Best of 2021 in Media
Feb. 2nd, 2022 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaPretend it's not just become February. Every year, sometimes very and exceedingly late, I post a list like this: Here's the best media I encountered, but which probably was not released, in 2021.
I read over 220 "books" in 2021, but my records are particularly unreliable. I read a lot of difficult to categorize things, like manga one-shots and fanfic, and zines, fairy tale translations, and other short work in toki pona. My November-December records have holes left by mental health crashes. My demographics tracking has only grown more generous, with a lot of overlap between categories.
Of my 2021 reading, 52% were written by women, 47% were written by men, 6% were by non-cis authors. 40% were authors of color, 5% were Jewish, and 14% fell in my bucket for all other marginalized identities. A remarkable 42% were works in translation—in the last few years, that number has been closer to 25%. An impressive 60-some books/28% were rereads, which is one reason my best-of list is unusually brief. In many previous years I've made efforts to diversify my reading—initially away from cis white male authors, but as time went on also away from cis white female authors; those habits have become part of my nature as a reader, but when not actively engaging in a similar goal the numbers tend to backslide. Comfort reading can be conservative reading; but comfort reading manga will at least inflate your demographics for PoC & works in translation. Learning toki pona also inflated my metrics with short translated works.
Only 5 DNFs! I must continue to encourage myself to learn to give up earlier and more often.
The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
I can't extricate the experience of the novel from the context of seeing The Untamed first; I love how they work in concert, that the book is the more complete story while feeling 200% like the world's most indulgent fanfic. Imminently satisfying. So good in fact that I didn't review it; how annoying that "loved it too much to talk about it" is a consistent indicator of my favorite works.
BL genre
I read and reread a lot of BL this year; and a lot is trash, but there's so many avenues for finding the specific trash which will really, really work for you, and that paid off for me. Highlights include rereading Sadahiro Mika, who is still a favorite; discovering the work of Harada, whose oneshots are some of the most intense and best crafted I've ever seen; Setona Mizushiro's The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese & sequel, which are exquisitely realized; and finally reading Yun Kouga's Loveless, which got me so good with its indulgent, gorgeous aesthetic and surprisingly refined writing.
Wolves and Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears, Emily Gravett
I'm always down for a weird "is this actually for kids?" picture book, but Gravett was especially weird, and surprising, and delightful—and scary! There's more Gravett on my TBR, but I imagine these will remain favorites.
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This is inextricable for me from the process of learning toki pona, which is one of the more fulfilling things I did in 2021; to reread the work and to read it in translation into a new language meant spending significant, intimate time with it; not every text can hold up to that (although I also had a lot of fun reading Grimm's fairy tales in toki pona), but this one bloomed.
The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule and A Death in Belmont, Sebastian Junger
I had complex feelings, this year, about true crime as ~problematic~ or guilty pleasure; and then there were these books. They each lift an enormous weight: Rule's exhaustive, humanizing portrait of Bundy and of everyone involved in his narrative demystifies much of the cultural concept of serial killers. Junger approaches a single murder from an impressively holistic perspective, exploring not just its connection to a serial killer but the entire function of a racialized justice system.
Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
I'm predominately a morbid nonfiction reader; this was a step outside of my comfort zone, but it turns out that listening to a nerd talk in profound and loving depth about their favorite thing can be comfort reading indeed.
Animal Land: Where there are no People, Sybil and Katherine Corbet
Whimsical, absurd, and delightful, with the added bonus of rediscovering a lost little passion project from 1897. I still think about it incessantly: A nasty biting Thing. Theres none more about it
A+E 4ever, I. Merey
I like that books as physical objects are becoming an increasingly small part of my life, but every now and then something violates that maxim. The experience of finding this in the library's discards and bringing it home and loving it when I may have never discovered it elsewise was such a joy.
Outer Wilds
I played this in February and went, well, game of the year; and was right. I also read the original thesis, and nothing can better illustrate how and why the game succeeds. Exploration is the only goal and reward, which creates incredible immersion and ownership in a journey of discovery that lives up to that level of investment. And this just gets me, thematically, in a way that holds up a mirror to Dark Souls, paralleling and reversing its image. Also the music makes me cry.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Last year I said "I hope this will be on my best of list next year, when I can return to the completed game," and here we are next year, and I was right! I picked this back up with the 2.0 update, and a completed New Horizons is robust, gorgeous, and chock full of quality of life improvements. I'm still playing for hours a day. I'm on the brink of finishing a town/island for the first time ever. I couldn't be happier with the game now.
Phogs
I've never made such quick turnaround from seeing the cover image to dropping everything to play co-op with Teja, and never recommended a better co-op game for our friendship in particular. Phenomenal aesthetics in the level design; puzzles more clever than difficult, making great use of a very silly premise; almost any time you wonder "can I..." "what would happen if..." there's 1) an answer and 2) an achievement for it; in every moment a pleasure, but especially with a friend who really wants to be half of a rubber-noodle dog.
The Wild at Heart
Pikmin gameplay meets Don't Starve art style but it's set in a whimsical, enchanted wood and the soundtrack is phenomenal. Average time to 100% is ~15 hours and I played it for 60, so take that as a measure of how immersive and delightful I found this game & how exhaustively I explored it.
Journey to the Savage Planet
I 100%'ed a lot of games this year (the previous two titles included) and this was another one of them because everything it does re: exploration and collection is done so well, and the ruthlessly irreverent humor, surprisingly, lands. Great art style, great movetech, very satisfying to eat orange goo.
Halo Infinite
I love Halo a lot, I love 343's Halo a lot. I have mixed-to-positive feels about the narrative/genre structure here which I will continue to resolve when I co-op is released, seven eternities from now. Some of the multiplayer decisions, specifically re: the leveling system, but also re: weapons, make me big mad. But a Halo with caveats is still a Halo I'll play nightly with friends for a calendar year, and: Cortana! forever my beloved!
Wilmot's Warehouse
This is objectively insubstantial, but never has a game been as satisfying as "organize boxes by whichever category you deem most logical." (Color, by the way: color is the answer and makes for such satisfying screenshots. But trying theme-based sorting gave this a lot of replayability.) I really like this Polygon video on it & on organizing in general.
NeiR Replicant ver.1.22474487139...
This year I played NieR: Automata myself for the first time and this remake made it possible to finally see the whole of NieR Replicant/Gestalt (since my partner burned out on the combat when playing the original Gestalt release); unsurprisingly, given my love of the series in theme and format, a great experience where all parts enrich the whole.
Psychonauts 2
A long-awaited sequel that fulfills expectation is no small feat; this really does preserve the strengths of the first game. I love how the style adapts to modern-day graphics and love a lot of the late-game level design.
Steven Universe
I can't say that I've ever cried so much watching a show, excepting probably Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Every time we had questions about worldbuilding, about a backstory, about how an event would impact a character, the show had answers: it has an incredible grasp of the through-line, of the fridge horror, of the slow but meaningful pace of true character growth. And it's so, so gorgeous.
Home Movie: The Princess Bride
During the pandemic, a vast ensemble of quarantined actors recreated The Princess Bride on their smart phones, wielding the worst props and the greatest love. There are line reads that are on point not just to the script but to all the quirks of filming and acting and the vibe of the film where it's like, this isn't a script, this is the memory of watching the movie a hundred times—the same memories I have. Hilarious; cried a lot, too.
Critical Role Campaign 2
I don't have the emotional investment in the second campaign that I had in the first, which has a gothic/angsty vibe that really worked for me and similarly angsty character arcs that struck a personal note. But Campaign 2 has universal improvements in quality: accessible, slick, improved acting, a more distinctive big bad, a good length, and also Jester Lavorre is there. Making hundreds of hours feel easily watchable is a feat and I loved the time I spent gaming while watching, even if I didn't love-love it with the unhinged intensity of C1.
Bee and Puppycat
This is what made me finally pick up Steven Universe, because I like the narrative but I love the vibes—cotton candy sci-fi and trauma and millennial humor. I feel this becoming a comfort rewatch.
Reality TV, particularly Great British Bake Off series 12, Forged in Fire, and Blown Away
My partner & I always pick up a reality TV show to watch in between other things and then, if it's the right reality TV show about competence at a practical/artistic skill with a minimum manufactured social drama, we ignore everything else to watch the thing. There was nothing more that I wanted in 2021 than that escapism. Cozy, satisfying; most definitely flawed, but so slight that, really, who cares.
My Spotify top songs of 2021. Almost nothing not instrumental video game/rhythm game music made it on there so, even more than usual, I probably spent a lot of time with my in the background playlist. But there's a touch of oldies (since I finally built up a 60s-70s playlist) and a smidgen of the same moody bullshit I listen to & love every autumn.
Particular highlights:
Spicy Boyfriend by Shawn Wasabi is at the top of the list because it became my cat October's official theme song. The entire lyrics are "I love you so so so so much," and I do.
As above, The Wild at Heart soundtrack is superb.
Books
I read over 220 "books" in 2021, but my records are particularly unreliable. I read a lot of difficult to categorize things, like manga one-shots and fanfic, and zines, fairy tale translations, and other short work in toki pona. My November-December records have holes left by mental health crashes. My demographics tracking has only grown more generous, with a lot of overlap between categories.
Of my 2021 reading, 52% were written by women, 47% were written by men, 6% were by non-cis authors. 40% were authors of color, 5% were Jewish, and 14% fell in my bucket for all other marginalized identities. A remarkable 42% were works in translation—in the last few years, that number has been closer to 25%. An impressive 60-some books/28% were rereads, which is one reason my best-of list is unusually brief. In many previous years I've made efforts to diversify my reading—initially away from cis white male authors, but as time went on also away from cis white female authors; those habits have become part of my nature as a reader, but when not actively engaging in a similar goal the numbers tend to backslide. Comfort reading can be conservative reading; but comfort reading manga will at least inflate your demographics for PoC & works in translation. Learning toki pona also inflated my metrics with short translated works.
Only 5 DNFs! I must continue to encourage myself to learn to give up earlier and more often.
The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
I can't extricate the experience of the novel from the context of seeing The Untamed first; I love how they work in concert, that the book is the more complete story while feeling 200% like the world's most indulgent fanfic. Imminently satisfying. So good in fact that I didn't review it; how annoying that "loved it too much to talk about it" is a consistent indicator of my favorite works.
BL genre
I read and reread a lot of BL this year; and a lot is trash, but there's so many avenues for finding the specific trash which will really, really work for you, and that paid off for me. Highlights include rereading Sadahiro Mika, who is still a favorite; discovering the work of Harada, whose oneshots are some of the most intense and best crafted I've ever seen; Setona Mizushiro's The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese & sequel, which are exquisitely realized; and finally reading Yun Kouga's Loveless, which got me so good with its indulgent, gorgeous aesthetic and surprisingly refined writing.
Wolves and Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears, Emily Gravett
I'm always down for a weird "is this actually for kids?" picture book, but Gravett was especially weird, and surprising, and delightful—and scary! There's more Gravett on my TBR, but I imagine these will remain favorites.
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This is inextricable for me from the process of learning toki pona, which is one of the more fulfilling things I did in 2021; to reread the work and to read it in translation into a new language meant spending significant, intimate time with it; not every text can hold up to that (although I also had a lot of fun reading Grimm's fairy tales in toki pona), but this one bloomed.
Honorable Mentions in Books
The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule and A Death in Belmont, Sebastian Junger
I had complex feelings, this year, about true crime as ~problematic~ or guilty pleasure; and then there were these books. They each lift an enormous weight: Rule's exhaustive, humanizing portrait of Bundy and of everyone involved in his narrative demystifies much of the cultural concept of serial killers. Junger approaches a single murder from an impressively holistic perspective, exploring not just its connection to a serial killer but the entire function of a racialized justice system.
Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
I'm predominately a morbid nonfiction reader; this was a step outside of my comfort zone, but it turns out that listening to a nerd talk in profound and loving depth about their favorite thing can be comfort reading indeed.
Animal Land: Where there are no People, Sybil and Katherine Corbet
Whimsical, absurd, and delightful, with the added bonus of rediscovering a lost little passion project from 1897. I still think about it incessantly: A nasty biting Thing. Theres none more about it
A+E 4ever, I. Merey
I like that books as physical objects are becoming an increasingly small part of my life, but every now and then something violates that maxim. The experience of finding this in the library's discards and bringing it home and loving it when I may have never discovered it elsewise was such a joy.
Games
Outer Wilds
I played this in February and went, well, game of the year; and was right. I also read the original thesis, and nothing can better illustrate how and why the game succeeds. Exploration is the only goal and reward, which creates incredible immersion and ownership in a journey of discovery that lives up to that level of investment. And this just gets me, thematically, in a way that holds up a mirror to Dark Souls, paralleling and reversing its image. Also the music makes me cry.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Last year I said "I hope this will be on my best of list next year, when I can return to the completed game," and here we are next year, and I was right! I picked this back up with the 2.0 update, and a completed New Horizons is robust, gorgeous, and chock full of quality of life improvements. I'm still playing for hours a day. I'm on the brink of finishing a town/island for the first time ever. I couldn't be happier with the game now.
Phogs
I've never made such quick turnaround from seeing the cover image to dropping everything to play co-op with Teja, and never recommended a better co-op game for our friendship in particular. Phenomenal aesthetics in the level design; puzzles more clever than difficult, making great use of a very silly premise; almost any time you wonder "can I..." "what would happen if..." there's 1) an answer and 2) an achievement for it; in every moment a pleasure, but especially with a friend who really wants to be half of a rubber-noodle dog.
The Wild at Heart
Pikmin gameplay meets Don't Starve art style but it's set in a whimsical, enchanted wood and the soundtrack is phenomenal. Average time to 100% is ~15 hours and I played it for 60, so take that as a measure of how immersive and delightful I found this game & how exhaustively I explored it.
Honorable Mentions in Games
Journey to the Savage Planet
I 100%'ed a lot of games this year (the previous two titles included) and this was another one of them because everything it does re: exploration and collection is done so well, and the ruthlessly irreverent humor, surprisingly, lands. Great art style, great movetech, very satisfying to eat orange goo.
Halo Infinite
I love Halo a lot, I love 343's Halo a lot. I have mixed-to-positive feels about the narrative/genre structure here which I will continue to resolve when I co-op is released, seven eternities from now. Some of the multiplayer decisions, specifically re: the leveling system, but also re: weapons, make me big mad. But a Halo with caveats is still a Halo I'll play nightly with friends for a calendar year, and: Cortana! forever my beloved!
Wilmot's Warehouse
This is objectively insubstantial, but never has a game been as satisfying as "organize boxes by whichever category you deem most logical." (Color, by the way: color is the answer and makes for such satisfying screenshots. But trying theme-based sorting gave this a lot of replayability.) I really like this Polygon video on it & on organizing in general.
NeiR Replicant ver.1.22474487139...
This year I played NieR: Automata myself for the first time and this remake made it possible to finally see the whole of NieR Replicant/Gestalt (since my partner burned out on the combat when playing the original Gestalt release); unsurprisingly, given my love of the series in theme and format, a great experience where all parts enrich the whole.
Psychonauts 2
A long-awaited sequel that fulfills expectation is no small feat; this really does preserve the strengths of the first game. I love how the style adapts to modern-day graphics and love a lot of the late-game level design.
Visual Media
Steven Universe
I can't say that I've ever cried so much watching a show, excepting probably Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Every time we had questions about worldbuilding, about a backstory, about how an event would impact a character, the show had answers: it has an incredible grasp of the through-line, of the fridge horror, of the slow but meaningful pace of true character growth. And it's so, so gorgeous.
Home Movie: The Princess Bride
During the pandemic, a vast ensemble of quarantined actors recreated The Princess Bride on their smart phones, wielding the worst props and the greatest love. There are line reads that are on point not just to the script but to all the quirks of filming and acting and the vibe of the film where it's like, this isn't a script, this is the memory of watching the movie a hundred times—the same memories I have. Hilarious; cried a lot, too.
Critical Role Campaign 2
I don't have the emotional investment in the second campaign that I had in the first, which has a gothic/angsty vibe that really worked for me and similarly angsty character arcs that struck a personal note. But Campaign 2 has universal improvements in quality: accessible, slick, improved acting, a more distinctive big bad, a good length, and also Jester Lavorre is there. Making hundreds of hours feel easily watchable is a feat and I loved the time I spent gaming while watching, even if I didn't love-love it with the unhinged intensity of C1.
Honorable Mentions in Visual Media
Bee and Puppycat
This is what made me finally pick up Steven Universe, because I like the narrative but I love the vibes—cotton candy sci-fi and trauma and millennial humor. I feel this becoming a comfort rewatch.
Reality TV, particularly Great British Bake Off series 12, Forged in Fire, and Blown Away
My partner & I always pick up a reality TV show to watch in between other things and then, if it's the right reality TV show about competence at a practical/artistic skill with a minimum manufactured social drama, we ignore everything else to watch the thing. There was nothing more that I wanted in 2021 than that escapism. Cozy, satisfying; most definitely flawed, but so slight that, really, who cares.
Music
My Spotify top songs of 2021. Almost nothing not instrumental video game/rhythm game music made it on there so, even more than usual, I probably spent a lot of time with my in the background playlist. But there's a touch of oldies (since I finally built up a 60s-70s playlist) and a smidgen of the same moody bullshit I listen to & love every autumn.
Particular highlights:
Spicy Boyfriend by Shawn Wasabi is at the top of the list because it became my cat October's official theme song. The entire lyrics are "I love you so so so so much," and I do.
As above, The Wild at Heart soundtrack is superb.
