiller - completely effective, nonaddictive, completely safe. Then, the drug's creator announces that anyone who's ever taken it will die 3 years after their first dose, and the first deaths will start in a month. We follow a team of operatives trying to find the creator so he can give them a cure, in a race with basically every other spy agency in the world. I was impressed that - for all the times I've watched Batman or Spider-Man jump off a building - every time the team's reckless daredevil did something like that, the animators got me to hold my breath and because it looked like he was going to die for sure.
Star vs the Forces of Evil is intended for a younger audience than the other shows I liked last year, but it was fun. A magic princess gets sent to Earth to learn responsibility, and has to protect her host-family from frequent (albeit mostly ineffectual) monster attacks. Star dresses like all her clothes are from Target's Cat & Jack line, and I literally love her outfits, all princess dresses and striped leggings and cute accessories. The manic energy and wacky characters remind me of Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls.
Jentry Chao vs the Underworld is about a Korean-American girl who moves in with her grandmother in Texas and discovers she has magical (and nearly uncontrollable) fire powers as a result of her family's history of dabbling in the supernatural and making deals with demons. Here the K-pop music is limited to the intro track, which also plays during the show at a few key moments. Jentry has a lot of problems, and while they're not of her own making, they are hers to solve, and she has to figure out not only how to achieve the outcome she wants, but how to accomplish it in a way she can live with, especially since her main tool is incredibly dangerous to use.
I remember catching the occasional episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex back in college, but for a long time, I thought there was basically no way to watch it, except for buying the out-of-print DVDs. And then I somehow discovered that it's on the Adult Swim website! (Notably, it's NOT on the HBO app, despite the fact that HBO owns Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.) The show isn't in continuity with the movies, but features the same cast of cyborg police investigating computer crimes. Each season has an over-arching mystery, and I think the first season is the most successful, but each case involves a series of linked crimes where the connections between the cases are initially difficult to understand.
Lazarus is a near-future scifi story made by the director of Cowboy Bebop. Everyone in the world uses Hapna, the perfect painkiller - completely effective, nonaddictive, completely safe. Then, the drug's creator announces that anyone who's ever taken it will die 3 years after their first dose, and the first deaths will start in a month. We follow a team of operatives trying to find the creator so he can give them a cure, in a race with basically every other spy agency in the world. I was impressed that - for all the times I've watched Batman or Spider-Man jump off a building - every time the team's reckless daredevil did something like that, the animators got me to hold my breath and because it looked like he was going to die for sure.
Star vs the Forces of Evil is intended for a younger audience than the other shows I liked last year, but it was fun. A magic princess gets sent to Earth to learn responsibility, and has to protect her host-family from frequent (albeit mostly ineffectual) monster attacks. Star dresses like all her clothes are from Target's Cat & Jack line, and I literally love her outfits, all princess dresses and striped leggings and cute accessories. The manic energy and wacky characters remind me of Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls.
The Best Things I Heard
Downbeat Pop - Winter in the Dark
The Jeanines are my favorites of the bands I heard for the first time last year, and "Winter in the Dark" is my favorite of their songs. They've perfected pop music equivalent of the tight 90, complete songs that clock in at about a minute and half. The Jeanines marry fast-moving instrumentals to wistful but hopeful lyrics about feeling unsure or out of place. All my first-place bands this year have a second song I recommend. For the Jeanines, it's a bop from their most recent album, "On and On".
"Cellphone" by Laveda could maybe be my personal theme song. Laveda sings about not wanting to use their cellphone too much, and not caring if their haircut makes them look like a boy. They're just like me for real.
"Indifferent" by Rowena Wise is a post-break-up song, the first of several that will make the list. Rowena knows it's inevitable she'll see her ex again, and is preparing for it by reminding herself that she'll grow and move on, but the issues that drove her away will remain.
"Olympus" by Blondshell is the first of a different set, what we might call pre-break-up songs, with lyrics about how bad and painful the relationship is, and how the singer wants to keep it going anyway. Blondshell likens her self to someone with a drug addiction, who wants to keep using despite harm it's doing her.
"Olympus" by Blondshell is the first of a different set, what we might call pre-break-up songs, with lyrics about how bad and painful the relationship is, and how the singer wants to keep it going anyway. Blondshell likens her self to someone with a drug addiction, who wants to keep using despite harm it's doing her.
Upbeat Pop - Blame Brett
The Beaches really caught my ear with "Blame Brett", which deploys one of my favorite kinds of musical irony, where depressing lyrics are paired with poppy instruments. Here the words are about a relationship so bad it ruins you into the future, but the music is just pure upbeat energy that I'd love to dance to. The other Beaches track I really liked was the much more subdued "Edge of the Earth".
"Don't" by Lolo is one of the funniest post-break-up songs I've heard. Lolo is trying to talk herself out of being tempted to go back to an ex, then realizes that giving herself this pep talk is actually tempting her even more, and redoubles her efforts to be good.
"Golden" by Huntrix is, of course, the hit track from KPop Demon Hunters, and normally I wouldn't give it a separate listing, just a shout-out in my praise for the film, but this song of resilience and hope really moved me this year. I actually cried watching the real vocalists behind the animation perform it live at the Macy's parade.
"Sue Me" by Audrey Hobert is about desire, and about wanting to be desired. Sassy, defiant lyrics defend setting a bar and refusing to go below it. We should all know what we're worth and defend it as well.
Rock - Let Me Go
The dual vocals in Deep Sea Diver and Madison Cunningham's "Let Me Go" paint a picture of a failing couple where both members want the other to be the person who initiates the breakup. And because neither is willing to be the first to quit, they're both trapped indefinitely in limbo. The lyrics are matched with guitars and a singing style that remind me favorably of early Radiohead. My other Deep Sea Diver recommendation is another collab, this time with Sharon Von Etten, "Impossible Weight".
"Adrenaline" by We Hate You Please Die is practically an anthem. To me, the lyrics read as an ambition and striving for artistic success that goes beyond the material and into a hope for spiritual transcendence. I adore this band's name, which is a reference to Scott Pilgrim, but also perfectly captures their attitude.
"Back to the Radio" by Porridge Radio is another near anthem, this one reminding me of Rilo Kiley's "Better Son / Daughter". We're again in a doomed relationship, but the singer is determined to save the couple from themselves, even though the task seems impossible to accomplish alone.
"Look the Part" by the Bel-Air Lip Bombs has a really excellent video showing the band plotting a movie-style heist, which meshes well with the song itself, about torturing yourself by repeatedly going back to a ex's house, and about wanting to be able to move on.
"Wasting My Time" by the Jackets reminds me of the garage rock revival from the early 2000s. I love a band that dresses in matching suits. The Jackets are stuck waiting with not much to do, but who could be bored listening to a song like this?
