Story Pile: 2018

It’s been a year, hasn’t it?

Game Pile work is by definition slower and more difficult to do than Story Pile. I can watch videos or listen to audio dramas or digest movies while I’m doing other things. Cleaning the house and playing a videogame at the same time isn’t going to be a problem. Unless a series is remarkably long (looking at you, Star Trek), even if I don’t get it, I can get it more on a rewatch. I don’t tend to be drawn to media that needs multiple viewings, too. Not to sound like a snob but the kind of academic reading I have to do right now really has me filled up on ‘oo but what does that meaaaaan’ kind of fictive experiences.

What this means is that rather than rethinking the Story Pile in my head with hindsight, what I’ve mostly been thinking about has been the general texture of the quality of what I’ve been watching, listening to, and reading this year for my pleasure.

Some stuff this year has been great but the Story Pile has also, in the latter half of the year, taken its time to kick around some utter tosh.

Okay, first of all, good stuff, reviews that I think are good commentary on good media. Stuff where I liked what I saw or read or listened to and I think you’d like it too. I tried not to do too many of these – I didn’t want the whole year of talking media to be about things I already knew I thought were great. This list includes Arrested Development (the first series), Monster, Hello Rockview and Cul De Sac. A TV series, a manga, an album and a newspaper cartoon – pretty odd grouping, really.

Then there’s the stuff that I experienced for the first time this year that I thought was super great: Pacific Rim, Black Panther and Drive. I feel like Pacific Rim got a treatment that’s the closest I get to just boring gushing. Black Panther is a little different, because I mostly wanted to whack at some common public opinions without involving myself in the discussions of how it should be seen.

Some of my media intake isn’t just rewatching things I half-remember, it’s informing myself on the ‘classics’ I completely missed. This year, I watched The Blues Brothers, a movie that’d been cut out of my childhood. I enjoyed Blues Brothers 2000, a movie that was not very good, and going back and watching The Blues Brothers was like taking a hit of something much more crude, more raw, and much more potent.

Of course, there’s been a bunch of crap, almost all masquerading as something that hypothetically I’d like. Arrested Development went on to a second series that is just plain out bad, for example. All flabby and meanspirited and unnecessarily awkward, even though it had a framing device I like.

The superhero space got its fair share of garbage, too, and so you could see me being a giant pissbaby about my superhero stories not being good enough – I went in on Daredevil Season 3, The Punisher, Justice League, and Iron Fist Season 2 (Danny sucks), and even gave Aquaman a stomping, even though it just came out yesterday.

Also, special mention goes to Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning. My review of that book received an enormous amount of attention, and I think that, in part, it’s because I wrote it in a clever way. Nonetheless, I am glad, because Trigger Warning is a silly book of mediocre garbage that wants to cloak itself in knives.

Nanette And the Limits of Comedy

Then there were the surprises. Stuff I didn’t know I’d like, stuff I was actually willing to ignore at first. The surprises, like Nanette, a truly blistering comedy show that presented the mind and pride of Hannah Gasbdy. Or Sonic Boom, a tie in show for a Sonic the Hedgehog game that has both nothing to do with the game and is really excellent on its own merits.

And who could forget how much I enjoyed Kamen Rider W, a series I’d been stupidly sleeping on for almost two years! These were all pleasant new things I got to experience this year, and I’m really glad I did. Nanette was excoriating and intense and amazing and heartful and wholesome while also brutal, and Kamen Rider W was a whole new genre of energetic love in form.

I liked Nanette enough to make a video about it, and I liked Kamen Rider W enough to make a whole month of essays about the ways it’s a Good Show. Basically I liked Kamen Rider W as much as I disliked Iron Fist. Is that a good metric?

There’s stuff I wish I’d written about – The Dragon Prince, and Voltron: Legendary Defenders, or the manga-and-anime Geobreeders. I wish I’d found the time to read Windblade and make my video about Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. But these things will come in time, and now they have time to percolate in my mind, to get better and better as I learn how to make better and better media. I know one thing I want to do is talk about why I dislike Hunk in Voltron so much, or talk about why media like Stephen Universe and She-Ra and the Princess Of Power lost me.

Oh, and go check out Dragon Prince, it’s really good. And Voltron. And watch Korra again!