Best of the Last Decade: Part 1

THAT’S RIGHT! It’s Leap Day so I’m finally doing my “Best of the Decade” list, using the poorly-defined and completely arbitrary categories! In whatever order that comes to mind! I’m going to break down what some of the best stuff I read, watched and played that was released this decade. Keep in mind to qualify this list I have to have consumed this media and it had to have come out in the past decade; sadly that disqualifies a lot. For instance, I first read Name of the Wind in like 2011, but it didn’t come out in this decade so it doesn’t count.

There’s a lot of stuff that didn’t make this list, which is sad, so I’ll try to at least give them shout-outs. If I mention it at all, it’s probably worth looking into. This is also delivered in parts (as you could probably tell from the title) as A) I couldn’t finish them all in time) and B) this was seven pages in Google docs, which is over twice the ordinary Note length.

Best Comic: Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona

[And I realize that it had a butt ton of illustrators, but that was the one of the first volume and the style that was most recognizable to this run of the comics.]

So I read a lot of comics in the past decade, so much that it kind of inflates my Goodreads book count unfairly, but when I think of serieses that not only started well, but stayed consistently excellent throughout most of their run, that list starts to drop down a bit. Even then, what makes Ms. Marvel so good isn’t that it’s got action or humor (though it has those too), it’s that it’s got a lot of heart. Telling the story of a Pakistani-American superhero fangirl who suddenly gets superpowers, Ms. Marvel follows Kamala Khan’s adventures fighting supervillains, but also navigating school crushes, trying to figure out where she stands in regards to her family’s Islam, and trying to help her friends change the world.

It feels like it was written for an audience the same age as the main character. Maybe there’s a lot of social commentary in this series, but it never bothered me too much because it ultimately boils down to this: as long as you treat everyone with love and acceptance, you won’t go wrong. 

Also, avoid clones of Thomas Edison that are also cockatoos.

Best Comic Event: Batman Eternal by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Ray Fawkes, Kyle Higgins and Tim Seely 

“Haven’t you heard? I’M BATMAN!”

Should give an Honorable Mention to Forever Evil, I think? I really liked that one more than I expected.

Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Batman, DC decided they had to do something BIG. Something MASSIVE. And that something was Batman Eternal, an homage to the enduring legacy of the Dark Knight, bringing in basically all of the supporting cast, along with ALL the villains into a tangled, convoluted plot to bring Batman to his knees. It is intense, it is hardcore, it is surprisingly humorous at times, and also we can credit it with the return of Stephanie Brown. 

Unlike Tom King’s run on Batman, this one event comic solidifies something that everyone and their mothers miss when talking about Batman: he’s nothing without his supporting cast. Without all of those people helping him, he’d never be able to last as long as he has. Batman’s reputation as a loner is silly at this point; he’s got the largest supporting family of any superhero. And instead of painting this as a weakness, Batman: Eternal strengthens the family, calls upon it in his hour of need, and expands it.

This isn’t the best Batman comic of all time, no, but it’s darn close to everything I want in a Batman story. 

Best Spin-off Comic: Gotham Academy by Becky Cloonan and Brendan Fletcher, illustrated by Karl Kerschl

“How do kids in Gotham feel about Batman?” is one interesting question. Another is, “What if we made a mystery boarding school series set in Gotham City?” Of course, both are worth asking and Gotham Academy does a great job with both by making a series that’s (relatively) short and sweet, telling us the story of a group of kids who form a Mystery Club at Gotham Academy, a place that’s naturally crawling with secrets of every kind.

It’s clear this is written by people who love everything they’re writing about: Batman, mystery stories, boarding school stories, ghost stories, and found family narratives. There’s drama and scares and all, but in the end it’s a story about two girls, Olive and Maps, who don’t quite fit in for different reasons but end up becoming the best of friends and taking on the secrets of the school.

[And I ship Maps and Damian I have no regrets]

Also one issue has a time travel plot that references Batman Beyond? That was weird in all the best ways.

Best Television Series: Person of Interest

Person of Interest wasn’t always at one hundred percent, but I feel like out of the shows I watched in the past decade, this is the one that maintained a mostly consistent quality throughout its run. And I watched a lot of shows, some of which had at least one season where plot or characterization took a nosedive. Not so with Person of Interest!

And it’s good. It’s really good. And despite it selling itself at first as a procedural about stopping crime with some stuff about computers, spies and national security, it evolves (or perhaps warps?) into this massive sprawling thing that asks questions bigger than I ever expect from any piece of media. How much invasion of privacy is justified? How much security is justified? If ultimately surveillance technology did exist, should anyone have it? What does it mean to be a good citizen? What does it mean to live in America post-9/11? Can law enforcement be trusted? Can governments be trusted? Is any level of criminal activity okay? How far should we go to protect our own people? What does it take to be a god?

And it all begins with that one terrifying line at the beginning of every episode that sticks in your head like a burr: “You are being watched.” 

Best Comedy: Brooklyn 99

I sat and watched a couple episodes of Brooklyn 99 on the plane ride to Puerto Rico one time, and got hooked almost instantly. I don’t know how they did it, but this show is comedy gold.  I was down between this and The Good Place for this category. The Good Place is, I think a better show, but this is a better comedy. Does that make sense? Because while The Good Place is more dramatic and more philosophically relevant, Brooklyn 99 fires joke after joke and never stops, and I can’t help but find it constantly hilarious.

And you know what else is great about this show that no one talks about? All the main characters, the goof cops who keep making us laugh? They’re all really good at their jobs (except Hitchcock and Scully)! They’re not funny people but terrible cops--they’re funny people and amazing cops. And it works, in part because this is a show that doesn’t romanticize crime either--the criminals are almost all idiots.

It’s a great series, and I recommend that you people watch it.

Best Limited Series: Over the Garden Wall

I’m not much for horror, but Over the Garden Wall isn’t scary as much as it’s unsettling. Don’t get me wrong, there are scenes that are terrifying. While those are effective, what works best in this series is the atmosphere. There’s a sense of dread and unease in many of the creepier scenes, and even the ones that aren’t there’s always this sense that something’s not quite right, and the way it might not be quite right could be harmful.

And once again, we have a sibling story! A story about two brothers wandering around the Unknown, a massive sprawling wood that’s… what the nature of the Unknown is exactly is subject to debate, even after having finished the series (though the final episodes give you some more clues). But even through the weirdness of the setting, it’s all filtered through the wacky antics of Greg and Writ stumbling along, especially since Greg as a small child has absolutely no idea how out-of-place the entire adventure is. Add a very cynical bluebird named Beatrice to the mix, guiding them on their way (OR IS SHE?!?), and you have a series that’s both really creepy and really funny.

Best Comic Book Series: Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD

I considered putting Arrow or Flash, which are great fun at their best--but admittedly, those shows aren’t always at their best. And there’s Legends of Tomorrow, which once it finds its footing is insane in all the right ways. But again, I’m going with the consistency of the quality. And yes Agents of SHIELD has had missteps, and Marvel Studios deliberately not telling them what they’re planning, I think it mostly holds up as a great comic book show, a great action show, and a fantastic spy show. It’s astounding that here’s a show which every season has its viewers asking, “What will they do/Where will they go next?” because every season-ending cliffhanger tends to be an intense mindscrew.

With an astoundingly good cast that the show seems to (mostly) care about, real stakes in every episode, kickbutt fight scenes and stories that range in scale from enclosed to world-shattering, Agents of SHIELD is able to tell a wider range of stories than the mainstream Marvel Cinematic Universe while also giving enough time for its characters to develop and become likable and believable human beings. All while Mulan’s voice actress is beating the snot out of HYDRA agents.

Best Short Cartoon: We Bare Bears

Who would have thought that a cartoon about three bears living around San Francisco would be one of the best sibling shows of the decade? Centering on Grizz, Panda and Ice Bear, this show is about three brothers that keep having misadventures when they drag friends and each other into misadventures.

This is a show that works on how ridiculous everything is. If your sense of humor doesn’t lean towards the silly, this show’s probably not going to work for you. There’s not much continuity, there’s no need for much backstory; each episode just gives you a set-up with the characters and rolls. So you get episodes like the brothers opening a coffee shop! Or their Bigfoot friend needing to go to the hospital! Or Panda finding a new friend through a friend-making app! Or Ice Bear’s feud with a small crab! And it’s all immensely hilarious.

Best Web Animated Series: RWBY

Sadly both Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series and Red vs. Blue didn’t begin in this decade, and though I liked Camp Camp, I can’t say that I can think of another animated web series that I got as invested in as I did with RWBY.

Monty Oum started RWBY a simple concept: what if someone did an epic fantasy CGI anime-inspired series that had some of the best fight scenes imaginable. Sadly, Monty Oum passed away in between the second and third seasons, but not without establishing a powerhouse of a series that continues to wow. Is this writing always excellent? No, it stumbles sometimes. And after Monty’s death, it took a while for the show to get its groove back on with the fight scenes. But if you stick with it, it’s a rewarding action series that manages to have lovable characters, excellent fight scenes, and consistently positive themes.

Also this show is an intertextual rabbit hole. Just look at all the fairy tale, literature, historical, and mythological references in this series. Look at them!

Best Live-Action Web Series: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Video Game High School gets an honorable mention, I think, because it’s not as dramatically great, it’s funny as all get out. This show is also really funny, but it’s also incredibly dramatic and pushes the very idea of web serieses a lot further than people thought possible, and caused a wave of spin-offs and imitators. Which anybody could do if they had a good camera, because it’s a really low budget series. It goes like this: Lizzie Bennet is a college graduate who moved back in with her parents and sisters in a small American suburb, and is annoyed by her mother’s old-fashioned insistence that her daughters need to get married and her young sister’s Lydia being reckless and annoying. There’s a wedding their family attends, in which her sister Jane hits it off with a medical student named Bing Lee (hah). But because Lizzie caught the bouquet, she ends up having to dance with the guy who caught the garter, the most insufferable guy she’s ever met: William Darcy.

Yeah, it’s a modern day AU of Pride and Prejudice. The title probably tipped you off. And it’s great! It’s fantastic! Told exclusively through the video blog format, in which Lizzie recaps her day and adventures, often with short scripted sequences. There are quite a few characters who you don’t get to meet first-hand until long after Lizzie has introduced them, which on the one hand seems cheap, but in the end it works because the story is about moving past first impressions, and of course you get Lizzie’s first impressions before meeting these people for yourself.

It’s a brilliant little gem shot on a tiny budget, and I think it outshines all of the imitators and spin-offs by its originality and by making its premise work.

Best Procedural: Elementary

Sherlock had a great first couple of seasons, but ultimately fell apart towards its end because it needed above all to be a giant cinematic drama. But Elementary remained consistently good throughout, and it has two added bonuses: first, it actually makes Sherlock into a person that you might conceivably want to be around, and second, it respects its female characters, especially and including Joan Watson.

Because yes, Sherlock Holmes is probably the smartest man in the room, but he’s not always right, and he’s not always good with people. This show establishes early on that his approach doesn’t always work because of his callousness, and above all that he needs people to help support him and let him do his best work. And Joan needs Sherlock to be her best self. These are two people who love each other, but they by no means are in love with each other because this is a beautiful depiction of a completely platonic relationship.

Many adaptations of the character make the mistake of making Sherlock into a god-level genius that makes everyone around him a bungling fool. Elementary gives us a great cast of intelligent people who all work together to solve the crimes presented every week. If it doesn’t always stay a faithful adaptation of the stories, it is a great procedural and a great take on the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Best First Season That Tanked Ever After: Once Upon a Time

...This was almost Sleepy Hollow.

Don’t get me wrong, OUaT was always insane, but there was a time once where it was actually, legitimately, a good television series. It was a show with a good mystery, interesting characters, a solid plot, and it achieved exactly what it set out to achieve at the end of the first season. There was some useless filler, but overall it was a surprisingly good show.

Too bad after the first season, it was quickly revealed that they didn’t have a plan for what happened next. Hence, seasons of quick plots that introduced dozens of Disney characters only to do nothing with them, hurriedly-written backstories about abusive parents handed out to everyone, and the entire cast making nonsensically stupid decisions. It was nuts, and at least the fanbase all knew it, which was why I never held it against them.

But that first season… it all ties together remarkably well, considering the premise. There are twists and turns all over that make it a great first season for a show that I never thought would ever be that captivating to begin with. Good leads, good acting, alright special effects, and a good wrap-up, it’s what a good first season should be, and it was what made OUaT one of the few Lost wannabes that stayed in the game as long as it did.

Best Book Series: Greatcoats by Sebastian de Castell

Look, there’s some stuff that came real close to this one. The Expanse is still really close to getting the win for this. But ultimately, Greatcoats has finished its story, and I still don’t know the end to The Invisible Library or The Expanse, so I’m giving it to the fantasy novel.

Greatcoats is often compared to Three Musketeers in that it’s got three leads and is a swashbuckling story about saving the kingdom. But I think that’s an overstated comparison, because this is a series that’s incredibly dark and cynical, and the kingdom in which it takes place, Tristia, sucks. Really really sucks. The king tried to establish a peaceful nation, but the Dukes didn’t like having someone limiting their power, so they rebelled and killed the king, and the force of lawgivers he established, the Greatcoats, were disbanded.

Except before disbanding the Greatcoats and getting killed, the King gave each of them a mission. And Falcio, the leader of the Greatcoats, is determined to finish his mission, even if he doesn’t know where to start looking. Helping him are Kest, his best friend since childhood, and Brasti, the snarky voice of reason who really doesn’t want all this stress.

This is a series that’s unflinchingly dark and gritty and the world is horrible; but the characters pull through because through suffering they become better, they become stronger, and gain hope. Because even when things are darkest, and you want to give up (which is, as the novels point out, a completely legitimate option in many cases), there is still one last shred of hope that you can hold on to.

Best Unexpected Surprise: The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan

Oh hey stories about a woman who decides to become a dragon scientist despite living in a country heavily inspired by Victorian Era England and women aren’t generally allowed to do things like that? Where have you been all my life? These books are good; not just because they have a no-nonsense female protagonist who is by no means a badass warrior of any time, not only because it critically examines colonialist ideas and narratives, and not only because it has a butt ton of dragons all over.

Written as memoirs by an elderly Lady Trent reminiscing on her youth, the books go a bit like this: Isabella is obsessed with dragons. They’re very little understood in the world, in part because their bodies rapidly decompose after death, and she wants to know more. So despite all the limits of society, she takes it upon herself to become a scholar in the ways of dragon physiology. And underneath her Darwin-esque adventures there’s another mystery that none of the characters even really pay that much attention to.

It’s fun, it’s unexpected, it’s a completely different direction than I thought I’d get from a fantasy book, and I think it’s what put Marie Brennan on the map in the speculative fiction genre. For good reason.

---

That’s it for this week--hopefully I think this will get finished in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Plot-Mandated Conflict

I really do intend to do that “Best of the Decade” Note, I just haven’t gotten around to it. Again, ‘Film’ is the difficult category for me. I can break it down into bits, but I don’t know how I feel about breaking that category down and not any of the others?

Anyway I finished the main story on Jedi Fallen Order. I feel as if it left me more satisfied with the story than at least two thirds of the Sequel Trilogy. I’m also dead sure I want a sequel, but it’ll be years before that happens if they’re going to produce a quality game.

---

Plot-Mandated Stupid Conflict

Also called the Conflict Ball! Or the Idiot Ball applied in a certain way, but today we’re going to talk about conflict. 

I’m still mad about RWBY.

Alright, I’ll back up. Sometimes, in order to make the Plot work, the characters need to act stupider than usual. Often this takes the form of causing conflict for very little reason. There are situations where it makes sense for the medium. For instance, in the video game Injustice, characters fight at the drop of a hat--Ares appears in front of Wonder Woman, telling her he’s there just to talk, only for her to attack, and they fight, and when she beats him Ares explains why he’s there. Of course, Injustice is a fighting game, and so getting in one-on-one fights is the entire point of the game. If these two characters who are sworn enemies, and they didn’t fight, you as the player would feel a little ripped off. That’s what you’re here for!

This excuse doesn’t really fly in other mediums, other than, “Hey, this would be cool!” And I get that, running on Rule of Cool, but it’s still really dumb and feels contrived. Using a DC TV example, in Justice League Unlimited, during the Cadmus Arc (which is still a mostly really well-written arc despite what I’m about to say), Superman is uncharacteristically angry about Lex Luthor’s squeaky clean public image and presidential campaign. It comes to a head when he thinks he found a bomb under a park that Luthor created, and he goes to deal with it, but Captain Marvel (who now goes by Shazam in most media; it’s a long story) tells him to cool it and stop wrecking stuff, and then they fight, wrecking everything around them, only to reveal that it’s not a bomb, it’s a power generator meant to give power to underprivileged people and Supes just destroyed it.

Oops!

This only happens because Plot. We need Superman to have a big public incident that makes him look bad, and we need to make Lex Luthor frame him for something. It also happens because someone higher up demands that Captain Marvel/Shazam almost always fights Superman, because it’s become an iconic part of using the characters now I guess? Even if it makes very little sense for the two to fight. Yeah, it’s an awesome fight to watch, but it feels all wrong, because it feels less like the situation called for it and more like the Plot is making them fight. Everyone involved, including the audience, knows that they don’t need to do this, and if you sit down and think about it for five seconds (which both characters can do, having superspeed) they can work things out. Both Superman and Captain Marvel (who I remind you has the Wisdom of Solomon) should know better.

And yes, the result of ‘Superman has a public scandal and more people lose their faith in the league’ is an important consequence that needs to happen for the story to progress. But beating the snot out of Captain Marvel at the drop of a hat is not a great way to achieve that, especially taking into account that Captain Marvel’s true shape is a child, meaning we’re watching Superman beat the snot out of a child in public and that’s not really an okay thing to do with your character. It’s a mighty stupid thing to do with your characters, especially when that character is Superman.

[To be fair, it’s unclear if Superman knows that Captain Marvel’s alter-ego is a child. I assume he doesn’t, but he also doesn’t seem shocked when he finds out, nor particularly ashamed of what he’s done.]

A worse example happened in the penultimate episode of Volume 7 of RWBY. A three-way fight erupts between Qrow, Clover and Tyrian--Tyrian’s an escaped convicted serial killer who worships the series’s Big Bad, Clover is law enforcement, and Qrow’s one of the hero’s uncles and mentor character. And Clover’s told he has to bring in his friend Qrow, who doesn’t particularly want to go to jail, but he tries anyway because he cares about his duty. Instead of shelving this until the serial killer, Tyrian, is put down, they all fight. And because Tyrian and Qrow have their own enmity between them, Tyrian suggests that they team up on Clover and then settle their score through combat afterward.

And Qrow does it.

Yes, Qrow teams up with a serial killer, a man who has tried to kill him and the people he cares about, against his former friend. This goes exactly as well as you’d expect. As a writing decision, especially in a season that’s been pretty solid up ‘til that point, it’s pretty inexcusable. Because it relies on a character making a stupid, indefensible decision in order to escalate the conflict and cause more drama.

A lot of these are often handwaved or excused with “Well, this character is angry, or upset, or otherwise not in the right state of mind for sound decision making.” And in some cases that excuse works. But in others, it’s pretty lame, because regardless of what you feel, I should think beating up a child or teaming up with your sworn enemy against your friend is something that shouldn’t happen willy-nilly. Unless the character in question is really emotionally unstable, these things shouldn’t happen.

Limyaael once did an rant with something “Does it make sense for your characters to do that?” in it somewhere. And that makes sense in a lot of different situations! But it especially makes sense in situations where you want two or more characters to fight. Because if it doesn’t make sense for these characters to duke it out, then don’t have them duke it out. Don’t make them make stupid decisions for the sake of a fight scene. If you absolutely need these two to fight, or have conflict in some way, come up with a reason that makes a lot more sense than a petty disagreement, or something that would be solved in seconds or minutes if they’d talked things out. Yes, there are people who are proud and won’t back down from a fight, especially when upset; I am reminded of the documentary on Hamilton where Lin-Manuel Miranda, going through the process of duelling, keeps saying, “There’s so much time to apologize and walk away.” Yes, there is, but both Hamilton and Burr were, in history and in the play, the kinds of people who couldn’t let that kind of thing go because they’re too proud, as the preceding drama had gone to lengths to show us. But many of these cases don’t involve those kinds of people. They involve people doing things they wouldn’t normally do or trusting people they know they shouldn’t in order to manufacture drama.

Don’t do this! Don’t have characters act like out-of-character idiots for the sake of it!

---

Batman as Horror

I really do wish that people were more inclined to not call and instead send e-mails, but alas the majority of my e-mails are spam mail and anyone important calls and I absolutely hate that. Stop doing it.

I’m also reading a lovely book called The Rook, which is pretty great in its first hundred pages or so. There’s a blurb somewhere that compares it to a cross between the Bourne series and War of the Worlds and that’s a fantastic comparison, I’d say.

I’m thinking of doing a Note (and by ‘thinking’ I mean ‘I already started a draft for’) titled something like “The Best of the Decade” wherein I talk about the best books, serieses, movies and games I watched, read and played that were released from 2010-2019. Still not sure how I’m going to approach movies though, because there are a lot of movies and I don’t really have a way of keeping track of movies I’ve seen.

Also this note is inspired by me reading Joker: Endgame and having read some of Scott Snyder’s run on Batman (which is much better than Tom King’s I think).

---

Batman as a Horror Story

Should probably give you some background:

Comics goes through cycles occasionally, and different authors will have different turns leading different comics and characters and such; that’s just how it goes. When there’s a shift in direction, like in a company-wide reboot, this often leads to radical new styles and story types, like what we got with DC’s New 52 reboot, which was an attempt to try to simplify comics for new readers. It didn’t work, and some of the comics that came out were… less than great, but there were also some notable works that were pretty good, like Geoff Johns’s Aquaman (which is mostly the basis for the recent movie), or Gail Simone’s Batgirl, and of course Scott Snyder’s turn on Batman.

Right off the bat (okay that wasn’t intentional) we get a story arc that gives us some great Greg Capullo art, like this and this, and has wonderful character beats like Batman going insane while trapped in a maze under Gotham, and some dickwad claiming he’s actually Bruce’s long lost brother. And it keeps going! When the Joker is brought in, one of the first things that happens is that his face is sliced off, and he’s assumed dead; when it’s revealed he’s not dead, he staples his face back on and creeps the fudge out of me. And even when he gets a proper face again, he decides to Jokerize the city into violent zombie minions obsessed with turning everyone. Also maybe the Joker can’t be killed, judging by the time Gordon axed him in the chest and he just got up and kept going.

The point I’m making here is that some of the best moments in Scott Snyder’s run on Batman when he approached it as a horror story. Not all of the story arcs are stellar, but there are plenty of little moments that really stick out and are genuinely terrifying. To me at least, a guy who only sometimes dips his toe into horror fiction.

It got me thinking, “Does Batman work better as a horror story?”

“Not necessarily,” was the answer I think I landed on. Batman often carries heavy horror elements; like I said, that’s not new, and a lot of the most popular iterations of the character play with this idea. Batman: Arkham City has moments like the entrance to Wonder City (where you see several men hanging from the ceiling as one guy screams in horror and falls down with a sword in his back) that are incredibly effective in ramping up the tension and showcasing Batman’s Gallery of Rogues. But many of the popular iterations don’t rely on those horror elements too much; The Dark Knight has some frightening bits, sure, but I don’t know if I’d call the majority of it horror as much as a crime thriller?

I’ve complained a lot about how comics just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, using the same characters, and how because there’s not actually an overall end goal in sight it kind of feels pointless and no major changes really stick in a way that matters. And that’s true, but one thing that is an advantage of this form of storytelling is that different authors and artists can take a hold of the story and tell different kinds of stories with the characters. So Wonder Woman for instance, is sometimes an epic mythological story, or it’s a more straightforward superhero story, or it can be a coming-of-age story. Likewise, Batman can be a crime thriller (like with The Long Halloween) or it can be more horrorcentric (like with Endgame). And those work, because it’s using already-established elements, just in configurations that we haven’t seen before. 

And Batman works really well as horror. A lot of the elements of horror are right there: the gothic environment, the widespread corruption, the useless asylum staff, the creepy asylum, underground mazes, infested sewers, and a killer clown. The stories don’t have to use all these elements to be a good Batman story, or even a good Batman horror story. No really, guys, please stop overusing the Joker. But those elements are right there, and I think it’s great that they’re being used in this way. I’m not suggesting that all Batman stories now need to be horror; I don’t want that, and I suspect the general public doesn’t either. But it’s a really cool take on the character and I’m surprised I hadn’t really thought about it more before. 

---

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Review

I wasn’t sure if I would do a Saturday Note this week because of weekend plans, but I found some time and I decided to do it. I feel weird because I haven’t walked in the past two days, but on Friday it was so weirdly windy outside I was scared if I went out for a walk I would find a branch flying into my head or something.

And I do not want that.

Anyhow I just watched the first season of this show on Netflix and I want to gush about it. It’s a short little Note, but I had a birthday on Thursday and I have a trip this weekend so deal with it.

---

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Review

So apparently around the same time that Netflix decided to release The Witcher, the streaming service released Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, an animated series with only ten episodes in its first season. It’s a colorful cute little story about a girl trying to get back home to her family, and making friends along the way, except that it takes place in a post apocalyptic wasteland where humans are persecuted by intelligent mutant animals that built their own gangs and subcultures.

Yeah, it’s like that.

I know that the cheerful and colorful post-apocalyptic story has been done before, don’t get me wrong. Adventure Time (which I’ve only seen snippets of so don’t hate me if I got this wrong), is also set in a world after the apocalypse. But this one’s less surreal than Adventure Time is. I mean, Kipo is weird, but it’s not that weird. There aren’t candy people or vampires. The creatures you meet are mutations of various animals. The strangest thing we see is the bees that light up and play dubstep.

The story goes a bit like this: Kipo is a preteen girl, daughter of a teacher single dad, who lives in an underground burrow society since humanity has lost the surface world two hundred years prior. The burrow is attacked, and she’s washed away by a canal to the surface. Deciding she needs a way back, she quickly makes friends with several other surface dwellers: Wolf, a young girl with a no nonsense attitude that’s kept her alive thus far; Mandu, a mutant pig that doesn’t talk but is very cute; Benson, a boy with a penchant for collecting old mixtapes; and Dave, Benson’s companion, a mutant bug that goes through his full life cycle in the course of a couple of days over and over again. Together, they set out to find Kipo’s burrow and her people, while a mute leader catches word of their presence and tries to capture them so that they can find the burrow and enslave more humans.

What made this series really stand out for me was its near boundless optimism. Kipo is an incredibly cheerful and friendly character; her whole schtick is being nice to everyone and everything around them, even when she has no reason to be. It seems like at first the dynamic will be Kipo trying to be nice to someone or something, and Wolf constantly having to save her from the ensuing mess. But instead that’s not what happens. Usually, Kipo tries befriending the creatures or people she meets, and it works. It gets them what they need and then some in order to keep pursuing their goals.

Here is a series that says: yes, we’re in an apocalypse where humans are second-class, at best… but the best option is still to always be kind to one another. In the long run, it’ll work out better. It’s a show about seeing beauty everywhere, even when life isn’t quite working out for you at the moment. And that’s fantastic. 

And this series also has an amazing soundtrack? There is an astonishing amount of songs, given the premise. With what I described to you, maybe you thought the music would heavily skew towards typical showtunes, but there’s a surprising amount of hip-hop influence in the songs. The Newton wolves (who are described as huge science nerds) have a nightly rap composed of the collected knowledge they’ve attained in studying the universe.

It surprised me how much I ended up loving this series. It’s a fantastic setting, it’s got lovable characters, it has excellent art and animation, it has beautiful colors, and exciting music, and I can’t help but recommend this series to people. 

---