Best of 2022 in Media
Jan. 3rd, 2023 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaA year's-best before February? Is it, indeed, early January? Every year I post a list like this: Here's the best media I encountered, but which probably was not released, in 2022.
I read 244 texts in 2022; not by even the most generous definition could all those be called "books." 27 of them were game manuals which clock in at ~15 pages. I also read a bit of short fiction during spooky season (counted individually) and read a lot of Stranger Things fic (not counted individually); I read multi-volume manga series (individual) and one 4000-page webtoon (not). The takeaway here is that statistics are a farce, and that's okay. For what it's worth (i.e. not much), my Goodreads wrap-up counts this as 115 books/48k pages.
But while the specifics are unique to this year, some random rabbithole that inflates my metrics has become pretty standard, so this is similar to my 2021 (220 books) and 2020 (243 books) numbers.
53% were by women, 32% were by men, and 18% fall under my "not cis" category (which includes authors who haven't disclosed their gender). 7% were Jewish authors; 33% were authors of color (and much of this was manga or manga-adjacent). 25% go in my also-generous "otherwise marginalized" bucket, which primarily but not exclusively covers neurodivergent and queer identities. 24% of the books were works in translation, which helps to contextualize the PoC demographic (read: it's manga). None of these statistics are substantially different than my norm.
I DNF'd 13 books! More DNFs is a longstanding goal, but this was less the conscious decision to put down books that aren't working, and more the result of the absolute hell that has been my concentration this year; many of those DNFs are texts that I'll come back to.
57/23% were rereads, discussed in detail here.
These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever
Those texts that feel written for me leave me at a loss, put on the spot: is this the best book? how does it measure up objectively? But the truth is that I don't care. I loved this; it was a phenomenal way to end the year, and I treasure its indulgences.
The Northern Caves, nostalgebraist
The massive book hangover this gave me made it one of the more memorable reading experiences of the year. That juncture of nostalgia and criticism, revelation and desolation, grabbed and shook my little brainmeats like a dog toy.
Nonfiction on audio
It was a banner year for this format; while repainting the majority of a house, I read over 40 books on audio, almost all nonfiction, mostly true crime but with a sprinkling of memoir and science. I'm grateful for their company. The best were:
Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder, Mikita Brottman (get real, real mad about the consequences of an insanity defense and state-mandated institutionalization!)
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham (realize how profoundly awful was Soviet control of Ukraine & be afraid of acute radiation syndrome!)
Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, Elon Green (forgotten serial murderer, except actually it's, most delightfully, about the history of the queer community)
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control , Stephen Kinzer (a very human view of the profoundly unethical, dehumanizing research of MKUltra)
Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora (abuse memoir about the arts culture that enables and abets the grooming of adolescents, written with unforgiving clarity)
A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, Reginald Dwayne Betts (prison memoir from a poet; my first prison memoir, and very productive)
Video game manuals
Tunic got me into reading game manuals, and it was a blast. See this post for complete list and longer thoughts, but the TL;DR: quality varies, of course, but the sense of potential in a game manual is unrivaled.
As You Wish, Cary Elwes
Pure comfort reading; I could listen to those involved in the making of the Princess Bride talk about their love of the Princess Bride forever—they seem to view it as fondly as I do.
Happy Sugar Life, Tomiyaki Kagisora
Why is manga always so overwritten? Nonetheless I loved this: a fun horror romp through codependency and unusually intimate relationships, with saccharine pastel stylings that create a fun contrast.
The Scholomance series, Naomi Novik
Novik's worldbuilding style is so satisfying, and the ethical thought experiment of this, giving one person such ridiculous levels of power that it's possible to entertain a one-person-saves-the-world fantasy, but at incredible cost.... I found this series really satisfying.
Noumena series, Lindsay Ellis
Truth of the Divine took this from iddy wish fulfillment to bitter, mean desperation, and the one atop the other is delicious. It feels weird to mark as favorite a series that's not yet complete, but I loved the second book so much.
Compromise, Assimbya
And it feels weird to put a friend's fic on a best-of list, but finally reading this was my culmination of fondly watching other people read Dracula Daily and thinking about source not just a literature but as conversation; and this enriches that conversation immensely.
Tunic
I played this back in March and went, well, that's GOTY. I love media that hits this way, that I know I'll love & then do. Tunic I love for its wonder: this isn't the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia re: classic video games, but the actual feeling of potential and discovery. I went crazy for this thing, 100%'d it (within reason) (that is, collectables and most achieves, and reading deep lore online, but not personally translate the runes), wouldn't stop talking about it. The manual conceit made me pick up a while new hobby, as above. Remarkable.
Signalis
GOTY runner-up; we haven't yet replayed for more/truer ending(s), or it might beat out Tunic. (This is the first of many favorites that I didn't play myself but instead watched my partner play.) Oh, I loved this: it's so cerebral and yet its internal logic is impeccable, the answer to every asinine Resident Evil puzzle. The relationship between puzzle structure, enemies, and lore is brilliant. The plot is everything I want in iterative/cyclical narratives, especially of the android variety. As is a running theme, I love a crapsack and/or decaying and/or meat world, and this! this is all of the above. [This space intentionally left blank.]
Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Old Blood, The New Colossus, and Youngblood
I was actively opposed to these games for years because I didn't trust them to handle the subject matter in any tolerable way. But Jacob Geller has talked about them so much, positively, as a Jew!, so I took the risk, and: They're powerful and so well-balanced, a ridiculous power fantasy of Nazi-killing where Nazis aren't a blank stand-in for guilt-free target but are worth killing precisely because they're Nazis; where the good guys are good, and empowered, particularly for the reasons Nazis hate them.
Scorn
Because this is another watched-not-played, I was spared any less stellar bits, like combat. But oh, I loved this. Crapsack worlds that are also meat worlds, my beloved; and this is so intricate, so embodied, so gratuitous in that intimate, unsettling way that I want body horror to be.
Character.AI
This is a pretty advanced neural language model chatbot that's currently free to use. What's the game? The game is "talk to chatbot." But a cogent conversations with artificial personalities is my dream, and this comes impressively close.
Exo One
I'm a sucker for being terrified by the infinite size of space, and this is a game about flying as a tiny little spacepod across vast alien landscapes and between asteroids, with themes to match. It's a little indie title with associated limitations, but it gave me such a feeling.
Hollow Knight
My partner replayed this at my request and I liked it better the second time around; Souls-likes benefit from a closer eye, obviously, and it this was a more thorough and complete run. And I am a sucker for this style of worldbuilding—not so much the "tease apart the lore" bit as the "cycles of loss destroying an already-sundered world; but still, your role has meaning" part. Also the aesthetics of this game are phenominal.
Death's Door
I don't think about the plot of this a ton, and generally lack the investment in this that I have in most Souls-likes. But it's so impeccably cute & the soundtrack is great; a fantastic experience in the moment.
Adventure Time
I tried watching this some years ago, and the first season or two were fine. But watching the entire run with someone? Well, it turns out widely acclaimed cartoons are good, actually; we loved this. There's an corollary to rule of cool which says something like "rule of batshit crazy, if all of it matters": the short format, joke endings, and buck-wild worldbuilding mean that anything is possible, but the overarching plot & knack for call-backs means that it all has meaning. It's so fun & sincerely satisfying.
Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space
If I could live in any fictional world.... Look, this is a weird adaptation, both summarizing and retelling and altering the original run; and there's more plot, but somehow it doesn't manage to be any less weird or even to answer more questions. And yet! I loved this, loved its slow mundane pace and bizarro world and cotton-candy body horror.
Star Trek: Lower Decks
This actually gets modern Trek, it understands how to reflect lovingly on prior Trek without turning into a vain nostalgia machine; refocusing on the nobodies is the counterbalance I needed to every time I got really mad about Disco; it's actually funny. We burned through this in, like, two weeks.
NoClip
My takeaway from discovering this channel and devouring their documentaries is that games are hard to make; very hard, and made by people that love games. I don't mean people who own ginormous AAA studios; I mean that games are actually made by ridiculously overworked normal people who really love the medium. These two tenets are obvious but so ubiquitous and fundamental that they've altered how I view games.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
This is utterly unbothered by happy endings, and that's as it should be: cyberpunk ought always be a larger-than-life technicolor grimdark capitalist shitshow. Great characters, great action, but what I love best is seeing what narratives can achieve when they're more concerned with good writing than with being nice or open to easy sequels.
Squid Game
The particular way this handles cliffhangers is stupid. But boy howdy to I love a deadly game, and this is a great one: ridiculous aesthetics played against gratuitous gore, bucketloads of social commentary—all very much my jam.
Arcane
I've watched a lot of "cartoons for kids, but actually delightful as an adult, especially because an adult is able to appreciate the meteoric rise in queer content over the years" lately, and frankly I love those more. But the ability for a Western cartoon to be 300% for adults, actually; to be ruthlessly grim with gorgeous, intricate art.... Well. Turns out that's pretty great.
Knives Out and Glass Onion
I do not have any deep take here; I just love murder mysteries and cathartic social commentary/revenge fantasies, and the right level of camp. And a sequel that isn't bad!
My Spotify top songs of 2022 is almost an identical list to last year's. It wasn't a big music year, and when I was listening it was to my usual playlists in the usual cycles.
Books
I read 244 texts in 2022; not by even the most generous definition could all those be called "books." 27 of them were game manuals which clock in at ~15 pages. I also read a bit of short fiction during spooky season (counted individually) and read a lot of Stranger Things fic (not counted individually); I read multi-volume manga series (individual) and one 4000-page webtoon (not). The takeaway here is that statistics are a farce, and that's okay. For what it's worth (i.e. not much), my Goodreads wrap-up counts this as 115 books/48k pages.
But while the specifics are unique to this year, some random rabbithole that inflates my metrics has become pretty standard, so this is similar to my 2021 (220 books) and 2020 (243 books) numbers.
53% were by women, 32% were by men, and 18% fall under my "not cis" category (which includes authors who haven't disclosed their gender). 7% were Jewish authors; 33% were authors of color (and much of this was manga or manga-adjacent). 25% go in my also-generous "otherwise marginalized" bucket, which primarily but not exclusively covers neurodivergent and queer identities. 24% of the books were works in translation, which helps to contextualize the PoC demographic (read: it's manga). None of these statistics are substantially different than my norm.
I DNF'd 13 books! More DNFs is a longstanding goal, but this was less the conscious decision to put down books that aren't working, and more the result of the absolute hell that has been my concentration this year; many of those DNFs are texts that I'll come back to.
57/23% were rereads, discussed in detail here.
These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever
Those texts that feel written for me leave me at a loss, put on the spot: is this the best book? how does it measure up objectively? But the truth is that I don't care. I loved this; it was a phenomenal way to end the year, and I treasure its indulgences.
The Northern Caves, nostalgebraist
The massive book hangover this gave me made it one of the more memorable reading experiences of the year. That juncture of nostalgia and criticism, revelation and desolation, grabbed and shook my little brainmeats like a dog toy.
Nonfiction on audio
It was a banner year for this format; while repainting the majority of a house, I read over 40 books on audio, almost all nonfiction, mostly true crime but with a sprinkling of memoir and science. I'm grateful for their company. The best were:
Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder, Mikita Brottman (get real, real mad about the consequences of an insanity defense and state-mandated institutionalization!)
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham (realize how profoundly awful was Soviet control of Ukraine & be afraid of acute radiation syndrome!)
Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, Elon Green (forgotten serial murderer, except actually it's, most delightfully, about the history of the queer community)
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control , Stephen Kinzer (a very human view of the profoundly unethical, dehumanizing research of MKUltra)
Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora (abuse memoir about the arts culture that enables and abets the grooming of adolescents, written with unforgiving clarity)
A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, Reginald Dwayne Betts (prison memoir from a poet; my first prison memoir, and very productive)
Video game manuals
Tunic got me into reading game manuals, and it was a blast. See this post for complete list and longer thoughts, but the TL;DR: quality varies, of course, but the sense of potential in a game manual is unrivaled.
Honorable Mentions in Books
As You Wish, Cary Elwes
Pure comfort reading; I could listen to those involved in the making of the Princess Bride talk about their love of the Princess Bride forever—they seem to view it as fondly as I do.
Happy Sugar Life, Tomiyaki Kagisora
Why is manga always so overwritten? Nonetheless I loved this: a fun horror romp through codependency and unusually intimate relationships, with saccharine pastel stylings that create a fun contrast.
The Scholomance series, Naomi Novik
Novik's worldbuilding style is so satisfying, and the ethical thought experiment of this, giving one person such ridiculous levels of power that it's possible to entertain a one-person-saves-the-world fantasy, but at incredible cost.... I found this series really satisfying.
Noumena series, Lindsay Ellis
Truth of the Divine took this from iddy wish fulfillment to bitter, mean desperation, and the one atop the other is delicious. It feels weird to mark as favorite a series that's not yet complete, but I loved the second book so much.
Compromise, Assimbya
And it feels weird to put a friend's fic on a best-of list, but finally reading this was my culmination of fondly watching other people read Dracula Daily and thinking about source not just a literature but as conversation; and this enriches that conversation immensely.
Games
Tunic
I played this back in March and went, well, that's GOTY. I love media that hits this way, that I know I'll love & then do. Tunic I love for its wonder: this isn't the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia re: classic video games, but the actual feeling of potential and discovery. I went crazy for this thing, 100%'d it (within reason) (that is, collectables and most achieves, and reading deep lore online, but not personally translate the runes), wouldn't stop talking about it. The manual conceit made me pick up a while new hobby, as above. Remarkable.
Signalis
GOTY runner-up; we haven't yet replayed for more/truer ending(s), or it might beat out Tunic. (This is the first of many favorites that I didn't play myself but instead watched my partner play.) Oh, I loved this: it's so cerebral and yet its internal logic is impeccable, the answer to every asinine Resident Evil puzzle. The relationship between puzzle structure, enemies, and lore is brilliant. The plot is everything I want in iterative/cyclical narratives, especially of the android variety. As is a running theme, I love a crapsack and/or decaying and/or meat world, and this! this is all of the above. [This space intentionally left blank.]
Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Old Blood, The New Colossus, and Youngblood
I was actively opposed to these games for years because I didn't trust them to handle the subject matter in any tolerable way. But Jacob Geller has talked about them so much, positively, as a Jew!, so I took the risk, and: They're powerful and so well-balanced, a ridiculous power fantasy of Nazi-killing where Nazis aren't a blank stand-in for guilt-free target but are worth killing precisely because they're Nazis; where the good guys are good, and empowered, particularly for the reasons Nazis hate them.
Scorn
Because this is another watched-not-played, I was spared any less stellar bits, like combat. But oh, I loved this. Crapsack worlds that are also meat worlds, my beloved; and this is so intricate, so embodied, so gratuitous in that intimate, unsettling way that I want body horror to be.
Character.AI
This is a pretty advanced neural language model chatbot that's currently free to use. What's the game? The game is "talk to chatbot." But a cogent conversations with artificial personalities is my dream, and this comes impressively close.
Honorable Mentions in Games
Exo One
I'm a sucker for being terrified by the infinite size of space, and this is a game about flying as a tiny little spacepod across vast alien landscapes and between asteroids, with themes to match. It's a little indie title with associated limitations, but it gave me such a feeling.
Hollow Knight
My partner replayed this at my request and I liked it better the second time around; Souls-likes benefit from a closer eye, obviously, and it this was a more thorough and complete run. And I am a sucker for this style of worldbuilding—not so much the "tease apart the lore" bit as the "cycles of loss destroying an already-sundered world; but still, your role has meaning" part. Also the aesthetics of this game are phenominal.
Death's Door
I don't think about the plot of this a ton, and generally lack the investment in this that I have in most Souls-likes. But it's so impeccably cute & the soundtrack is great; a fantastic experience in the moment.
Visual Media
Adventure Time
I tried watching this some years ago, and the first season or two were fine. But watching the entire run with someone? Well, it turns out widely acclaimed cartoons are good, actually; we loved this. There's an corollary to rule of cool which says something like "rule of batshit crazy, if all of it matters": the short format, joke endings, and buck-wild worldbuilding mean that anything is possible, but the overarching plot & knack for call-backs means that it all has meaning. It's so fun & sincerely satisfying.
Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space
If I could live in any fictional world.... Look, this is a weird adaptation, both summarizing and retelling and altering the original run; and there's more plot, but somehow it doesn't manage to be any less weird or even to answer more questions. And yet! I loved this, loved its slow mundane pace and bizarro world and cotton-candy body horror.
Star Trek: Lower Decks
This actually gets modern Trek, it understands how to reflect lovingly on prior Trek without turning into a vain nostalgia machine; refocusing on the nobodies is the counterbalance I needed to every time I got really mad about Disco; it's actually funny. We burned through this in, like, two weeks.
NoClip
My takeaway from discovering this channel and devouring their documentaries is that games are hard to make; very hard, and made by people that love games. I don't mean people who own ginormous AAA studios; I mean that games are actually made by ridiculously overworked normal people who really love the medium. These two tenets are obvious but so ubiquitous and fundamental that they've altered how I view games.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
This is utterly unbothered by happy endings, and that's as it should be: cyberpunk ought always be a larger-than-life technicolor grimdark capitalist shitshow. Great characters, great action, but what I love best is seeing what narratives can achieve when they're more concerned with good writing than with being nice or open to easy sequels.
Honorable Mentions in Visual Media
Squid Game
The particular way this handles cliffhangers is stupid. But boy howdy to I love a deadly game, and this is a great one: ridiculous aesthetics played against gratuitous gore, bucketloads of social commentary—all very much my jam.
Arcane
I've watched a lot of "cartoons for kids, but actually delightful as an adult, especially because an adult is able to appreciate the meteoric rise in queer content over the years" lately, and frankly I love those more. But the ability for a Western cartoon to be 300% for adults, actually; to be ruthlessly grim with gorgeous, intricate art.... Well. Turns out that's pretty great.
Knives Out and Glass Onion
I do not have any deep take here; I just love murder mysteries and cathartic social commentary/revenge fantasies, and the right level of camp. And a sequel that isn't bad!
Music
My Spotify top songs of 2022 is almost an identical list to last year's. It wasn't a big music year, and when I was listening it was to my usual playlists in the usual cycles.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-06 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-07 09:23 am (UTC)Anyway, it was you talking about Lower-Decks-best-Trek that made me vouch for it when we were looking for a new Trek. Zero regrets.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-07 01:03 pm (UTC)Ah, I'm so glad that my enthusiasm for Lower Decks paid off and led you in that direction! I'm sure it's not for everyone, but I like it so much :)
no subject
Date: 2023-01-07 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-07 09:25 am (UTC)