My Favorite Things I Posted Here in 2023
- $torytime
Obviously this is the big one—literally, the three essays together come in at about 14,600 words, and the Rings of Power essay, at about 8,300 words, is the longest single piece of writing I’ve ever written.
And I’m still pretty proud of them, it turns out. I do think in the end the whole $torytime thing doesn’t quite manage to be more than the sum of its parts, and I kind of wish I hadn’t left some of the most important parts of my Horizon Forbidden West review in the postscripts, but other than that I think they’re all really strong pieces, with important arguments that are made well.
I do wish I’d done a little more research for the RoP essay, as much as it was already nearly more than I could handle. The main thing that I really should have looked up, and I honestly have no idea why I didn’t (to the point that I think I must have and then just forgot), is the background of the showrunners. Like, surely I’d want to know what these people did before that got them entrusted with this giant show? Well, they were uncredited writers on 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond, uncredited script doctors on 2021’s Jungle Cruise…and that’s. Fucking. It. Not only had they not run a show before, not only had they not even been in a writers room before, they had literally never had any credited role in film or TV. Ever. (At least according to IMDB, anyway.)
Had I known that before the show aired it would’ve been mind-blowing. Now, it’s just confirmation that these people had no fucking clue what they were doing.
How did they get hired? I mean, I don’t know how they even got the meeting, but according to this content farm article that’s mostly just summarizing a paywalled WSJ article, they convinced Simon Tolkien, the worst Tolkien, that they were huge Tolkien fans and had a fully-developed idea for the show, a lie which should sound very familiar to fans of Lost (or whatever you call people who sat through 6 years of that show)(to be clear I am one of those people).
When writing my essay I was hesitant to ascribe too much blame to Simon as I didn’t know just how involved he actually was (he’s credited as “series consultant,” a made-up title that could mean basically anything, but he doesn’t have an EP or writing credit, so I was kind of assuming he couldn’t be that closely involved), but it sounds like this was all kind of his fault? And I’m now much more willing to stand by my “Durin IV is a Simon Tolkien self-insert” comment.
Anyway apparently they were continuing production on Season 2 without the showrunners during the WGA strike, so who knows, maybe it will be better. I will not be watching to find out, because if and when I write a 16000-word essay I’d like it to be about literally anything else. - “Everything Everywhere All at Once: Choosing Joy”
Honestly I kind of like my shorter EEAO review better, but I feel like I should highlight this one as a counterbalance to all the (well-deserved) negativity above. Sometimes it’s ok to like things, and I really needed to be reminded of that. - “Office Hours #3: What We Talk About When Talk About Poetry Would Be a Really Hacky Title For This”
I guess I’ve stumbled into to an ongoing quest to demystify poetry, and that goes for writing about it too, not just writing it. - “Thoughts on Stuff”
I don’t think I really have to explain this, right?
* * *
Uhhhhhh, yeah, so it’s been A Year. I had to deal with some life stuff in the first half of the year, and I developed some not entirely healthy (or at least not particularly productive) habits while coping with that which I’ve been struggling to let go of (you’ll notice the video games list is a bit longer this year). As such I haven’t done nearly as much writing as I would’ve liked, and even the myriad projects I have in the research phase have been kind of on the back burner.
So far, though, I’m having a very productive 2024 (I actually got these out in January!), so hopefully I can keep that momentum going. I think I’ll refrain from any hints or promises this time, given how that panned out (or rather, didn’t) last time. Suffice to say I hope to make some stuff at some point.
Certain of Eventual Failure 