At the beginning of 2019 I started a list for every new movie, anime, game, etc. that I was interested in and crossed them off as I went. Over the course of the past year, I watched 47 new movies, 12 seasons of television, 7 documentary features, played 46 new games, watched 16 anime, and read 16 volumes of comics and manga. From those, I’ve selected the 12 pieces of art I consumed this year that I got the most out of. I wouldn’t exactly call it a “best of the year” list, because I’m not in any way trying to be objective about their quality, but just to explain why I personally connected with them more than any other media I consumed this year. These are the things that meant the most to me. The ones that were dealing with subjects I found personally relatable or got me thinking and stayed in my head long after I had finished them, as well as the ones I just had the most fun with in 2019. Hopefully you get something out of reading this, and my words can encourage you to watch, read, or play some of my favourite things of the past year.
Eliza
Eliza is a visual novel that asks tough questions and refuses to give the player easy answers to them. In our society where tech start-ups are increasingly coming up with new ways to “disrupt” existing professional fields in ways that, while innovative, potentially cause harm to the workers of those industries and consumers of those products, Eliza is about the intersection between the tech industry and mental health. You play as Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey, a woman who has signed up for a job as a proxy for Eliza, the titular mental health AI, which patients voice their concerns to while the human proxy acts as a puppet to vocalise Eliza’s algorithmically generated response and add a touch of humanity to the automated response process. In the same way that Uber is a cheaper alternative to Taxis, Eliza is effectively Uber for therapy by working as a cheaper, gig economy alternative to seeing a licensed therapist, with all the benefits and drawbacks that implies. However, the game quickly reveals that Evelyn herself was a programmer working on the technology that would become Eliza before a personal tragedy caused her to burn out and leave the project. Now, years later she is returning to see what she helped create, and whether it’s having a positive effect on the world by getting first-hand experience of how it works.
While the idea of letting a computer program act as a therapist seems dystopian, and the game doesn’t shy away from exploring the flaws and potential problems of such an idea, the concept of an AI that can tell you exactly what to say to help someone through their personal issues is very tempting to believe in. I’ve been in situations where a person close to me has gone to some dark places and relied on me for emotional support, and the feeling of powerlessness when you’re unable to help them feel better because you don’t know if there’s anything you can say that will help is honestly terrifying. While playing Eliza, I found myself wishing I had a similar system to help me help my loved ones when they’re going through a rough patch. Maybe it’s an unrealistic fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that’s easy to sympathise with, and comes from a very relatable place. This sentiment is echoed by one of Eliza’s main characters, Rae. Rae is a manager at the Eliza proxy centre the protagonist Evelyn works at who comes from a poor, underprivileged background and has had family members deal with mental health problems they never got help for. Rae is realistic about Eliza not being a perfect program but believes that anything which helps more people access mental health services, even if imperfect, is a good thing. A more straightforward story would position Eliza as nothing but the tool of a corrupt tech industry seeking to exploit its users, but Eliza comes at its concept from multiple angles, each represented by one of its main characters trying to convince Evelyn to support their personal perspective. However, each character is well written enough to not simply come off as mouthpieces for their ideology, but a realistic portrayal of the type of person who has understandable and compelling reasons to have decided on their specific ideology as the path they choose to walk.
While most visual novels are known for offering the player choices that affect the story, Eliza’s genius comes from deliberately removing choice for most of the game, as Evelyn is directionless and unsure of where to go next in her life. This is felt the most during Evelyn’s sessions as an Eliza proxy, where the game gives you a single dialogue option you must select to advance that simply vocalises what Eliza is telling you to say on screen. That feeling of powerlessness to say what you feel would help the patient most, and to simply regurgitate Eliza’s basic leading questions and suggestions to try certain medicines and meditative apps contributes to the dystopian feeling of our lives being at the mercy of The Algorithm™ run by giant tech companies concerned only with generating more profit, and not with improving lives.
A worse game would give Evelyn the power to choose between taking down Skanda or helping them reach an AI dominated future, but Eliza is less interested in being a big picture story about the fate of the world than being about what one person can do to help make the world a better place in the face of structural problems so big that no one person can hope to solve them. This theme resonates so much because we’re all faced with problems like this every day of our lives. What can one person do in the face of climate change, or unethical mega-corporations, or the rise of fascism? We only have control over our individual lives, and although it’s easy to shrug and say there’s nothing we can do to solve them, we need to think about what impact we do have and what path we want to walk to help the world as much as we can individually. What that means for your Evelyn will likely depend on your own personal experiences, and which of the games main characters perspectives you resonate with the most. Eliza spends the majority of its runtime exploring these different ideas and perspectives about the future, and then asks you to choose which you think is the right way forward, and it does all this in an incredibly nuanced way that never feels like it’s pushing you in one direction over another.
Parasite
Bong Joon-Ho is one of my favourite directors for the way he crafts movies that are simultaneously funny, thrilling, and unsettling, while also exploring social issues and Parasite might be his most interesting movie yet. The story follows the poor Kim family, who live in poverty in a semi-basement apartment until their son Ki-woo’s friend recommends him for a job tutoring the daughter of the rich Park family. From there the first act of the movie is a succession of cons as the Kim family usurps the positions of the Park family’s employees and tricks the rich family into hiring them so they can make enough money to get by.
It would be easy for Parasite to be a simple story of good poor people vs rich assholes like similar 2019 “eat the rich” movies such as Knives Out or Ready or Not do, (not to diminish either movie, both are fantastic and worth watching.) Yet Parasite’s genius comes from how the villain of the movie isn’t the rich family, but the institution of capitalism itself driving its victims to do whatever they can to get the money they need to survive. Neither the poor or rich family are easily categorised as wholly good or bad people, but it’s the specific ways their class status informs their actions and perspectives that makes all the difference between the two families. The Kim family may be scamming the Park’s, but they’re doing so for survival, and to earn their living via employment rather than directly stealing from them. Meanwhile, the Park family’s wealth has allowed them to be naïve, and ignorant of the struggles of the lower class, while having a disdainful attitude towards them. The Park family may not specifically state they hate poor people, but their inherent biases show through in the negative ways they talk about their working-class servants in private, and how they are blinded to the fact that the Kim family live in a much harsher world than theirs. At the end of the film’s second act, a torrential downpour of rain hits the city, and while this only slightly inconveniences the Park family by causing them to cancel their camping trip, it devastates the Kim family due to the poor neighbourhood they live in being flooded, destroying their basement apartment and driving home how massive the gap between the two families status and wealth really is, and how that materially affects their lives.
While the first half of the film plays out as a power fantasy for the Kim family where they feel in control over the target of their grift, it’s from this point of the film onwards that we see which of the two families really has power in this situation. It’s difficult to talk about Parasite past its first act without spoilers, but it’s at this point where the film reveals itself to be a portrait of how capitalism forces poor people into a parasitic existence where they need to fight for the scraps of the upper class in the slim hopes of escaping poverty. Scamming their way into employment may have made the Kim family feel in control of their own destiny, but ultimately they’re still servants to the rich, living in a basement while buying into the capitalist myth that they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps with enough hard work. Parasite emphasises the inescapable nature of poverty, and how no individual scheme to get rich, no amount of hard work in a service job, will ever be enough to rise up from being forced to live underneath the rich.
Our Dreams At Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare
Yuhki Kamatani’s coming of age and coming out manga Our Dreams at Dusk is the most honest and raw depiction of the queer experience I’ve ever seen in fiction. The series follows high schooler Tasuku Kaname as he comes to terms with his identity as a gay man after he is forcibly outed to his class and finds solace through volunteering at Cat Clutter. Cat Clutter is a local non-profit organisation in his small seaside town of Onomichi that tears down and redevelops abandoned houses and is run by members of the local LGBT community, all of whom Tasuku gets to know as he watches them grapple with the difficulties of being queer.
I’ve never seen a piece of fiction so accurately portray the contradictory unease and comfort of being a queer person in the closet, and how “coming out” is not a process you go through once, but something queer people have to consistently do throughout their lives, with various different people who either can’t, or don’t want to understand our identities. The cast of Our Dreams at Dusk spans a variety of different LGBT identities, from gay men and women, to trans people, asexuals, and some who are still figuring out who they are. Each character struggles with acceptance from heteronormative society in some way and is lost somewhere in the liminal space between knowing their queer identity and being unashamedly out and proud. Some are reluctant to tell their loved ones because they know breaking the silence provided by the closet could cause a rift between them, or are out, but unwilling to correct others on their assumptions and problematic behaviour because it’s a difficult conversation to have. Others are hesitant to define their identity at all because acknowledging it means coming to terms with the difficulties of being queer. I’ve been all of these people at various points in my life, and I know people like all of them.
Conversations about representation tend to boil down to simply seeing minority characters be visible in fiction, but Our Dreams at Dusk takes representation to a new level by representing the queer experience vividly by portraying characters going through realistic problems faced by queer people, and with evocative metaphorical imagery that represents the tough emotional journey of realising and coming to terms with your queerness and all the baggage that society forces onto you because of it.
Dragon Quest Builders 2
It would be easy to dismiss the Dragon Quest Builders games as low-effort clones trying to cash in on the success of Minecraft, but what they bring to the table that Minecraft lacks is a more structured, quest based experience, as well as the charming Akira Toriyama aesthetic and humorous pun-filled writing of the Dragon Quest series that make for a game greater than the sum of its parts. Although the idea of a more structured Minecraft experience sounds like it might defeat the purpose of the freedom that game provides, what makes Dragon Quest Builders 2 work so well is that it provides a framework which encourages creativity in people like me, who struggle to come up with ideas when presented with the endless possibilities provided by Minecraft.
It might be less obvious now that it’s ostensibly considered a “kids game,” but Minecraft’s origins in its beta version as a hardcore survival game where players needed to rely on communities of YouTube guides and fan wikis to learn recipes means that Minecraft is deliberately obtuse. This is both to its benefit in the communal experience of learning to play it by sharing your experience with others, and its hindrance in being daunting to approach for newcomers, by refusing to teach players how it works. Dragon Quest Builders 2 on the other hand is always giving the player new objectives and provides tutorials over the course of the game to drip feed new mechanics for a deliberately designed sense of progression. It’s also more single player focused, which is great for introverted loners like myself who aren’t too hot on multiplayer games. The focus on building a town means the player has a defined goal in that specific buildings need to be built but provides the freedom to accomplish that goal however they want. You need to build bedrooms for your villagers, but you can accomplish that by building individual houses, an apartment complex with private rooms, or simply placing a bunch of beds together in a single room for shared accommodation.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 has become my go-to relaxation game. Whenever I’m feeling bored or upset, spending some time building up my village is the perfect cure. It’s everything I like about Minecraft, but without the structureless gameplay that has always prevented me from ever fully giving myself over to it.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
After the disappointment that was Fire Emblem: Fates, I was doubtful Intelligent Systems would be able to recapture the lightning in a bottle, franchise saving success of Fire Emblem: Awakening and went into their newest game with low expectations. However, Three Houses manages to take the series in a new direction that makes for a great step forward for the tactical RPG series. Three Houses puts you in the shoes of a professor at Garreg Mach Monastery who is set to teach one of the titular three houses, each of which is tied to one of the major nations in the land of Fódlan. Each house’s campaign tells a unique tale that gives the player a different perspective on the political issues facing Fódlan as well as its relationship to the powerful but suspicious Church of Seiros.
The brilliance of Three Houses comes from its characters and how each of them at first appear to be simply broad anime archetypes, but reveal greater depth as you get to know them, as well as how each of them, noble, commoner, or foreigner, has had their entire life defined by the class system of crests, magical traits passed down through bloodline, and how they suffer because of it. For example, Bernadetta of the Black Eagles house initially seems like a pretty standard over-the-top shy, anxious, introverted girl who isn’t good at interacting with other people. However, through her support conversations with other characters, it becomes clear that Bernadetta’s personality is the result of years of childhood trauma at the hands of her noble father. As the only heir to the Varley family, she was subjected to intense, abusive training to try and mould her into the perfect wife so she could be married into a good noble family and produce a male heir with her Crest of Indech. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is filled with characters like Bernadetta, whose lives have been affected in some way by the Crest and class systems putting pressure on them, regardless of their place in the world.
I’m not going to pretend Three Houses is a perfect game. It’s certainly flawed. It looks visually ugly in parts with weirdly stretched backgrounds and character models that can be flat and inexpressive, and the battles become trivial at some point, which is a big problem, but the strength of the characters and my investment in them more than made up for these flaws in my opinion. However, more than anything this game is special to me because of the queer fandom that formed around it. A big part of my personal journey in 2019 has involved getting more in touch with my femininity and queerness after spending some time suppressing those parts of myself, and Fire Emblem ended up being an outlet for that through its characters and the queer art and fanfiction those characters inspired. For finally getting me to understand and be somewhat involved in fandom, and reconnect with my femininity and queerness, that makes Three Houses one of my favourite games of the year, even though it definitely has big flaws I wouldn’t begrudge people for being unable to look past.
Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out So I Teamed Up With A Mythical Sorceress
With a title like Sexiled (which is not part of the original Japanese title, but an invention of the English localisation team) you’d be forgiven for thinking this is just another gross fantasy light novel filled with male gazey fanservice, although as its subtitle quickly assures you, this is not your usual fantasy light novel. This is an unashamedly feminist story of sexism, using a fantasy world and the well-worn tropes of light novels to comment on real world sexism and misogyny. The overly long light novel subtitle explains itself well enough, but to explain anyway: protagonist Tanya Artemiciov is a mage who has been kicked out of her adventuring party because the leader told her that adventuring wasn’t for women, and she should settle down to become a subservient housewife, leading her to fire off some explosion magic in the nearby desert and accidentally free 1000 year old sorceress Laplace, who agrees to assist her with a plan to get revenge on the guy who wronged her by humiliating him in a fighting tournament.
Ameko Kaeruda states in her author’s note at the end of the first volume that she was inspired by her frustration at the 2018 scandal where Tokyo Medical University was found to have artificially lowered the test scores of female applicants “to be fair to men,” which resulted in fewer women being accepted to the university. Kaeruda draws on this and other sexist attitudes held by society to craft a fantasy world where sexism is the norm, and our protagonists are fighting against it. What I think is really unique about Sexiled is how it turns a genre and format typically associated with male power fantasies that objectify women on its head. Your regular dime-a-dozen fantasy light novels tend to feature a mediocre self-insert male character transported to a fantasy world that works exactly like an RPG, where their knowledge of video game mechanics means they can escape into a new life as a world-saving hero that all the female characters have the hots for. But Sexiled rejects the typical vision of the traditional fantasy world as a playground for a male power fantasy and crafts a female power fantasy out of overcoming the adversity of institutional sexism. One of being a feminist trailblazer who inspires other women to be the best they can and aim for more than just a future as a housewife, despite how hard patriarchal society tries to stand in their way.
Sexism is even built into the lore of Sexiled’s world in a way that subverts the epidemic of flimsy lore reasons being used to justify the grossest elements of a fictional story, (as if the lore wasn’t created by the author to specifically include said gross elements,) and turns it on its head in clever and hilarious ways. For example, the in-universe lore explanation for all the female characters wearing ridiculous, skimpy boob armour is revealed to be a symptom of the systemic misogyny of the fantasy world lying to women about showing off skin being necessary to “open their mana circuits” in order to objectify them. However, it quickly follows that up with Laplace stating she wears revealing clothes out of personal preference to avoid this rejection of skimpy outfits coming off as slut-shaming.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Sexiled’s worldbuilding is the implication that in Laplace’s time, women weren’t subject to the same sexism they are now. An implication which backs up the idea that the sexism of Sexiled’s fantasy world, where women are deemed less capable adventurers, and relegated to the role of healers or mages in adventuring parties, if they’re allowed in at all, is not based on anything inherent, but a system put in place by men to gain power over women. Where past female accomplishments which don’t fit the restrictive mould of femininity created for women have been intentionally ignored and stricken from history to keep this system in place. And this isn’t unlike how our own world works. You don’t have to look far to find evidence of women who accomplished great things in the history of stereotypically male dominated fields, but a conservative, misogynist society will pretend that its sexist attitudes about how women “should” be are natural, and the way things have always been, despite evidence to the contrary. In fact, Sexiled’s video game like world brings to mind how video games themselves were initially not considered a gendered hobby or creative field until their graphics advanced far enough that they could be marketed, and the industry decided on marketing them specifically to boys. This created a situation where video games were considered a masculine interest, and women were systematically ejected from that space. And this is something we’re still feeling the effects of today with men who insist that gaming is a masculine space the same way adventurers in Sexiled’s world insist that adventuring is a primarily masculine profession.
I hope we get more light novels like Sexiled, which serve as a foil to a light novel market dominated by male power fantasies and prove the weaboo myth of Japanese creators “not being political” wrong by being so openly and unashamedly feminist. Sexiled’s two volumes that are available so far neatly wrap up both Tanya and Laplace’s stories, so I don’t know if Kaeruda intends to continue writing Sexiled past the two volumes that are currently available, but if she does, I’m very eager to see what comes next for these feminist fantasy heroes.
A Short Hike
A Short Hike is a shining example of the potential for video games to be comfy, healing media. The game marries Animal Crossing’s relaxing small-town atmosphere and cute animal characters with the freeform open world exploration of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Then it wraps it all up in a unique aesthetic that’s a hybrid of pixel art, low-poly 3D models, and cel-shaded graphics. The result is beautiful, but hard to describe. This creates a truly unique “walking simulator” where you play as a young bird girl anxiously awaiting a phone call, who needs to hike up the nearby mountain for cellphone reception. But where A Short Hike differs from other games which get slapped with the term “walking simulator” as a pejorative is that rather than using the game world as a space for environmental storytelling, A Short Hike’s setting of Hawk’s Peak is a space that’s just a joy to walk around and explore. Comparisons to Animal Crossing become obvious the second you see its cute, chibi animal characters, but A Short Hike steals the most important part of Nintendo’s chilled out life sim series in that simply existing in the game space even when you’re doing nothing in particular is a relaxing, cozy experience.
As the name implies, A Short Hike isn’t a very long game, but making a beeline for the top of Hawk’s Peak means you’ll miss out on plenty of lovely interactions with charming animal friends as you chat with them about their day and help them out with their problems. A Short Hike is a game best played on a lazy Sunday or rainy day, where you can take your time to soak in the healing atmosphere as you run, climb, fly, and swim around Hawk’s Peak while seeing and doing everything the game has to offer. Even if you want to go for 100% completion the game can easily be beaten in an afternoon, and the payoff at the end as you glide down from the top of the mountain is guaranteed to put a smile on your face. A Short Hike is pure, concentrated joy in video game form, and definitely something I’ll return to in the future whenever I’m feeling down and in need of a pick-me-up.
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust
The original Anodyne was a dreamlike Zelda: Link’s Awakening clone with a story about depression and escapism that was ultimately a little too abstract and vaguely told for my liking, but the two-person team of Analgesic Productions is back with a much stronger sequel. This time adding a low-poly PS1 aesthetic and overworld, as well as a more coherent narrative that still retains the surreal, up-to-your-own-interpretation appeal of the original game, while being easier to process and draw meaning from.
After a strange tutorial section where she is born, you play as a robotic looking girl named Nova who is told she is the chosen Nano Cleaner and given a quest by her parents C-Psalmist and Palisade to clear the world of the dangerous Nano Dust that is corrupting the world and threatening their community of The Center. From there, in a sort of Psychonauts-by-way-of-Zelda fashion, Nova explores the low-poly 3D overworld to find people affected by the Dust and shrinks down to nano size to enter their bodies/minds and cleanse them through 16-bit 2D dungeons that explore each characters personality, and the problems they’re facing.
As Nova progresses on her quest, she encounters The Dustbound, a group of people with a different perspective on the world. One in which the Dust is not a destructive force to be feared, but a natural part of life that communities live and thrive in harmony with. From there, Nova is challenged by the idea that the beliefs and lifestyle ingrained in her from birth by her parents and The Center might not be the only, or best way to live. There are many ways to interpret the specifics of what Anodyne 2’s story is an allegory for, but as Nova struggles to unlearn the biases that form a foundational part of her identity, it becomes clear that this is a tale about how the institutions of our society shape us from birth to uphold their desired lifestyle. How parents can fall into the trap of treating their children as a means of reproducing their view of the correct way to live, rather than as individuals who are free to choose a different path through life and belief system than they did.
As for my interpretation of Nova’s story, as a trans woman I connected with it as a representation of the experience of how it feels to be a trans person in an overwhelmingly cis-heteronormative society. A reading I believe is supported by one of the developers, Marina Kittaka being transgender herself. Part of the trans experience involves knowing that your identity is considered a deviation from the norm. One that society demonises as creepy and suppresses information about, while pushing the idea of cis and straight identities as the default to discourage people from discovering their own queerness. It might not be as obviously evil as conversion therapy, but there’s something quietly sinister about the way a conservative society manipulates children from birth to think being cisgender and heterosexual is the only option available to them.
As someone who always knew I didn’t want to be a boy, but lacked the concepts of gender identity necessary to discover my own queerness, Anodyne 2 means a lot to me because I see a lot of myself in the transition Nova undertakes over the course of the story. Nova starts off surrounded by people in The Center who believe that joining its collective hivemind where they can be free of the Dust is the best way to live. The game then expands outwards to the lands around The Center and reveals a contradictory perspective that challenges everything Nova believes about herself and the world she lives in, and reminds me of my own experience in my early 20’s of realising that trans people exist as regular human beings who weren’t just the weird creeps I was brought up to think they were, as well as the deeper realisation it led to that just maybe the answer to the deep, indescribable discomfort I had always felt about being male… was that I was also one of them. I felt the same defensiveness Nova feels when her biases about the destructive nature of the Dust are challenged when my concept of trans people as weirdos who probably had some kind of mental problem was challenged. But Anodyne 2 suggests that overcoming the defensive close-mindedness of what you were taught to believe growing up, and opening yourself up to different perspectives and lifestyles can only enrich your life, and maybe even help you discover new things about yourself.
Baba Is You
I love puzzle games. They might actually be my favourite video game genre for how satisfying it feels to figure out the solution to a puzzle that has you stumped. And Baba Is You has some of the best “eureka!” moments I’ve ever experienced in a puzzle game. Inspired by programming language, Baba is You is a deceptively simple looking block pushing puzzle game where the rules of the game itself are blocks that can be pushed around and manipulated. This leads to a game with inventive solutions like changing the win condition, altering the properties of objects so they become intangible or transform into other objects, and even changing what you the player control as an avatar. Across its over 200 levels, Baba is You repeatedly challenges the player with puzzles whose solutions involve thinking outside the box and get increasingly more bizarre and creative with how you can manipulate its set of rules.
Not all of the puzzles will click with everyone’s mind, and some will have you so stumped that you might be tempted to turn to the internet to find the solution. To mitigate this, Baba is You gives you access to multiple puzzles at a time, and lets you do them in whatever order you wish, meaning that you only need to complete a small number of puzzles in order to progress to the next area, and can leave any that you’re stuck on for later. At least… for the most part. Later in the game, when Baba is You starts getting meta in ways I wouldn’t dream of spoiling, the game requires you to solve specific puzzles in order to progress, and some of these are so devilishly hard that I have to admit I never actually wound up completing the game. Still, I have so much respect for this unique twist on puzzle games, and the highs of those eureka moments far outweighed the lows of getting stuck that I had to include Baba is You on my list, even if it isn’t a perfect game. It’s one of the most inventive puzzle games I’ve ever played, and I look forward to returning to it again sometime to hopefully finish it.
Us
Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out might be messier and more abstract than his first feature, but that doesn’t stop it from being just as powerful. Whereas Get Out was very direct and obvious in its point as a social thriller about racism, Us wants you to spend some time dwelling on the movie while you unpack and interpret its meaning for yourself. That’s not to say Us is just a pretentious artsy film. It functions perfectly well on a turn-off-your-brain, surface level as a home-invasion doppelganger horror flick, and is led by an amazing dual performance from Lupita Nyong’o as main character Adelaide and her evil doppelganger Red. But Peele has packed his film with small details and references to pick up on and draw meaning from. Just like in Get Out, where he created the concept of The Sunken Place, Peele again shows his skill at creating a visual language to convey social issues with The Tethered. A group of subterranean doppelgangers terrorising America that functions as a brilliant metaphor for classism by creating an entire group of people just like us who have been denied the privileges afforded to those of us above ground. To say any more would be getting into spoilers and ruining the fun of figuring the movie out for yourself, but Us is a film that stuck with me for a long time after watching it, one that only got better the more I thought about it and read other people’s interpretations, and proof that Peele isn’t just a one-hit wonder. I can’t wait to see whatever he makes next.
Watchmen
The words “Watchmen sequel” feel wrong to even say. The concept of a follow up to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons seminal 1980’s satirical superhero comic sounds like something that shouldn’t work, and yet Damon Lindelof’s sequel TV series manages to succeed by telling a story focusing on new characters in an alternate universe 2019 where the events of the original comic 30 years prior have reshaped the world, and our new protagonist Angela Abar (played by Regina King) has grown up in the America that resulted from their legacy. Legacy is one of the core themes of Watchmen, not just in the legacy of the heroes from the original comic, but the legacy of white supremacy in America, and how the legacy of black Americans has been disrupted by it, creating a generational trauma that is still felt in Regina King’s character of Angela today.
Despite being focused on the fallout of the events of the comic, the most striking thing about Watchmen’s 2019 is how the more things change, the more they stay the same. The alternate history of America formed by the events of the Watchmen comic has created a very different 2019 to the one we live in, but as the puzzle box of the series unfolds, it reveals that under the hood, Watchmen’s 2019 still parallels our own in many ways despite decades of alternate history, which drives home its message that the history which shapes our society runs so deep that a few decades of progressive social change actually aren’t enough to completely erase all of the problems we’re facing today. To say much more would be to spoil both the comic and the series, but Watchmen deftly handles issues of the intersection of, and conflict between, justice and race in America by foregrounding black stories in stark contrast to the whiteness of the original comic, and uses the idea of telling its story from a racial perspective that was largely ignored in the original to recontextualise parts of the comic in a way that makes the TV series a worthy companion piece to the book, even if Alan Moore doesn’t approve of its existence.
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
I’m still surprised the original Lego Movie was actually one of the best animated movies of recent years and not just a shallow feature length advertisement, but Phil Lord and Chris Miller have made lightning strike twice with The Lego Movie 2, which might even be better than the original. The key to both movies success is in how they engage with Lego’s themes of creativity through play, and the importance of play for the developing minds of children. The first movie explored the tension between father and child by taking place in the imagination of a young boy rebelling against his father’s overly restrictive approach to Lego of simply building the sets as intended and leaving them as static models instead of letting his son use them as an outlet for creativity, however The Lego Movie 2 explores how play intersects with gender through the now 13 year old boy Finn, who has developed an obsession with grim and gritty post-apocalyptic fiction, and his younger sister Bianca, who plays with her Lego in more traditionally feminine ways, such as constructing weddings, playing with sparkly vampires, and making her Lego characters act out musical sequences.
Meanwhile in the world of the Lego characters themselves, the evil armies of the “Sistar System” have turned Bricksburg into a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic wasteland. Despite this change in setting, returning protagonist Emmet is still a goofy, happy-go-lucky guy, much to the disappointment of his punk girlfriend Lucy, who wishes he would grow up and become a more serious, mature person. When Lucy and friends are captured and taken to the Sistar System, Emmet ventures forth to find them and encounters tough guy action hero Rex Dangervest. A walking collection of bad Chuck Norris jokes who Emmet hopes can teach him how to be the gruff, mature dude Lucy wants him to be.
The Lego Movie 2 is a brilliant commentary on how society forces men into stereotypically masculine attitudes that uphold toxic masculinity, as well as demonises femininity and sincerity in favour of performative apathy and cynicism. The reason this movie means so much to me as a trans woman is that I feel like my whole journey with my gender identity from childhood to now has been characterised by a desire to be genuine and sincere that has come into conflict with the male socialisation expected of me. As a kid, watching Beauty & the Beast and Cardcaptors showed me that fiction aimed at girls could be just as cool as boys’ stuff, but I still felt the need to keep my love of them a secret because I knew I’d be ridiculed for liking “girly” things. As a teenager I was always frustrated by how any attitude other than edgy aloofness in the pursuit of looking cool was punished by my male peers, and it wasn’t until adulthood that I managed to overcome and unlearn a bunch of these shitty attitudes and come to terms with the fact I didn’t fit the traditional image of masculinity, leading to my realisation of my transness.
I don’t mean to say that The Lego Movie 2 is a film *about* being trans, or that there isn’t any way to be masculine without upholding these toxic attitudes. I think Emmet’s arc in the film makes it clear that there’s a model for non-toxic masculinity that’s achievable, while Lucy’s arc explores the way women can also be affected by, and reinforce, the toxic attitudes that reject sincerity and enforce cynicism. What I’m saying is that what I got out of this movie feels like a movie length exploration of ideas that have defined my whole life, from being a young boy who wouldn’t let my younger sister play with my Gameboy, to an adult trans woman who is still in some ways struggling to overcome these toxic attitudes and get in touch with my emotions. Even starting this blog and trying to express why I love the art that I love is in some way an exercise in sincerely channelling my feelings into something creative after spending the first two decades of my life struggling against the constrained emotional expression the world expected of me pre-transition.
And that’s the end of my list! I could probably write a whole other blog post about the honourable mentions which almost made the cut, but missed out for one reason or another. Film wise, Hustlers, Knives Out, Shazam, Booksmart, and The Nightingale were all big hits with me, while on the small screen, Russian Doll was a fun twist on the Groundhog Day time-loop concept, while Tuca & Bertie was a hilarious and touching comedy about female friendship that was tragically cut short after only one season. Middle school tennis anime/parental abuse drama Stars Align looked set to be the only anime to make my list before its producers robbed us of any resolution for the characters by chopping its episode count in half, and I don’t think I need to explain to anyone how charming indie hit Untitled Goose Game was.
Of course, I’m only human so I didn’t get around to checking out everything I wanted to in the past year. There were a few movies I never got to see, like Midsommar, Uncut Gems, and The Lighthouse which all looked interesting, and a couple of big games I haven’t sunk enough time into to have a hot take on like Death Stranding, and Disco Elysium. But overall, this is a pretty comprehensive list of all the art that spoke to me in 2019. It was a pretty great year, and whatever 2020 has in store, hopefully I can find the time and words to write about it here.
PancakeTime 