pure nerd joy in 2023
Hello! So this is kind of long overdue - I meant to write something for the end of 2023, and life gets in the way (in the form of flight cancellations taking away all my free time for the rest of the year), and then I got busy with catching up with all the stuff I missed out on because I was away, and I'm still catching up now. Why do people go on long vacations? In the long run it's always more stressful than not. I was only gone for 10 ish days, and the exhaustion from all the "borrowed spoons/spell slots" cuz I didn't have enough to get me through and now am paying back for leading to me spending days and weeks with fewer spoons/spell slots than usual, combined with extra exhaustion coming from not being able to do anything related to my special interests for that long, and my piled up work on top of all of that.
Give me my short "long weekends" any day, though.
Anyway, I did say in my mini zine that I will share some of the things that brought me nerdy joy in 2024, and that I will do!
film and tv
Look, the clear winner for the whole year is definitely Dimension 20, particularly all the seasons with the Intrepid Heroes. I started watching D20 around late 2022 (November ish? Or October?) and it's taken over my life like nothing else. It's not like it's my first actual play - I was really into the first arc of The Adventure Zone and fully plan to go back to it ONE DAY, and I liked the idea of Critical Role a lot even though I can never watch the entirety of the any episode (too long, too many people talking over one another, maybe just not edited enough? The animated version is great, though!)
D20, though. First of all, Fantasy High was just so fresh. If you know me at all, you know that what I love the most about stories and storytelling are characters, and character development. And like Kacen Callender's said at some point, and I'm very badly paraphrasing, younger characters tend to make more mistakes, so they also have a lot more room for growth and there are more interesting conflicts that can happen from that, which means greater character developments, and this is a thing I love to see/read/listen to.
(Older characters can and do have great character moments, like you can see with Kingston Brown in Dimension 20's Unsleeping City, but yeah Kristen Applebees in Episode 1 of Fantasy High is basically a different person from Kristen Applebees in Episode 20 of Fantasy High: Sophomore Year and I just fucking love to see it.)
Also, I think part of the reason why I love following narratives like Fantasy High, and reading the particular YA books I do in general, is a kind of "revenge" thing for my younger self? Cishet NTs may not get it, and they seem to be the ones more likely to yuck everyone else's yum online, but yeah I missed out on a LOT of "normal" teenage experiences growing up because of (1) queer isolation, and (2) just being undiagnosed/unaware of the existence of aceness and aro-ness and enby-ness the way they actually are (instead of the wrong stereotypes perpetuated by the media) and thinking I'm a weird horse, instead of realising I'm a normal zebra.
I never got to "grow" and "find my people" and all that shit, but I get to watch characters like Fig and Kristen and Adaine and Gorgug and Fabian and Riz do it, and it's absolutely wonderful.
(The saving the world part is really secondary, haha.)
But yes, as if Fantasy High wasn't already perfect from the get-go, they followed it up with Unsleeping City which has all the Neil Gaiman vibes I love, mixing lore with modern fantasy tropes, and the characters get to be OLD and MESSY and so flawed and lovable. I will die for La Grand Gata, okay. I don't feel as personally involved with the characters in this series, but the story! The level of storytelling in Unsleeping City was breathtaking, and the way Brennan wove together urban myths like the gators in the sewers and the rat king, with actual history like Robert Moses, giving us a story that is also a commentary of gentrification and how the systems we built were created to keep marginalised people marginalised... and how as terrifying as Robert Moses was, the biggest tension in the series is between the Lawful Good Kingston Brown and the Chaotic Good Pete Conlan, and how even being "on the same side" can mean something so fundamentally different... it's so good and I am not really smart enough to put my thoughts about this series into words.
So let's just say, Dimension 20 was my rock throughout all of 2023.
There were so many wonderful highlights, like The Sandman series on Netflix (such a perfect adaptation); the One Piece live action on Netflix (again, this adaptation? so good, and I would even say I prefer it to the manga); the D&D: Honor Among Thieves movie (I never thought a good adaptation of D&D would exist, and yet here it is); The Marvels film (Kamala Khan is such a joy to watch); and something old that I'm rediscovering thanks to someone putting it on YouTube, The Punk Singer documentary about Kathleen Hanna.
Speaking of Kathleen Hanna! She is amazing and I am itching to do a zine just about her, but I'll wait for her memoir to come out this year.
Books
For books, there are just too many, despite last year being a year that I barely read (for my standards, that is).
The best thing I read the entire year would probably be a tie between two books.
The first is British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture by Catherine Butler, which is exactly the sort of thing I would love to study and am glad someone actually did it and I can just read everything second hand, also there is an entire chapter with constant mention of Diana Wynne Jones <3 and basically this book indirectly gave me the idea of a 2024 promotion which will take over four whole months this year.
The second is Sarah Monette's A Theory of Haunting which is a whole NOVELLA about Booth and I love (and relate to) Booth so much, he is the reason Sarah Monette is one of my favourite writers. Like the other Booth stories, this novella is haunting and atmospheric and spooky and left me imagining scenes in it long after I've finished reading, and left me feeling all the feels.
After that there are still way too many books to talk about so I'll put them in clumps cuz this year I had reading MOODS.
One of these moods, surprisingly enough, was for horror comics. Me, who hates horror! I think after going around saying "I hate horror" so much I've come to realise that almost every single one of my favourite comic that isn't a superhero (or cottagecore/queer slice of life) comic, is a horror comic. This year I've gotten obsessed with Something Is Killing the Children, and Nice House on the Lake, and The Summer Hikaru Died, and The Neighbors, and Know Your Station. So good, all of them. They're haunting and perhaps less "scary" in the traditional sense, and the true horror are almost always something like capitalism (in the case of Know Your Station and Eat the Rich) or in the case of The Neighbors, yes there are scary fairies but what is truly scary is being trans in a small town. I think I've come to embrace the fact that almost all the really good queer narratives out there are horror stories, because hey, our life is just one big horror story, right. /stares at the long list of "best queer movies of 2023", almost every one of them a scary movie I don't dare watch. /
Another mood I had, surprise surprise, was trans love stories. From the nerdy Breakup, Makeup to the fantasy horror A Hundred Vicious Turns (which, okay, I don't know if the protagonists will survive in the next books, let alone confront their feelings for one another), I just love all these transmasc narratives. Growing up, the only trans rep I've had were of transfems and some were not even good ones (mostly written by cis writers), so again, I'm just inhaling all these books, both good and mid ones.
The third of my reading moods is also not a surprise - d&d related stories. Some of these are YA novels, some are middle grade. Some are comics. Some are about a group of people finding friendship and comfort through the game (Roll Call), some are about the irl drama arising among a group of gamers and how that affects the game (Roll For Initiative), some are about gamers falling in love (Dungeons and Drama), some are about characters finding roleplay to be a therapeutic experience (Buzzing). Oh and some are just set in very D&D inspired worlds, like Frieren and Dungeon Meshi, of the upcoming anime series. All were excellent reads.
everything else
These are all unrelated things kind of so let's just do it in a list:
- N.D. Stevenson! Nate Stevenson is the writer of Nimona and the showrunner for the Netflix She-Ra reboot and it seems like, just like many of the people I looked up to in the early 2000s, they've since transitioned. Nate's current newsletter/comic is mostly about his life, about the past, about transness and coming out and how things have changed and how other things haven't, and so many of the comics are so relatable (not just the trans stuff but other stuff too) and some had me tearing up at the office, and as if that wasn't enough, the community around the newsletter is one of the most amazing I've been in the periphery of. I almost never comment on anything online (publicly at least) and yet, from the very few comments I've written, and the ones I've liked/replied to, I've come to feel so much love and support for and from some of the others there. I think this is the closest I've ever felt like having "a community". It was the same for the Nimona comment sections way back when, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
- comic and game cons! I went to so many good ones last year, I will group them as one. Some may think that SDCC as the pinnacle, and I think if I had been able to move around freely there it definitely would be, but I will always remember that trip as the one where I missed seeing Brennan Lee Mulligan DM the The Adventure Zone dudes live. Being in the west coast again felt SO GOOD, though, that it surprised me. I guess as much as I idealise NYC (the movie/book version of the city), my earliest life was lived in the west coast and I will always belong there more. What was I talking about again? Right, conventions. So, CAFKL was amazing and full of amazing art, some even about D&D and Animal Crossing! I wish that CAFKL can happen every other month so that I can have a chance to buy all the things I couldn't afford last time, because I wanted almost everything. And then there's Any Games Con, which I didn't know existed before this, WHY? A whole convention, dedicated to tabletop games? I had a lot of fun, spent a shitload of money (mostly on a board game for Arissa), and looked a few times at the groups playing D&D and Warhammer, although I would never join a table of strangers unless I had at least a friend with me, I think.
- ONE OK ROCK. I haven't been to a concert since Arashi's in 2019, and since Arashi isn't around to do concerts now, there is no better group to get me into a concert high again than OOR. Honestly, the week leading up to the concert I was exhausted and unprepared and stressed out and just generally overwhelmed and overstimulated, so I wasn't in the frame of mind to enjoy it at all. Then I was there, and everything else washed away. I really needed it, I think.
That's all (ok, most) of the things that brought me pure nerdy joy in 2023. It wasn't a great year, but these things make it better. Here's hoping for more cool nerd shit in 2024. I mean, I'm already in the middle of Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+, am going to start on Fantasy High: Junior Year tonight, and am looking forward to both the new Doctor Who and Dungeon Meshi, and Echo is showing now but I can't spare the braincells for it yet, and Lauren James' awesome Last Seen Online will actually be in PRINT this year, and The House in the Cerulean Sea is going to have a sequel called Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Bobby Darin will be in my head all year I think) so we're looking to a good start <3
Take care and drink water!