Is it even a blog if you don’t do an end-of-year round-up the last day of December? If we don’t look back on the last twelve months of our life and cherry-pick a handful of things we liked, does the year exist at all? Are we human, or are we dancer?!!
With those hard-hitting questions out of the way, have a few favorites off my list:
Movie: When I looked back over my list of Stuff I Watched This Year, I was really surprised at how little of it came out in 2023. Turns out most of my movie nights were either rewatching longtime favorites or watching old-but-new-to-me flicks. But the handful of 2023 movies made such an impact that it felt like an absolute banger of a year; despite the little I watched, there was not a dud in the bunch. Which makes it so hard to pick a winner!
One just barely eked out the lead, though, in a photo finish alongside Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse:
I loved Nimona. I loved it a legit embarrassing amount. While I went in with only cursory knowledge of the comic, I’ve had an enormous affection for ND Stevenson’s work for years, ever since he was on Tumblr posting The Broship of the Ring in the early aughts. (His newsletter, I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand, is also a lovely heart-on-its-sleeve exploration of his many and varied journeys – gender, mental health, family, and otherwise – in his 30s.) And not only is Nimona basically the tiny weird gremlin child that’s lived in my heart for decades, not only is the whole film joyous and heartbreaking and just fucking fun, but to have an animated movie this unabashedly queer, with a trans allegory so high-key that an opera soprano couldn’t hit it, in a year when queer and trans rights felt more precarious than ever? I cried. Also an embarrassing amount.
Since watching it, I’ve read the comic, and it’s fascinating to see how the movie leaned into an explicitly hopeful ending versus the comic’s angrier, more bittersweet conclusion. Sure, it could be marketing; it could also be a reflection of Stevenson’s journey as he realized he was trans and settled better into his own skin. I don’t know. But someone on Tumblr remarked, “the comic is the call; the movie is the response,” and I feel like that’s the perfect summation.
Runner-up: Across the Spider-Verse, both for the spectacular animation (HOBIE!!!) and for hitting all my favorite narrative buttons about being aware you’re trapped in a story, choosing how you break free of it – and if you even can break free.
TV Show: I’ll be honest, I was ready to write off this year in TV. A lot of the zeitgeist-y shows didn’t pique my interest, especially when I’m still feeling too soft and bruised to handle the darkness of Yellowjackets or the everybody’s-just-awful-ness of Succession. Meanwhile, the shows I knew I’d like were… well, the less said about Our Flag Means Death season two, the better.
But then, less than a week before the close of 2023:
BY GOD, IT’S LETTERKENNY WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!!!
Letterkenny dropped its twelfth and final season on Christmas (or Boxing Day, depending on where you get your episodes), and good buddies, it stuck the landing. I’m not Canadian, but enough of my family lives in the upper Midwest that I can’t describe the patter at anything other than comforting: the accents, sure, but also the rapid-fire back-and-forth, the way every idle musing gets stretched into deadpan absurdity, the in-jokes and repetitions that weave into a performance knitted so tight you could make a sweater out of it. And it has so much heart, my god. The hicks, skids, and hockey players squabble all the damn time, but when it matters most, they know that when a friend asks for help? You help him.
Except for maybe if they fucked an ostrich.
(Allegedly.)
Runner-up: Not a single show, but an entire network! Ah, Dropout, what would I do without you? I mentioned getting hooked on Um, Actually… a while back, and since then that’s expanded to Make Some Noise, Breaking News, and basically anything Brennan Lee Mulligan DMs on Dimension 20. It’s also a streaming service that got where it is by focusing on what it does best – niche nerd comedy – which: respect. This nerd appreciates the pandering and the laughs that got me through a lot of rough nights this year.
Book: I went outside my SF&F wheelhouse with my pick this year. I’m as surprised as you are!
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin is an absolute queer hot mess of a novel, and I say that with the utmost admiration. It follows Greta, a medical transcriptionist working for a dubiously effective therapist/sex coach, who gradually develops an infatuation with one of his clients: the titular Big Swiss, whom Greta only knows by her voice. Being in a small town, she hears that voice at the dog park one day, and what follows – like I said. It’s a hot mess.
Considering the book’s a jumble of infidelity, trauma (sexual and otherwise), repression, and the kind of HIPAA violations that made me whisper oh noooooo over and over in horrified, strangled tones, it feels doubly strange that it’s my favorite book of the year, cf. all that stuff I said earlier about gravitating toward softer media. But here’s the thing: Big Swiss is also delightfully weird. There’s a specificity to the weirdness that startled multiple laughs out of me; the precision with which Beagin describes a massive beehive in Greta’s run-down farmhouse, or the most awkward dinner party ever between Greta, Big Swiss, and Big Swiss’s husband, gives the whole story a lived-in quality, even at its most ridiculous. Plus, Greta herself is dryly hilarious as she throws herself headlong into all the wrong choices, digs a hole, and somehow unearths an even worse choice at the bottom of the pit.
A fun final note: the audiobook uses the medium perfectly by having multiple actors read the transcripts Greta’s writing, as if we, too, were listening to Om the therapist’s audio files. I loved it.
Runner-up: Years behind everyone else, the release of Martha Wells' System Collapse finally got me to dig into the Murderbot series. Understandably, I’m lost in the quagmire of library holds, patiently waiting for each one to reach the top of my list, but from the three novellas I’ve read so far, I am kicking myself for not picking it up sooner. May 2024 bring more copies to my library and more free time to enjoy them.
And may all of you have a happy 2024, too! I’m not gonna be the dumbass who gasps “I think we lost them” as the awfulness of 2023 vanishes behind us, but may the new year bring us all a few sparks of good, and may we find them easily when we need them most. Kick its ass, y’all.