20 Favorites of 2020: Art and Entertainment
So...well...2020 was pretty bad, wasn't it?
When the pandemic really started to seem like it would last for longer than just a few months, I started to write off 2020 in my head. Anything I wanted to accomplish, anything I thought I'd get to do or experience, all of that would have to wait. We would essentially just lose the year. But by the time I'm writing this, only a few days out from the end of 2020, it looks like I did actually accomplish some stuff despite everything.
The big things being, in chronological rather than importance order:
(1) I basically adapted an RPG campaign my friends and I played into a book, which is unpublished, but hey, I might self-publish it some day. It's called Hungerhill and it's a very tongue-in-cheek melodramatic supernatural British boarding school story.
(2) I was furloughed for six months, but managed to get a new job after all, hopping away from the private world into the non-profit world, as I'd been hoping to do for awhile.
(3) And most importantly of all, I proposed to my girlfriend and she said yes! Our wedding is still some time away (given, you know, covid), but now we have something exciting to look forward to in 2022!
Alright, but none of that is what this article is about. I want to talk about my favorite pieces of art/pop culture from this hell show of a year. To clarify, this is only stuff actually released in 2020, not anything I happened to experience this year. Rather than separating things by medium, I'm just throwing it all together here in alphabetical order. Books, movies, TV, video games, music, podcasts, etc. Let's go!
My 20 Favorite Releases of 2020, in Alphabetical Order
Axiom's End by Lindsey Ellis (Book)
One of the most fun and poignant first contact stories I've ever come across. It's a fast-paced thriller with good characters and a real cool alien, all taking place in the far-off distant time of 2007. It's just screaming to be made into a film or a short miniseries. Lindsey Ellis is one of my favorite YouTubers; her long-form analyses of pop culture and entertainment, in particular her epic examination of why the Hobbit films are so bad, are always insightful and funny. She brings that energy over to her first novel, which is chock-full of references both to the aughts and to other science fiction, all while charting a new course and offering up some intriguing answers to questions like the Fermi Paradox. The audiobook is particularly good, by the way.
Crusader Kings III (Video Game)
I will have more to say about this grand historical strategy/role-playing/management simulator/dating simulator/anecdote-generator game not too far in the future, but suffice it to say that Crusader Kings III allowed me to conquer Rome as the Byzantine Emperor Jesus II in the name of Orthodoxy. I became best friends with the Khan of the Mongols, only to have him declare war on me anyway. I groomed the perfect heir to inherit my empire, only to see he'd been taken captive and castrated and would be replaced in the line of succession by my terrible, no-good failson. I had multiple family members be murdered by an obsessive serial killer daughter who never demanded anything from me, and whom I could not implicate. I even became a witch and tried to convert my family, though we never did anything particularly witchy.
This game rules.
Friends at the Table: Partizan (Podcast)
Friends at the Table is the best actual play tabletop RPG podcast out there, bar none. If those words meant nothing to you, here's the basic gist: the eight friends of Friends at the Table gather together to tell improvisational stories using the framework of tabletop RPGs (of which I've written about before). They've been doing it for six years now, and Partizan is their sixth season, telling the story of a galaxy-spanning empire and the civil war on one small moon that threatens to destroy it or change it irrevocably. It's also basically a mecha anime. Listening to an actual play is an acquired skill, as it means hearing the friends actively discuss the story they're making as they're making it, from both the narrative importance of decisions and the mechanical elements of the dice and rules. It takes some getting used to, but once it clicks, it's an impressive project that's made some of my favorite moments of storytelling in any medium. Combine that with incredible music made just for the podcast by player Jack de Quidt, a real gripping examination of the ideology of empire and the need for revolution, and the joy of a bunch of good friends having fun together, and you've got a ridiculously huge backlog of audio storytelling to keep you occupied for years to come. If you're interested, Partizan is actually a great jumping on point.
The Great, season 1 (TV)
The Great is only very loosely based on the life of Catherine the Great of Russia - the German princess who married a Russian prince, deposed him, ruled on her own, and dragged Russia kicking and screaming into a new era, with all the great and horrible elements that come with such an endeavor - and is all the better for it. From the screenwriter of one of my favorite films of the past decade, The Favourite, The Great is a darkly funny, tragic, and wonderfully weird show. The Catherine of this show is undoubtedly one shaped by our current time's social mores, but the show's gleeful embrace of anachronisms turns it into a truly compelling examination of what it takes to seize power from those who have always possessed it, and wield it against all the wishes of your society. Elle Fanning is excellent as the eponymous Catherine, and I've never seen Nicholas Hoult having more fun than while playing the Emperor Peter, a terrible man-child who nevertheless manages to make us feel sorry for him and hate him all at the same time. I don't know when season two will get here - given, you know, covid - but I'm at the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happens next, even though it's based on history.
Hades (Video Game)
Last month I wrote a whole post about what Hades is the best video game of 2020, and probably one of my favorites of the last couple years. Go check it out!
The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
The best Gothic Romances are horror only on a surface level. Yes, they have ghosts and haunted houses, curses and demons, terrible visages and the impending dread of death. But these stories understand that horror is about humanity's obsession with death, how we both bury most active discussion of it and yet its inevitability literally haunts us at every moment. As the Haunting series so aptly understands, ghosts are never just ghosts, even if the storytellers who employ them don't actively intend for them to be anything else. Ghosts are regrets, they're loss made manifest, they're the past refusing to let us go. And in a year where we've all had to deal with loss and grief, or at least the specter of its potential, I fell hard into the two anthology seasons of this show.
As long as humans have been around, we've been afraid of living on without the people we love, afraid of leaving them in the world without us. Some of us believe we'll see them again after death, and some of us believe that this life is all we have with them, but either way, their absence follows us, even when they're still alive, just because we fear to lose them. No other show this year captured what that means better than Bly Manor.
The Last of Us: Part II (Video Game)
Earlier this year, I wrote a post grappling with my conflicting feelings towards this game. There's a lot of media and art that I mostly love or mostly hate, but every now and then something comes across that provokes both feelings in equal, powerful measure. The Last of Us: Part II is Great and Terrible in all the meanings of those words, and even now, six months after finishing it, this game hasn't let me out of its clutches. For that alone, it deserves a spot on the list.
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel (Book)
Hilary Mantel’s gorgeously-written trilogy about Richard Cromwell, low-born advisor to the infamous King Henry VIII, is easily my favorite piece of historical fiction. It’s a staggeringly incredible character study of Cromwell - a figure who’s spent much of history being vilified as the archetypal evil advisor - portraying him instead as a generally well-meaning, if complicated, man who’s realized that his only ticket to a good life is to cling tightly to King Henry VIII’s every whim. We haven’t gotten a new book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series since 2011, so for anyone craving the scheming machinations of medieval/early modern politicians, this series should satisfy that itch. The looming tragedy of Cromwell’s end makes the final installment the most poignant and impressive, and if I was ranking books specifically, it's my favorite of the year. Start with book one, Wolf Hall.
Not a Cast (Podcast)
The A Song of Ice and Fire book series - the still incomplete basis for the show Game of Thrones - is one of my favorite book series and fictional stories of all time. I first began reading them when I was 14, nearly half my life ago, and after many re-reads I love them even more. They became so popular because of their thrilling plot-lines and incredible characters, but I firmly believe that they have a depth of narrative construction, thematic cohesion, and skill of writing that earns them a spot at the top of fiction's pantheon. These books really do have enough depth in them to merit deep-dive analyses and thoughtful conversations...and luckily, I'm not the only one to believe that. The Not a Cast Podcast (a reference to author George R.R. Martin's long running blog called Not a Blog) is not a fancy, highly edited podcast broken into small, bite-sized chunks. No, hosts Jeff and Emmett do 1-2.5 hour weekly takes on each and every chapter of this gargantuan series, sometimes even breaking one chapter into 2 or 3 episodes. How many chapters are there in this series? 344. So far. Yup, this is a herculean, obsessive task, for the most obsessive fans out there. And I, uh, well...I love it. It's just two guys - plus the occasional guest - talking about this series for hours upon hours, and I can't get enough. The two have a great dynamic and even greater insights into both the story on a narrative level and a thematic one. They're almost done book 2 of 5, and we'll all be much older by the time they finish, but in a world of so much uncertainty, it's always a comfort to sink back into this tale for an hour or so a week.
Palm Springs
Every year I compile my top 10 or so favorite films of the year. This year, Palm Springs is the only film to make it on my top 20 pieces of pop culture at all. I think it's fair to say that much of my love of movies comes from seeing them in the theater and following the stories and discussion about what's coming out right now. Without movie theaters, without a lot of new movies, I just haven't had the energy or interest in watching new ones.
That being said, Palm Springs is an oddly relevant comedy about spending all your days living the same day over and over again with the person you love, and if that doesn't describe my life right now, nothing else does. It's consistently funny without sacrificing characterization or interesting ideas, and it hit at the absolute perfect time.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Book)
For the journalist and scientist called Piranesi, all the world is and has ever been is a huge and ruinous house, filled with giant statues and twisting staircases, and surrounded on all sides by a white-foamed and roaring ocean, which long ago has broken through parts of the house and periodically floods them. Piranesi scrambles around day to day, collecting fish from the flooded rooms, documenting the secrets he's discovering, and having conversations with the only other person he knows to exist, a man he appropriately calls The Other. Piranesi the book is a beautifully surreal tale that quickly sketches out a fantastic world in the original sense; one who seems to me both haunting and amazing. It's definitely worth your time.
Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers (Music)
Phoebe Bridgers is just slightly younger than me, and while our lives have been very different, it's always satisfying to hear someone of your generation chronicle a sampling of all the feelings and anxieties swirling around you both, just from being born into similar times. Special emphasis on "anxieties." I've been a nervous person through much of my life, but faced with the horrors of 2020, this was the first year I was really honest with myself about having capital-A Anxiety. I've always been drawn to music that echoes how I'm feeling, and so naturally Phoebe Bridgers has been a perfect fit for these times, and it's not just me. Punisher swept Phoebe Bridgers from the indie world to the Grammy's, which isn't any indication of quality, but it just goes to show how she's been embraced by my generation and the next.
Phoebe Bridgers' music, and Punisher in particular, is quiet, and nervous, and tries to find something beautiful in the darkness. From the dreams and nightmares turned real of "Garden Song," to the angry reconciliation of "Kyoto," and to the triumphant apocalypse of "The End is Near", Punisher showcases the best of her songwriting, and I think she's just getting started.
The Queen's Gambit (TV)
We're obsessed with stories about geniuses. Our often-young heroes are either wildly gifted with specific talents or possessed of a herculean drive and conviction. Usually both. Frankly, I find stories of geniuses and those who throw away everything else in their life in pursuit of a singular excellence to be kind of grating on a personal level. I think there's so much in life to enjoy that to commit yourself to one thing so relentlessly is bound to lead to disappointment and regret. The best kind of stories like this, in my opinion, portray their geniuses as tragic figures.
The Queen's Gambit does this to an extent, but in many ways it the same kind of genius story that usually leaves me cold. Yet, it works? Maybe because everybody seemed to be watching it at once. Maybe because it really does feel like a kind of movie that's not made as much anymore, while its TV format lets us really dig deep into the character's story. Maybe because it's held up on the back of Anya Taylor-Joy's performance. Maybe because it looks really excellent. Who knows why this story clicked with me when others didn't, but I found myself swept along the wish-fulfillment power fantasy of it all.
RTJ4 by Run the Jewels (Music)
No other band has held me in a state of righteous anger through the past several years than Run the Jewels, the collaborative rap duo of Killer Mike and El-P. Their music is always incisive and insightful, managing to channel the rage, despair, and glimmers of hope running through life in America so well that their songs echo events yet to come. Their last album, Run the Jewels 3, was released at the very end of 2016, recorded before the election of Donald Trump, and yet in the months afterwards I couldn't listen to anything else. I mostly listen to indie music, and while that genre is great for introspective emotional investigations, it rarely has anything interesting to say about our political realities, or at least, anything with any bite. Throughout the Trump years, I kept hoping for some music that would understand how I felt, that would have something to say about it other than "Trump's stupid and awful."
Finally, here comes Run the Jewels with their first album recorded since Trump's election, arriving just in time for the pandemic they couldn't predict. Killer Mike and El-P thunder through track after track of angry, indignant attacks on the powerful few who have left us all to suffer for a quick buck and to hold onto the reigns of power. No other album this year has energized me more for the fights to come.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, season 5 (TV)
Like Avatar: The Last Airbender before it, Netflix's She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is a kid's animated series that's found a much wider audience due to its understanding of the building blocks of great storytelling. Wonderful characters who go through transformative character arcs, a cool science fantasy world, lots of good-natured humor, and one of my new favorite characters, Catra, combine to make this one of the best shows out there.
She-Ra's fifth and final season brings the show the finale it deserves, as the complicated and always fascinating relationship between protagonist Adora and antagonist anti-villain anti-hero Catra reaches its long-awaited conclusion. There will always be a place in my heart for well-told epic fantasies with great characters, regardless of medium or audience, and She-Ra comes to a close with a tale that places it in those lofty heights.
Shore by Fleet Foxes (Music)
I needed Shore. I've been weathering the pandemic storm better than most, statistically, but I've always been prone to anxiety, and sitting inside watching the world burn is a recipe for a troubled mind. Fleet Foxes' fourth album leaves behind some of the turbulent introspection of their 2017 comeback album Crack-Up and dives instead into an ocean of warm, beautiful, comforting music feels like the best parts of the beach I once belonged to. Robin Pecknold (who essentially is Fleet Foxes) wrote the lyrics to this album during the pandemic, and so it remains some of the only music I've heard so far that incorporates what we've all been feeling. From the sunny ode to fallen musicians "Sunblind," to the aching quiet of "Featherweight," to the shimmering horn-filled epic "Long Way Past the Past," Shore is the album I needed to calm me in the face of the trials of 2020 and beyond. Damn, this guy knows how to sing.
Songs for Pierre Chuvin by The Mountain Goats (Music)
The Mountain Goats are my favorite band. I've seen them live more times than any other band, and it's not even close. I will follow John Darnielle and friends through their music-making careers as long as they keep making music. And they keep making music. At the beginning of 2020, they were sitting on 17 studio albums, plus as many EPs, 3 compilations albums of early cassettes, and a ton of un-released live-only songs. The Mountain Goats began releasing lo-fi songs recorded on a boom-box, usually only featuring John Darnielle's voice and his acoustic guitar, with maybe a bass accompaniment. They operated that way for years, releasing six studio albums before their seventh, Tallahassee, came in 2002 and ushered in the era of studio, full-band recordings. I think both eras of The Mountain Goats have great stuff, but there is a certain magic to those early, lo-fi songs that they've never been able to release again.
This year, a few weeks into the pandemic, with the looming threat of financial disaster for many touring musicians, John Darnielle grabbed his old boombox recorder, recorded ten new songs inspired by a history tome about the last pagans, and released it as their 18th album, even though they had another one in the pipeline that would come out later this year (Getting Into Knives). And lo and behold, a new lo-fi Mountain Goats album was unleashed upon the world, bringing all of John Darnielle's musical experience gained in the past two decades while also sounding just like those magical early records. It sold like hotcakes.
It's among their very best work, and while the tribulations of the last pagans fighting the Christianization of Europe and/or mourning for a way of life on its last legs doesn't on-paper match with life in a pandemic...it somehow feels true. The futures we thought we were going to have were dashed away in an instant, or at least delayed and altered. We live in uncertain times, apocalyptic times even, and Songs for Pierre Chuvin channels the voices of those long dead who went through their own slow apocalypse. It's not overly optimistic, but there's a grim, defiant hope running through it all. As John Darnielle sings in "Hopeful Assassins of Zeno": "How long before the snake devours its tail? / Longer than we think. / Still it's gonna happen sometime / Until then raise a drink."
The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (Book)
The Masquerade series of novels - of which this is the third out of an eventual four - are the best written and moving explorations of empire, colonialism, and the messy intentions and aspirations of a true egalitarian revolution I've ever seen in fantasy fiction. Protagonist Baru Cormorant has quickly become one of my favorite fictional characters, and Dickinson never loses sight of how to balance political machinations, world-shattering revelations, and the terrible, moving struggle of Baru's heart in conflict with itself. The first book in the series, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, is a perfectly-constructed, thrilling knife of a novel, and I highly recommend it to everyone. The second book, The Monster Baru Cormorant, was more slower-paced, sprawling and somewhat messy - but now it's easy to see that books 2 and 3 are really just halves of one impressive and epic whole. Here's to a great conclusion...at some point in the future!
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell (Book)
David Mitchell has written eight novels, and while they’re not really a “series,” they do all definitely take place in the same universe. It looks like our world, mostly, but there might be some odd things floating around history. He’s one of my favorite authors, with Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks as some of my favorite books ever. His latest is both is most accessible, while also his most interconnected into the great Mitchell Literary Universe. Utopia Avenue is a tale of a classic rock band in the UK in the late 1960s, and it chronicles their four band member’s lives as they form the band, become mildly famous, live and learn and write music, and of course, run into a whole heaping helping of famous celebrities. I’m not hugely invested in that era of music, but Utopia Avenue works because of its love for music in general, and because of its wonderfully written, lovable band of misfits. It’s also chock-full of allusions and references to Mitchell’s other novels, and while you don’t have to have read them before…part of it just straight-up spoils The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet’s ending. So, up to you.
What We Do in the Shadows, season 2 (TV)
The second season of this "mockumentary comedy horror series" (to quote Wikipedia), aired in April, right as we all settled into lockdown, and it couldn't have come at a better time. The tales of four vampires and their familiar-turned-vampire hunter is always creative and funny and dark and occasionally even moving. There's no reason why the second season of a TV show based on a movie should be this good, but the writing is so consistently...ahem...sharp. Episode 6, "On the Run", is easily one of my favorite episodes of television already, and has definitely inspired my next Halloween costume once the pandemic is over.
And there we go, my 20 favorite pieces of pop culture and entertainment released in the year 2020. It's been an awful year, but humanity still manages to make some good stuff regardless. Here's hoping for a better 2021 in every way possible!
Runner-Ups:
Dark, season 3 (TV)
DIE, volume 2 (Comic Book)
Emma. (Film)
Final Fantasy VII: Remake (Video Game)
Infinity Train, season 3 (TV)
Shirley (Film)
Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett (Book)
A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne Brown (Book)