My 2025 in Review

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.

  

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.

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?
 

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.

 
 

  
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.
 
 

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.

 

 
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? 

My 2024 in Review

This is my fourth year doing a round-up of my favorite media. This year, I decided to pick one winner in each category, but acknowledge a top five, which made it easier to give shout-outs to all my runners-up. So here are my favorite things from 2024! If there's a trend, I think it's that I've applauded originality, often giving the win to works that are the least like what I've seen before.

 

 

The Best Things I Read

 

  

Fiction - The Carpet Makers 

 

My favorite book from last year was a German scifi novel that was written thirty years ago, and first published in English, twenty. The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach is one of the strangest and most skillful books about a space empire I've ever read. Eschbach structures his novel as a series of short stories that progressively follow every step the strange tradition of weaving carpets from human hair for the glory of the emperor. We don't follow any recurring characters, or like, the path of one carpet as it travels from the artist to the marketplace to the stars, but instead we approach obliquely, looking at the ordinary lives that are impacted by what turns out to be a senselessly cruel process. I've never seen a book structured like this before, but I think it's a great narrative format, and I'd love to see it applied to a real world social process sometime.

 

My honorable mentions are all more recent. Premee Mohammad's The Butcher of the Forest is a dark fantasy novella about a doomed trip into a fairytale forest that's feverishly compact and brutally imagined. 

 

Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden is like a classic aliens come to Earth first-contact story, but one that builds on current ideas about climate change, community organizing, computer networks, gender, and language, rather than simply reiterating a pastiche of the future as it was imagined in the 1950s. 

 

A Memory Called Empire is a space opera, and Arkady Martine goes deep in building the language and culture of Teixcalaan, and marries it to a thrilling plot about the fate of one small world trying to avoid being conquered by the empire. 

 

And Juneau Black's Shady Hollow is a cozy murder mystery, set in an isolated rural town in the northern forests, populated by all the familiar characters you'd expect, but everyone is a talking animal.
 

 

 

Graphic Novels - The Real Dada Mother Goose

 

My favorite graphic work was actually a children's picture book, The Real Dada Mother Goose by Jon Scieszka and Julia Rothman. Scieszka and Rothman took six classic nursery rhymes and made six variations on each of them. Each variation is a like a little game. They each take the original text and then apply some procedure for changing it, although they're not just robotic. Each procedure still relies on human creativity for applying it. Some are relatively simple substitutions - the last word of each line replaced with its dictionary definition, key words put into Morse code or American Sign Language or simplified Egyptian hieroglyphics. Others are more transformative, and many rely on collage and remixes of the illustrations just as much as the text. The whole book is both a demonstration of creativity and an invitation to young creators. It's also a reminder how often "new" things are the result of playing with and transforming something that already exists. I found it really inspirational.

My other favorite graphic novels are a bit more traditional. Guillem March's Karmen is a dialogue between a young woman who's just attempted suicide and the spirit meant to guide her to the afterlife. It's genuinely mature, about the regret adults feel for past mistakes, about the possibility of continuing to grow and change even after it feels like your life is over. 

 

Tillie Walden's On a Sunbeam tells a young woman's story at two points in her life - working her first job after graduation, and in flashback, her time falling in love with another student at her strict boarding school. The whole thing is set in the future, in space, and the spaceships all look like giant koi fish. 

 

Shuna's Journey, by Hayao Miyazaki, of Studio Ghibli fame, is a science fantasy retelling of a Tibetan folktale, illustrated in watercolors, more like a picture book than like a traditional manga. This is actually Miyazaki's earliest comic, and you can see the first seeds of ideas that will blossom in some of his later and better known works. 

 

Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber's Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? is an absolute romp through the tropes and hijinks of Silver Age comics, as Jimmy Olsen attempts to solve his own attempted murder, and also deal with about a dozen other wacky problems at the same time.

 

 

The Best Things I Heard 

 

  

Rock - Kids Wanna Dance

 

One of my favorite songs this year is "Kids Wanna Dance" by Gen & the Degenerates. I like dancing, and I'm already predisposed to like songs about wanting to dance. They're usually fun, have infectious melodies and kicking beats. They're also usually about being young, lonely, filled with life and desire. This one is a little different. It speaks directly to the state of the world today. It stares straight in the face of all the reasons you might give up or lose hope. And then it asks you to choose joy instead. Choose to stay alive. Choose to live. That's as good a reason as any to dance.

 

"Bet You Don't" by the Albinos has a fuzzy, oversaturated sound that reminds me of both the 1960s and the early 2000s garage rock revival, and I like the defiance in the lyrics.  

 

"He is Not" by GGGOLDDD is also defiant. It's about continuing your life without someone important to you, and the mixed success you sometimes experience trying to regain your independence. I read it as being about a breakup, but it could also be about a partner's death. 

 

"Peace be the Day" by Hannah Mohan is another breakup song, I think, but it's more immediate to the moment itself, rather than the long tail aftermath. It reminds me of the relief of getting out of a bad situation. 

 

"Synchronize" by Milky Chance might be the most apocalyptic of my picks from last year. It's about the immediacy and intensity of a new romance, where it feels like they're the only other person in the world, and it doesn't matter how many bad things are happening around you, because you found each other.

  

 

Pop - Forever in Sunset

 

My other favorite from last year is "Forever in Sunset" by Ezra Furman. As much as I like the song, I might like the music video even more. A young nonbinary or transmasculine person is having a really rough night at the bar. But an slightly older trans woman is there to help; you get the sense she's been in exactly the same place before. The varying displays of self-destruction and kindness toward another that's also kindness toward oneself gets to me every time I try to watch it. And the music is good, the lyrics evocative. "Do you remember when we thought the world was ending?" Girl. I still do.

 

"Docket" by Blondshell, featuring Bully is a sweet song about not really feeling it in a new relationship. The lyrics aren't overtly queer, but two women singing together about not being interested in any of the guys who pursue them feels a bit lez to me.  

 

"Everywhere, Everything" by Noah Kahan, with Gracie Abrams is much more devoted love song, and continues what I'm just now realizing is a trend from last year of songs about desperate times. Kahan and Abrams are determined to cling together, no matter what. 

 

By contrast, "Steven Proctor, Bus Conductor" by the Neutrals is a throwback and a bop. The music sounds like the 60s again, and the storytelling lyrics remind me of early Belle & Sebastian. Plus the claymation and papercraft music video is just charming. 

 

The fact that I only recently heard "Tongue Tied" by Grouplove probably says more about my media awareness than I mean for it to, but gosh, what a fun song.

 

 

The Best Things I Watched

 

 

Movies - Hundreds of Beavers

 

The best way I can describe my favorite film of the year, Hundreds of Beavers, is to say it's like a feature-length Looney Tunes cartoon. It's a classic story about a hunter getting repeatedly outwitted by his intended prey, even filmed in black and white as though it's really out of the 1930s. But where an animated short would show the hunter losing and losing and then end, in the film, Jean Kayak loses and loses and loses and learns enough to finally win. Every part of the fictional wilderness here operates according to cartoon logic and animated physics, and over the course of the movie, our wannabe fur trapper observes them all and figures out how to Rube Goldberg them together into functioning traps. And, it's important I mention, all the animals in the film are portrayed by human actors wearing animal mascot costumes. The was the funniest movie I watched all year, and the way that it revived and remixed plots and film techniques from the early days of cinema made it a wild ride from start to finish.

 

Blue Jean is unfortunately very timely right now, despite being set in England in the 1980s. Lesbian gym teacher Jean lives an anxious split life - she's closeted at work, but spends most of her free time hanging out at the local lesbian bar with her girlfriend and other couples. When a new student at the school shows up at the bar, and gets accused of being gay by the other girls, Jean panics, afraid that people in her working life will find out her truth, and that she'll lose her job. Watching this one is a reminder that other people have lived during difficult times, and that there's a value in being brave, a value in confronting others' prejudice rather than trying to hide from it.

 

I Saw the TV Glow is a horror movie that's meant to be especially scary to closeted trans people. When I watched it, I felt something more like relief. The film is structured like a spooky campfire story, reminded me a lot of watching The Adventures of Pete & Pete when I was a kid. As an adult, Owen thinks back on his favorite tv show, The Pink Opaque, which he could only ever watch by have sleepovers at his friend Maddie's house, or having her tape the episodes for him. Then Maddie shows back up, and she seems to remember things a bit differently, and to suggest there was more to the show and their fandom than Owen is allowing himself to recall. If you're not trans, I don't know if you'd find it frightening at all, but there's still something a little wistful, maybe even sad, about realizing you don't really know your old friends anymore, don't really enjoy the things you used to when you were younger. It's a realization that goes on to affect your memories of them, prevents you from recalling them with the same fondness you used to. It's a loss in the present that reaches backward to steal something from your past too.

 

Last and First Men is a pretty faithful, very weird adaptation of Olaf Stapeldon's book about the future history of humanity. In the book, modern humanity are only the "first men," and there will be fourteen more successor species of humans that follow after us. What does it mean to be human, when only 1% of our existence will be spent in our current form, when only 10% of our history will take place on Earth Tilda Swinton reads a script that's a condensed version of Stapeldon's text. The imagery is all in black and white; it's footage of war memorials in Eastern Europe. They look otherworldly, alien. There's an excellent, moody background score as well. I don't know if Stapeldon invented the idea that future humans will spend a lot of their time using psychic powers to observe their own history, to observe us, that we today will have a kind of secular afterlife as we are remembered again in the far future, but both the book and the movie are about a message from the end coming back to us here, at the beginning.

 

Raw is a French horror movie about a vegetarian who's forced to eat some meat as part of the freshman hazing at her veterinary college. Eating it awakens a new appetite in her; you can probably guess which one. For the first half of the film, the horror comes from her coming to realize the nature of her new hunger, as she tries various ways to feed it, hoping that that something else will satisfy it so that she won't need to go further. Halfway through is a scene that could have been the finale of a slower-burning film, but from there, the tension just keeps ratcheting up, as she can no longer deny what her body wants, but still doesn't want to give herself over to become a total monster. It's creepy, bloody, and very satisfying.

 

 

Television - Mrs Davis

 

The most succinct way to describe Mrs Davis is to say that it's about a nun who's searching for the Holy Grail in order to defeat a planet-wide AI. That's true, but it's also misleading, because I think it sets you up to expect something very different from what you actually get. But then again, everything about this show defies expectations; at nearly every turn, it surprised me. It's very funny and wickedly smart. I kind of can't believe it got made, for network television no less, and that it's as unashamedly weird, sincere, and delightful as it turned out to be.

 

When I started The Penguin, I worried it might turn out to be a lesser-quality gangster show that happened to star Batman villains instead of other criminals, or else a lesser superhero show with no actual hero. But the strong performances by Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti quickly reassured me, as did the plot, which combines more traditional plots of ambitious mobsters trying to move up the ranks within their crime families with some big, showy, chaotic, set-piece bits of supervillainy.

 

The show I probably watched the most seasons of was Portrait Artist of the Year, which is a competition reality show where all the contestants are real, skilled artists. Each episode, three celebrities come on the show to be models. Several artists make portraits of each - mostly oil painters, but other mediums appear as well. The celebrities each pick their favorite to keep, and the judges pick a short list and a winner to send ahead to compete in the season finale. What I like most are all the shots of the portraits in progress. You get to see footage of artists working in real time, plus time lapse of the whole process from initial sketch to finished product. I found it incredibly inspirational. There's also a companion series devoted to landscape art, but I found the human subjects more interesting.

 

Set in a tiny, fictional European state, The Regime is an inside look inside an "illiberal democracy" (functionally a dictatorship) as the nation is wracked by its leader's obsessions and insecurities. Kate Winslet is fantastic as the charismatic, vain, anxious, insecure, egomaniacal leader of a county that is overtaxed by its oligarchs and oppressed by its military. She's at the mercy of her own out-of-control emotions, and everyone else, everyone else, is at the mercy of her. The episode structure works really well here, because in one episode the palace is being desiccated while she worries about damp and mildew, the new next it's full of steam from boiled potatoes because she's convinced of the vigorous health of the medieval peasant, the next it's an icebox because she's having menopausal hot flashes. A number of other characters think they can control Winslet, and for awhile she's enamored by the earnest fascism of a handsome war criminal, but the whole system is set up to give her the final say, regardless of how destructive her ideas are or how many people might hate them.

 

We are Lady Parts is far more hopeful. You can kind of tell that I picked up a month of Peacock to watch the Olympics, and I'm glad I was able to fit this one in during that time. We follow a punk band made up of young Muslim women living in London as their career just starts to take off. The women have different perspectives on Islam, different approaches to their clothing, different social classes, etc. But being in the band together helps them bond and to better understand each others' perspectives. And I liked that as they begin to be successful, they also ask if they actually want the traditional "rock star" trajectory, and if not, what their arts career could look like instead.

 

   

Animation - Scavengers Reign 

 

Last year was a very good year for new animation. Honestly, even if I'd picked only a winner and runner-up in every other category, I still would've needed a top-five for animation. I could've easily made this a top-ten. It was hard to pick one favorite, but ultimately I decided on Scavengers Reign, because unlike some of the others, it's not simply a very-well-executed variation on an already-popular format, it's a nearly unique visual experience. There is a tradition of scifi that explores the bizarre ecologies of alien worlds, but it's always been a thin strand stretched across the tapestry. Scavenger's Reign follows several survivors of a spaceship disaster who are stranded and separated on a world where species interact, not only as predators and prey, but in complex webs of parasitism and symbiosis. At the start of the show, each of the groups has attained just a little knowledge, just a little mastery over the otherwise wholly mysterious environment, but they each still have a lot to learn as they slowly converge on a meeting place. The characters are emotionally complex, but the real standout is the world itself, and the complicated, only partially comprehensible relationships among its inhabitants.

I think I've mentioned before that I have a fondness for revenge stories, so it's no surprise I liked Blue Eye Samurai. In Meiji-era Japan, Mizu, an outcast and orphan, plans to kill the only four White men in the country, one of whom must be her father. The fight scenes are both brutal and especially well-choreographed, the cost of revenge is on vivid display, the voice cast is a veritable Who's Who of famous Asian American actors, and the plot has thoughtful commentary on women's opportunities under patriarchy. The episode about the siege of the brothel is a standout.  

 

Dan Da Dan is an absolutely wild romp across competing visions of the supernatural. Cool girl Momo and nerdy Ken discover that ghosts are real, and aliens, and psychic powers, and they're all somehow related to each other. The pair's burgeoning friendship is complicated by their very different social circles and personalities, the repeated interruption by spaceships and demons, and by the embarrassment and discomfort of puberty. It's a show where the choice between getting killed by a monster and letting the girl you like see you undressed feels like an impossible decision because they're both equally undesirable. There's a chase scene set to a remix of the William Tell Overture that's like an homage to every classic cartoon ever that exemplifies what I love about this show.

 

Delicious in Dungeon starts us out in what seems to be a fairly generic, D&D-inspired fantasy world. After the death of one of their friends, a party of adventurers head back into the megadungeon to retrieve her body so she can be resurrected. They don't have time or money to resupply, so they plan to cook and eat dead monsters to sustain themselves. They meet a dwarven adventurer who's been living in the dungeon doing the same thing, and away we go! The monsters are naturalistic, often in quite creative ways, and the cooking scenes look just like you'd see from an tv chef. The thing is, I could've happily watched at least a dozen episodes that really were that simple, but very quickly, the world of the show starts to expand. We learn more about the ecosystem and history of the dungeon, the cast broadens to include more and more fellow adventurers, and what started out seeming like it might be episodic and formulaic grows into a larger story, like when a stream suddenly opens out into a delta and then connects to the ocean. 

 

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End also starts with a classic fantasy scenario, this time more like Lord of the Rings, and then asks questions of it in a way that feels almost science fictional. After the heroes defeat the dark overlord, what do they do next? If elves really live for millennia, what is it like when an elf is friends with a human? What does human culture even look like to an elf? What is magic for? Is it meant to be used for fighting? And if not, then what other purpose should it serve instead? The depiction of time in this show is fascinating, because we kind of adopt Frieren the elf's pace, where historical events are still in living memory, and ordinary human lives seem to pass by too quickly. I appreciated the depiction of demons in the show, as part of a recent trend showing us enemies who are not redeemed, because they neither want nor reserve redemption, and would only betray you if you tried to offer it to them.

My 2023 in Review

This is my third annual Year in Review post, so I think I can officially consider it a tradition! Here are my favorite things from 2023.

 

 

The Best Things I Read

 

  

Fiction - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

 

My favorite novel last year was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, a work of literary fiction about two childhood friends who grow up to become video game designers together. The pair are very close friends as kids, then have a falling out and lose contact. They reconnect in college and begin making video games, first as class projects, later starting their own company and growing it into a major studio. They grow apart, then have another falling out. And then, tentatively, they begin to reconnect again. 

 

Parts of this book are very sad. The characters struggle with poor health and damaging romantic relationships, even as they find artistic and commercial success. The saddest part though, I think, is simply the very real pain of growing apart from someone you care about, or having a fight that means you don't talk to one another for years. Zevin did her homework on the video games too. The fictional games she describes sound realistic, and would be appropriate to each era. And impressively, the structure of each section of the book mirrors the game the friends are working on at the time. It was inspiring and encouraging to read.

My runners up this year are Corienne Hoex's Gentlemen Callers, which is like Invisible Cities, but for sex, literary and playful and phantasmic; and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris by Leanne Shapton, which tells the story of a couple getting together and then breaking up entirely through objects, presented in the style of an auction catalog with photos and descriptive captions. Shapton accomplishes what every museum curator and dungeon designer hopes to, creating a narrative entirely through

 

 

Nonfiction - Islands of Abandonment

 

My favorite nonfiction book in 2023 was Islands of Abandonment by journalist Cal Flyn. Flyn visits and writes about places that humans no longer use, and looks at how the ecosystem has regrown and recovered there. In a few cases, the abandonment is for political or economic reasons, but mostly it's because of pollution or poison - these are places we've made so toxic that we can no longer work or live there. A recurring theme is that the simple fact of human occupation is worse for the local ecosystem than anything else we can do to it - worse even than tons of unexploded ordinance, buried neurotoxins, or radiation. 

 

The ecosystems that grow back represent a kind of feral nature, different from what was there before, or in any of the few remaining places we've never touched. Flyn shows places that were abandoned for many possible reasons, and that have recovered in different ways. If the future involves fewer people, or even just more efficient land-use, there will probably be more abandonment, and Flyn helps us imagine what that might look like. This is probably the most D&D-able book I read all year.

 

My runners up are Ace by Angela Chen, which offers a look at asexual identity, its complexities, and what it illuminates about other sexualities that we might otherwise not see; and Adam Nicolson's Life Between the Tides. Nicolson builds his own tidal pools and reports on the ecosystems in miniature that spring up inside, talks about the biology of some of the most common tidal species, and gives a history of the Irish coastal region where he's working. It felt like a unique and very holistic view of both the niche and the system that contains it.

 

 

  

Comics - Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and Ducks (tie)

 

My favorite graphic novel this year collected the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow miniseries, written by Tom King and illustrated by Bilquis Evely. It seems like DC might be giving each of their heroes a chance at standalone superhero adventures out in space, and if so, I am fully in support of this project. A young Supergirl goes to a planet with a red sun so she can get drunk when she celebrates her 21st birthday, and ends up on a star-hopping adventure with a young farm girl, who narrates the series, in tow. This is science fantasy at its finest, real sword-and-planet stuff, and I liked the contrast between the physically-powerful but emotionally immature Supergirl, and the politically-empowered criminal she pursues.

 

My favorite graphic nonfiction was Kate Beaton's Ducks. Beaton is best known for her whimsical Hark! A Vagrant comics, but her memoir of her two years working in the oil industry to pay off her student loans is a serious and mature work. Beaton's experiences with sexual harassment were harrowing and persistent; any counterbalance within the piece comes less from humor and more from the awe of nature and her briefer encounters with human kindness.

 

My runners up are the Forest Hills Bootleg Society in fiction, and Flung Out of Space, which is technically fiction but grounded in biography. In Forest Hills, Dave Baker and Nicole Goux give us a story about four girls at a Christian high school who try selling bootleg hentai movies to boys so they can buy cool jackets and hopefully the approval of their peers. You just know it can't end well. Space is about the author Patricia Highsmith, by Grace Ellis and illustrated by Hannah Templer, covering the period where Highsmith was working in comics, beginning to experience success from Strangers on a Train, trying to sell Carol, and struggling with her own lesbianism and the self-hatred from her internalized homophobia.

 

 

The Best Things I Watched

 

 

Live-Action Television - Kleo

 

My favorite live-action show in 2023 was the German revenge thriller Kleo. I'm beginning to realize that I might have a soft spot for revenge stories. Show me a righteously angry person willing to suffer unlimited punishment for the chance to murder their way up the org chart until they can confront and kill the boss who wronged them, and I am on the edge of my seat the whole time. In real life I'm a pacifist, but on film, the more brutal and morally complex the revenger is, the more I'm enthralled. And Kleo, the character, is enthralling. She's an East German spy, who got burned and sent to prison. Then, when the Wall comes down, she's released into the rapidly reunifying German, with exactly one goal - to find out who in her own government framed and imprisoned her, and make them pay. 

 

Kleo is delightfully unhinged, with tactics that made me wince even as I couldn't look away from them. It helps that the show itself is very aesthetically pleasing, with bright colors, excellent action sequences, and a soundtrack that mixes synths with 80s New Wave and actual Red Army patriotic music. And actress Jella Haase plays the role with the kind of manic enthusiasm we usually associate with Nicholas Hoult or Nick Cage - absolutely committed to a character who is sometimes terrifying, sometimes sympathetic, and always compelling.

 

My live-action runners up is Irma Vep, which is much more high-concept. It's a prestige miniseries about the making of a fictional prestige miniseries. The fictional miniseries is a remake of the 1915 French film serial Les Vampires, and the real show, Irma Vep, is also a kind of remake or sequel and expansion of an earlier film with the same name and same concept by the same director. But if you can sort of set all that real-life complexity aside, then Irma Vep is a behind-the-scenes look at how prestige tv gets made today, the way the artistic and creative ambitions of some of the people involved can use, be used by, or simply clash with the purely financial motivations of others, and a kind of surreal exploration of the lead actress - played by Alicia Vikander - getting back in touch with her identities as an artistic and romantic person after an ugly breakup and an unfulfilling starring role in a superhero blockbuster.

 

 

  

 

Anime - Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and Sailor Moon (tie)

 

I only started consistently watching anime again in the last few years, and I feel like I'm embarrassed by the riches laid out before me as I sample some of the treasures from the past that I missed when they first came out. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is at least from this century, and like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it's about people making something they love. In this case, we follow three high school girls who form their own tiny animation studio as a club. Across the brief series, we see them make and screen three short films, and learn about each step of the process along the way. The characters dream of feature films and international success, but the show is realistic about how much work they have to do, and what kind of results they can produce.

What makes Eizouken really enjoyable is the absolutely irrepressible enthusiasm of the lead character, the bucket-hat-wearing Midori. She has an unstoppable imagination, looking at the real world and imagining it filled with robots and hovercrafts, and filling notebooks with drawings of her ideas. Midori imagines the kind of things I used to daydream about when I was a kid, and the way the show depicts them really captures the feeling of that childhood excitement; I've never seen it portrayed so accurately before, in any medium. The theme song is also a banger, and sets the mood with its infectious energy.

 

Eizouken has a somewhat non-traditional animation style, especially for anime, and it makes me want to shout out a few other short series I watched that used unconventional visuals, all of which I really enjoyed, including Kayba, Mononoke, and Fire Hunter.

My other favorite season 1 of the original Sailor Moon anime, the one that first aired in America television in the 90s, where I watched it sporadically after school. It turns out that my clearest memories are from the plant alien arc at the start of season 2, but my heart belongs to the first and best season, which in my opinion did the best job sharing the spotlight across the ensemble, and doesn't include Sailor Moon's difficult daughter from the future. An ordinary, imperfect high school girl discovers that she is also the superhero Sailor Moon, the guardian of an ancient Moon Princess, and defender of Earth against aliens who want to steal the life energy human teenagers, usually Sailor Moon's friends from school. As the show progresses, she meets a team of other guardians, and they become real friends out of costume too.

 

Yes, this is absolutely a formulaic, monster-of-the-week action show, but within that framework, there's a great deal of creativity and love that went into the series. The combat sequences, for example, often use a series of splashy still-frame images in lieu of full animation. This was almost certainly a cost-saving measure, but it's also an artistic choice, one that amplifies key moments in each fight, and the splash images are always really good. The show also deploys exaggerated, Looney Tunes style expressions to convey strong emotion; a deep knowledge of the art form and its history really shows through in those moments.

My runners up are Princess Jellyfish (for slice of life) and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury (for action). Princess Jellyfish follows a group of nerdy girls who live together in an all-women apartment building. When the city starts threatening to tear it down to revitalize the district, the girls are forced to confront their shyness and social awkwardness to advocate for the building at government meetings. One of the girls also makes friend with a crossdresser (someone who, I wonder, might be portrayed as a trans girl if the show were made today) who helps her practice acting confident and assertive, even when she just wants to hide. That crossdresser reminds me a lot of myself when I was that age.

The Witch from Mercury is not in continuity with any other Gundam series, although it uses the same giant robots and the same conflict between humans who live on Earth versus humans who live in space. This series focuses on the students at an elite academy, mostly the children of the richest and most powerful government and corporate leaders in the solar system. A cold-war conflict among the adults is acted out among their kids in the form of ritualized dueling (with mechas, of course) and high school romances. The stakes continue to ratchet up throughout the series, until the system is right at the brink of a real hot war. And I really liked the central relationship between Suletta and Miorine.

 

 

  

Films - The Creator

Probably my favorite film of the year was The Creator, which is exactly the kind of scifi film I hope they'll make more of. It's an original story, but in conversation with other works about robots and AI; it's visually stunning, seamlessly mixing CGI with practical techniques to make something that looks much better than either could produce alone; and it has something relevant to say about the contemporary world that's not simplistic, trite, or nihilistic.

At the end of an alt-history 20th century, where sentient robots became citizens of every country in the world over the course of the 60s and 70s, America suffers a terrorist attack, an atomic detonation in LA that kills a million people, and responds by outlawing robotics, and waging a global war on robots and any country that harbors them. Visually, the scenes of combat in Southeast Asia are reminiscent of the Vietnam War, but everything else about the war is obviously inspired by the War On Terror. What The Creator makes you feel, viscerally, is that even after an incident as severe as that, America's reaction is a catastrophic over-reaction, and that killing civilians abroad will never make anyone any safer at home. I watched this film over the summer, but its portrayals of racism and unconstrained military violence are even more relevant now, as the Israeli military is engaged in mass killing in Gaza.

My runner up is Vesper, which has like, all the same good qualities as The Creator, just on a smaller scale. In the climate and genetic engineering post-apocalyse, the self-contained cities known as Citadels control the supply of seeds to anyone living outside, and they only sell crops whose own grains will be sterile, forcing the hinterlands to purchase new seeds every year. Vesper is an ambitious girl on the cusp of puberty. She wants to be a scientist and move into the city; her uncle who owns the farm next door wants to ensnare her in debt and take ownership of her body. Then a small personal airship leaving the nearest Citadel crashes within sight of the farms, and Vesper suddenly has a new opportunity, and new dangers. After Islands of Abandonment, this might be the second-most D&D-able thing I enjoyed this year! It's actually very easy to imagine a version of this film that's just a Western, albeit one that center's women's experiences on the frontier, but I think the science fictional elements are improvements, they make the film better, certainly better-looking, and more impactful.

My 2022 in Review

Last year I started what I hope will be an annual tradition, and posted reviews of my favorite things I read and watched in 2021. It's time again, so here are my favorites from 2022! 

(Please note, the categories are somewhat different this year, and might be different again next year, depending on what particularly interests me each time around.)

 

The Best Things I Read

Graphic Novels - Black Water Lilies by Fred Duval and Didier Cassegrain

Black Water Lilies is a murder mystery set in the French village of Giverny, where Monet lived and painted for the latter part of his life. Police quickly determine that the murdered man was interested in acquiring Monet paintings by deceiving owners who didn't know the value of what they had, that he had numerous affairs, and that he might have a child. Three women emerge as suspects within the narrative - an old woman who secretly owns a Monet painting that is only rumored to even exist, a schoolteacher who has been seen with the dead man and might have had an affair with him, and a little girl who wants to be a painter and might be the right age to be the dead man's daughter. The police focus on the teacher and her husband, but that might be because the lead detective has fallen in love with her.

The investigation turns up a lot of information, but seemingly no conclusions, until the very end. The end of the story is perfect, and makes everything you've read so far even better in retrospect. I found myself immediately flipping back through to consider it all again. The art is also a absolutely gorgeous, which I think you can tell from the cover. The pastel colors, the profusion of flowers and large panels that show off the landscape - reading this book is like investigating a mystery set inside a Monet painting. The text and art work really well together, with the beautiful surroundings contrasting with the darkness of the story.

My runners up are Berlin by Jason Lutes, and Giantess by JC Deveny and Nuria Tamarit, which was published by the same press as Black Water Lilies. Berlin is an absolute masterpiece, with a large cast of characters who embody the major events of Germany in the 1930s and black and white art that resembles the striking graphics of posters of that era, and of course Lutes' name should be familiar to RPG fans. Giantess is a fantasy comic about a giant girl who is adopted by humans, then sets out to find her way in the world, along the way encountering politics, war, dogmatism, asceticism, witchcraft, and feminism, all while trying to decide what sort of person she wants to be.

 

 

Literary Fiction - Destransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

I'm always a bit nervous to read fiction about trans people, having been burned a bit by some of the novels by non-trans authors I read when I was first coming out. But I'm very glad I read Detransition, Baby, which is by a trans author, and filled with the sort of true-to-life details that let you know she really knows what she's talking about. I recognized myself in this, was reminded of other trans women I've known, and felt like I maybe learned some things about the community that I hadn't known before. Peters treats all her characters with empathy; she understands them and expresses their sometimes difficult-to-explain interior states with deceptive ease. Consider, for a moment, the beautiful ambiguity of the title. Is it a loving request, a bullying taunt, or simply an ordered list?

Detransition, Baby follows a trio of characters. Ames is currently living as a man, but he used to live as a trans woman, and may choose to again, sometime in the future, beyond the end of the book. Reese is Ames's ex-girlfriend, and another trans woman. Katrina is Ames's boss and current girlfriend, and she is accidentally pregnant with Ames's child. Ames suggests an unconventional arrangement - that the three of them co-parent the child together. As this plot unfolds in the present day, we get flashbacks to Ames's and Reese's closeted girlhoods, the early days of their transitions, how they met, and why their relationship ended. Ultimately, the three of them will have to decide whether to commit to Ames's plan or not, but the novel doesn't end with a decision; it ends when they have each finally confronted enough of their past mistakes to actually make a real decision.

My runner up is Temporary by Hillary Leichter, although The Very Nice Box by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman probably deserves a shout-out as well. Temporary follows a member of the precariat through a series of temporary jobs, where she deals with loneliness, low-pay, mistreatment by her coworkers, and the moral injury of being asked to do someone else's dirty work, all while longing for "the steadiness" of a job of her own. What's unique here is that her temporary positions are all fanciful and surreal - a pirate, a barnacle, a ghost, a hitman's assistant, a witch's assistant, a temporary mom. The Very Nice Box is a subversive romance novel that follows a queer woman working for an IKEA stand-in, designing the titular object for her company, and maybe re-opening her heart to a bro-ish young man whose affable masculinity is a little more toxic than it initially appears.

 

 

 

Genre Fiction - Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft

Senlin Ascends is a fantasy novel, set in a world that resembles rural England, or maybe New England, with the Tower standing in for London or New York. Thomas Senlin, a small-town school teacher and latter day Ichabod Crane figure, takes his new wife to the Tower for their honeymoon and immediately gets separated from her. We follow him as he searches, gradually working his way up the levels of the interior. The bottom floors of the Tower are tourist attractions, gaining expense and exclusivity as they rise. Senlin is a flawed protagonist, at once too fussy and too certain of himself, but he survives to continue his search because he grows and learns from his mistakes.

Although the idea of the Tower, and its early displays of steampunk technology, are indeed fantastical, Bancroft grounds his story in a great deal more social realism than you might expect. He's especially attuned to issues of class and gender. The Tower is a machine, and it runs on the exploitation of labor. Where I think Bancroft excels is, at each stage of his story, recognizing what's the most obvious thing that could happen next, and then trying to outdo himself. By the time I reached the final set-piece, where a half dozen factions and conflicts all exploded into one another, I was seriously impressed by his skill. Senlin is the first book of a quartet. It stands alone well enough if you're not sure you want to commit to the series, but I'm glad I kept going.

My runner up is Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. Harkaway gives us a James Bond type spy villain with a doomsday device and a plan to freeze the world in a state of perpetual quantum certainty, an aging lady spy forced out of retirement to stop him one last time, and a hapless watchmaker, son of a famous dead gangster, who assembles the greatest underworld vigilante team this side of M to pull one last heist and save the world from a state unbearable epistemic oversaturation. The whole caper is an awful lot of fun, at least as rollicking, madcap, and sexy as it is philosophical, but the elevated stakes, and the ideas behind them, only added to my enjoyment.

 

 

The Best Things I Listened To

Pop Music - "Expert in a Dying Field" by the Beths

With lyrics that seem to simultaneously describe the feeling of loving vintage and retro things, the grief of a failing relationship, and the pervasive anxiety of working in academia in time of budget cuts and shrinking college-age populations, guitars that progressively shift from pop to rock, and a video that was seemingly decorated by someone who wanted to make me sick with jealousy, the Beths score a very easy win here. 

For my runners up, I recommend "I'm Not Where You Are" by Marika Hackman and "None of My Friends" by Liz Lawrence, which are both about wanting to be alone, in their own ways, and both have excellent videos. 

 

 

Rock Music - "Hertz" by Amyl & the Sniffers

Amyl and her band are an honest-to-god punk rock phenomenon, with fast guitars, punchy lyrics, firecracker energy that rages without ever seeming to run out, and a name that genuinely offends at least half the people I try to recommend them to. (Just what are they sniffing, everyone seems to wonder. Is it glue, or the only other obvious alternative?) Here, she sings about wanting to go on a beach holiday, and I find her mood irresistibly infectious.

My runner up is "Chaise Lounge" by Wet Leg, which got much more attention this year. Despite their equally salacious name and even-more-explicit lyrics, no one ever seems as put out by this duo as they do by the Sniffers. The guitars here are probably a bit more danceable for most folks too.

 

 

The Best Things I Watched

 

 

Television - Dirty Pair

I never saw Dirty Pair when it was originally on in the 1980s -  in fact, I only found it because of a recent CBR article praising it shortly after it reappeared on Crunchyroll - but I'd like to think that if I'd had a cool older sister, this is the sort of show she'd have taken me under her wing and forced me to watch with her for my own benefit.

Dirty Pair follows a couple of teenage girl heroes-for-hire as they solve problems and restore justice in the most chaotic ways possible across a wild and dangerous scifi future. The girls feel like real teenagers. They quarrel with each other constantly. They'd rather go on dates with cute boys that save the world, but they will, though they'd like bonus pay or extra vacation days if they have to go above and beyond their original contract. In a galaxy where there seemingly is no "letter of the law" to follow, they consistently try to do the right thing and to stand up for people with less power who're being oppressed, no matter who's doing it.

And yes, their costumes are basically just fancy swimsuits. Yes, we sometimes see them wrapped in towels after showering at their apartment. But unlike more recent anime, we don't get any leering fanservice close-ups of their bodies. Their outfits just seem like an expression of self-confidence; their time "backstage" is shown naturalistically. The camera treats the audience as a peer rather than a voyeur. This is a series that was made for girls first and foremost. 

 

Plus, listen to that theme song! It's immediately jumped to the top of my favorites list, right beside "Cruel Angel's Thesis".

Honestly this was a good year for animation, and I watched a lot of it, but my runner-up is Andor, which would be first place in its own category if I was splitting television any further this year. It's a show about a Rebellion and an Empire that is thematically all about, you know, the ideas of rebellion and empire. Other reviews of the show tend to emphasize the price we see the rebels paying; I want to draw attention to Andor's representation of imperialism. All the cops we meet are bastards, the prison we see deserves to be abolished, and one of the most powerful scenes asks us to cheer for rioters throwing bricks at the police. (You might be briefly tempted, as I was, to feel some empathy for the girlboss character, until you're reminded that, oh right, she works for a government that tortures and kills with impunity, and the more competent she is at her job, the worse things are for the people she's targeting.) Andor is by far the most anti-authoritarian show I've watched recently. It also has excellent pacing into 3-episode arcs that inevitably culminate in perfectly choreographed action scenes, actors who are good at acting, and really excellent attention to detail in terms of the sets, costumes, and music.

 

Arthouse Films - Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn

Bad Luck Banging tells the story of a teacher who made a short porn video with her husband, and has to attend a meeting with the school's principal and a group of concerned parents to determine whether or not she'll be allowed to keep her job. In the first act, she crosses Bucharest on foot, walking from her apartment to the school, with a couple errands along the way. The movie was filmed in spring or summer 2020, so the masks, and the weird tension that suffused every face-to-face encounter during that time, are presented as a matter-of-fact part of the story. There's an interlude where the director criticizes what he sees as the sexual hypocrisy and growing fascism of Romanian society. His complaints about his country sound a lot like my complaints about mine; the differences are matters of degree, not kind. 

In the second act, the teacher attends the meeting, outdoors, because of the pandemic. If the first part was her Gethsemane, this is her Golgotha. The crowd of parents all want her fired. They insist on screening the porn video. (It was taken down from the internet, but one mother "helpfully" downloaded a copy for the meeting.) The parents all watch the video while the fathers make lewd comments. And the teacher does not flinch. She doesn't apologize. She doesn't offer to resign. She defends her right to exist as a human outside of her job, and she defends her ability to do her job well. I was in awe of her, transfixed by her courage and her strength. I only hope I can be half as brave if a conservative mob ever comes after me.

One thing I sometimes think about when watching or reading, is whether the depiction of sexuality is appropriate - was it necessary? was it authentic to the characters? should there have been less of it? or more? The show My Dress-Up Darling stands out to me for its inauthentic portrayal - when Marin looks at Gojo, we see him through her eyes, and understand what she feels, but when Gojo looks at Marin, we get generic anime fanservice, not a faithful representation of why he's so flustered by his sexy friend. The City in the Middle of the Night, which I otherwise really enjoyed, is notable for having characters who, seriously, should have just fucked at some point, where it feels false that literally none of them did, ever.

Bad Luck Banging absolutely passes this test. If a point of this film is that the teacher and her husband had the right to make a porn video, that she did nothing wrong either in her actions or by filming them, then yes, I really think the movie really does need to show you that video. It's not just acceptable; it's necessary. It would be self-defeating for the film to insist that this was completely fine but also refuse to allow the audience to glimpse it. And the film makes it clear, she hasn't done anything immoral - the people who keep re-uploading the video after it's taken down, and the people who watch it when she asks them not to, have.

My runner up is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which again, is probably the more famous of the two on my list. It's kind of a slow burn of a movie, but not only did it keep growing on me as I watched it, but I found my enjoyment of it increasing even more in retrospect after I finished. It's a historical lesbian romance that does right a lot of things that other films in that niche are often criticized for doing wrong. And as a bit of storytelling technique, I especially appreciate the character of the maid and her problem, which forces the two main women to get out of their own heads, interact with other people, and help someone who needs it. Her being younger also emphasizes the lead characters' relative maturity. It's a very well-made film.

 

Genre Films - Everything Everywhere All At Once

Speaking of well-made movies, can we talk about just how good Everything Everywhere All at Once is? At a time when multiverse movies are all the rage, it is easily the best multiverse movie, and likely to stay that way for awhile. We get a quick, understandable explanation for how the multiverse works, and how people can contact their multiversal variants, and the payoff from visiting the multiverse isn't just cool costumes, incredible fight scenes, and an excuse for each actor to play multiple roles - though we get all those things too. The payoff is a surprisingly moving discussion of the regret we all sometimes feel over the decisions we didn't make, expressed by characters who are not idealized or perfect, but are realistically, at times frustratingly, flawed, imperfect, human.

And as I said, it's a really well-made film. From Chekov's Gun in drama to a whole host of ideas about the role of repetition in comedy, we know that there are times in any work to bring something back from earlier rather than introduce something new. And part of the beauty of EEAAO is that everything comes back, usually two or three times. Nothing is one-off, nothing is just for effect. Everything comes back, and gains humor and poignancy from its reuse. 

 

The film editing also deserves a special shout-out here. Most of the time, I feel like awards for editing are mostly a way to lavish even more praise onto already successful films, or to ensure that a particular prestige pic doesn't get completely boxed out by someone else's winning streak - but seriously, EEAAO is a well-edited film. From the cuts between realities, to the super-rapid flashbacks, to the main villain's mutating mulitversal costumes and weaponry, to the really touching scene where two unmoving rocks talk to each other with the help the best shot-countershot since Alligator Loki, this is a movie that simply would not work if it weren't edited so well, and among the many things worth noticing as you watch it, that's definitely one.

My runner up is Netflix's Kate, featuring Mary Kate Winstead on a furious and doomed mission to get revenge on the people who poisoned her before the poison finishes its job. Absolutely brutal fight scenes, plot and dialogue that manage to not romanticize her remorseless killing spree, and the kind of neon-drenched visuals that I'm always excited to see more of. Watching Kate back-to-back with Gunpowder Milkshake made the latter seem even more garbo by comparison than it would have if I'd watched it alone. I'm ready for a change of pace from the formula of making your anti-heroic character more sympathetic by giving them a kid to defend, but considering that the radiation-poisoned protagonist goes back at least to D.O.A., it's not originality that matters here, but how well the film uses the pieces it's assembled from.