Times Like These
my 2025 year in review. movies, music, webcomics, and everything else
This past year was the most successful I’ve ever had. Yeah, I know. This fuckass year. I’m sitting on a creaky bed in Melbourne, Florida, in a small house my dad impulsively rented for two weeks that smells, to be frank, like death. I was in Orlando last weekend for an anime convention called Holiday Matsuri, and my mother called me and my sister on our last night there, almost in tears because she felt that this AirBnB was haunted. I hate AirBnBs. When you open the front door, the normal Melbourne air skitters out of the way to make room for the thick, stale air of this place, whose windows are so thin that it sounds like the traffic is inside with us, and is near enough to a train that my parents wake up every half an hour or so in the night at the sound of its strangely manic honking. My sister and I, however, have ear plugs.
Florida has always felt apocalyptic to me. There is a religious sort of sadness here, in the air, in the fog, in the creamy foam of the ocean as it hits the toes of the sand pipers. Do you know what I mean? It feels like Vegas to me. Maybe it’s because when I’ve visited here, it’s usually been around Orlando, physically or spiritually. My parents have decided to move to this state; they sold their house of 10 years and drove here without much of a plan. I am trying to be kind, surely, probably, certainly, but they are, honestly, insane people. I have come to be a mediator. Mostly unwillingly. I always come to be a mediator. If I transcribed a single conversation we all have had about moving here, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. But I’m mostly unbothered, I suppose, or I have to be; I’m going to Disneyworld tomorrow with free tickets my friend kindly gifted me and my sister, and it’s going to be Christmas Eve, and I’m going to have to get up at seven in the morning to start the couple-hour drive north to that desolate, godforsaken area they trap you in. I just think it’s crazy. It’s crazy, right? That this place exists. I can’t stop thinking about the ocean burying all of it like Atlantis. I can’t stop looking at people’s lawns and thinking, Does that matter? Does it matter, that your mailbox looks like a dolphin, or a mermaid, and that my mother wants that so badly? Does it matter, this Publix, or this Burger King, in the middle of dense, world-ending-flavored swampland? Does it matter, that my father wants to see the SpaceX rocket launch in person? When the girl behind me at the convention clearly thinks she’s better than me, does it matter that I don’t like her glossy fanart of Jolibee with a giant tits, or that I looked at her Instagram and that she seems like an unfathomably lonely person? Does it matter that I can’t stop myself from my obsession with learning everything I can about people that impress me or really don’t impress me? Does it matter that I haven’t been truly impressed by someone in a while? I am satisfied by the idea that Disney won’t get more than a few dozen dollars than me for food or whatever. Maybe that makes me a little hypocritical, I don’t know. I kind of really want to watch that company as a whole be buried by the waves, like Atlantis, or perhaps like a garbage dump in the wake of a tsunami. I am satisfied, thinking about the end of many things. Other things, I see their faces in the seconds before my alarm jolts me awake. Pirate Zootopia 2, for the love of god. Or don’t watch it at all, if you really want to hang. I think that in 2026, I’m going to start asking us all to have some fucking standards. Yeah, I know I’m going to be fun at parties.
So, like, I’m not satisfied. If you didn’t catch that. I’ve taken maybe twenty flights this year and spent thousands of dollars that are pretty questionable, maybe. Maybe the answer to the question is that it was meant to be. It’s not like I don’t have enough debt, but okay, who cares! I ended up at conventions that I didn’t think were within my capability at all this year: Dokomi in Dusseldorf, Germany, MCM London, and Anime Expo with my own table, in my new hometown. I live in Los Angeles now, by the way. I made it happen. I still don’t know what to do with it, but everywhere I go, I end up missing LA, which is very significant for me. To miss a place. I went back to New York for Anime NYC and I realized I wanted to be in LA a little more. What the fuck, man! I worry about my obsession with novelty. I worry about my obsession with proving people wrong. I worry about my obsession with learning everything I can about everyone around me. I sold more stuff on my online shop than I ever have, and I packed a thousand billion orders that made me feel like I was in some self-motivated blanket packing factory that I’d created within the confines of my tiny apartment, and I do it all to take my fifty-dollar Ubers to the club where I meet no one worth my attention and where I listen to bad DJs half the time and incredible ones the other half.
There is, in fact, an incredible half of it all. It is a half that I cling onto and defend and kiss the feet of. I mean that while I’m still genuinely broke and fucked real hard by my finances on the a daily basis - despite what some people like to believe about me, lol - I am having, perhaps, a good time. And during this presidency, of all presidencies! The other half is, well, you know. You know. It’s fucked. Everything’s fucked. I mostly spend my time drawing and binge-reading Berserk or something and talking with my roommate about the politics of reality television or AI until three in the morning, or slowly watching Glee for reasons unclear to me as of now, and when I’m not doing that, I’m getting mad that other people get to spend more time drawing and also getting railed. I mean, listen. I want to make art that changes the world. Not for the sake of being big, but that’s there, too. I’m a greedy bitch. You know what my roommate said to me a month ago, when we were sitting in a tent outside the Ontario Convention Center for Anime Expo Chibi and watching some guys take a picture after cheering, 1, 2, 3, GOONERS! I don’t have the verbatim quote in my head, but she said something like, “The character you’re most like in Hazbin Hotel is Angel Dust. Like, you’ve got a bit of Blitzo and some others-“ I was aghast. “You have this story you tell about your life, a romanticism-“ I keep thinking about this. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m completely batshit?
What I’m saying is that this year was incredibly horrible in so many ways, for so many people. I had family issues and am still in the thick of them, and people have become noticeably more cruel to each other, even at the grocery store, or at a concert, or at a party, or in line for the bathroom at a restaurant. I have become convinced that most people are stupid, and mean, and lack empathy and choose to be all of these things because it’s easier. But I’m also twenty-five years old, which is, well, nothing. I can’t tell what’s always been horrible and what has become more horrible, though it’s more layered than all that. May all transphobes, racists, ableists, misogynists, homophobes, and any other bigots live terrible lives and die in terrible ways. I know some things have gotten better. I know that I’m finally living my long-held dream of living in Los Angeles, though I’m balancing on a wire every month. I want to get into big, stupid house parties and say weird shit to celebrities and see what they reply with. I want to get on a boat that sails to the middle of the ocean. I’ve never been so far from land that I can only see water on every side. I want to see a glacier that threatens my life. I want to be held down with a sweet tenderness that makes up for all those wide-eyed moments in the dark. I want a beautiful hand around my neck, though not a delicate one. But this year was my most successful one yet.
I guess life’s no fun through clear waters!
For this Year in Review, I’m going to try to convince you to get into my favorite things from this year, instead of vaguely reviewing them with the idea that you have already watched them or taken me seriously and watched them at my behest (which you should still do, of course). But because I am indeed that bitch, the first one I’m writing about is my novel that I released digitally on November 11th, The cutesy lovey-dovey heart-shaped thing about knives.
It’s 92k words, it’s a sci-fi romance novel about queer ice skaters in space, and I badly want you, dear reader, to read it. It’s been interesting releasing this because people I know - especially in the visual art world, which most of my close friends are a part of - have been largely surprised by the notion of me writing a book with no images inside it, and I don’t think many know what to do with it. Maybe it’s really unreadable to most people, I don’t know. I really wouldn’t know, still, because I haven’t gotten any reviews from people that aren’t like, my best of friends, and they have biases and I kind of wanted a bunch of randos to tell me that this book changed them, or something. But so it goes. I’m not concerned with becoming famous through this book or anything like that, though there’s an embarrassing sort of conversation some people have been starting with me where they assure me that it’s really okay if this book doesn’t do well, et cetera, et cetera, and while I do want more people to read it and love it, I wasn’t exactly aiming to earn millions of dollars from it, and had decided I wouldn’t self-publish it on Amazon or any large corporate site like it because I hate Amazon and feel it’s unethical. Friends have told me this will impact sales; that’s not my biggest concern. Though it’s not like I didn’t want to go the traditional publishing route, either- I queried agents for around eight or nine months and the personalized rejections I got were comprised of things like “I like this but the mashup of sci-fi and romance like this makes me unsure how to market it” and “the crass language of your sci-fi tone doesn’t go well with romance”. Like, this hurt, but it’s pretty funny to me. Also, I think the book is too queer and genderqueer and Latine and unconcerned with the rules of traditional publishing (especially the rules of romance genre fiction…) but who knows, maybe it’s just mediocre. Again, I wouldn’t know how people have been experiencing it. I like to think it’s pretty great, though.
I want the book to stand for itself but, here: it’s a book about ice skating. It’s mostly a fun book, in my opinion. It’s a book about BDSM, the romantic part of it, the poetic dynamics of such things. What does it mean to want to be overpowered, or to want to overpower? Is violence a physical thing, and can violence be loving and sweet, or is that just a roleplay of violence? Is performance a sort of violence, if you decide that violence is the removal of one’s choice? It’s a very bisexual book. Yeah. Everyone is pretty bisexual. There are she/he’s and xe/xir’s and she/they’s, among others. It’s a beautiful utopic version of our solar system that I pooped out of my brain. I’ve always wanted more abrasive sapphic characters, or at least sapphic books that aren’t period pieces with a fixation on one woman cheating on her husband or something, or a modern romance where the two people are just kind of really hot but lack any complex dynamics and also the prose is bad, so this book was me wanting to create what I wish to see in the world. It’s fine that those books exist, but I’m not their biggest fan and think sapphics and queer people deserve a wide variety of things that the market is blocking at every turn. I can’t really market The cutesy lovey-dovey as a sapphic book because the main character is a bisexual woman and the love interest is a nonbinary person, but it’s a sapphic book in spirit, if you get what I’m saying. I love making things less mainstream with every decision, apparently. It can’t just be a book about queer ice skaters, the agents say tiredly, it has to be in space? And also it’s about all-gender ice skating? In these times? And also the prose is complex and it’s about, uh, a dom and sub sex thing? But it’s not really filled to the brim with sex? I don’t know why I thought these supposedly “queer-forward” publishing agents would want this, but I guess I was optimistic about the world. More and more, I find that I have to make my own path. So here’s my fucking book!
If you like the stuff I write on here, you might be my audience. It’s only four bucks. I didn’t make it free mostly because I wanted people to take it seriously and be forced to read it because they paid money for it, but it looks like most people haven’t finished it or hated it so much they don’t want to say anything to me at all. I would prefer the negativity to silence! (Guilting you) Anyway, if you long for something that hopefully captures the beauty of reading a genuinely well-written sports anime fanfic and perhaps something more, read it. Maybe I’ll write another post on here about it down the line or something. If you read it, thank you so much, I hope you enjoy it.
“Addison” by Addison Rae (8/10)
A few weeks ago, I was laying on my back on our couch we bought from Bob’s Discount Furniture in the middle of the night, watching a video of Addison Rae singing “Fame is a Gun” live, and after she performed a move that teased the audience with the idea of her kissing her dancers, I asked my roommate if she thinks she’s really into women or if she’s doing a bait thing (ala Britney, in the way that most of Addison’s brand right now is ala Britney). My roommate said that her perception of Addison’s sexuality is the same sexuality as a Greek nymph’s or something. Like, she’s floating somewhere else. I got what she meant. I don’t mean this in a materialistically reverent way, like, “SHE’S A GODDESS <3”, I mean that she’s like, outside of her body somehow. In all her interviews I feel like she’s not aware she’s putting on a front and also is completely aware she’s putting on a front. She’s a girl like me, she’s nothing like me at all. She’s the straightest person I’ve ever listened to and yet I feel like she could tap into something in herself and get married to a woman and live her best life. Though I say that about most women. Perhaps I don’t know her at all. I definitely don’t.
This is one of the best albums of the year, though I feel like the naivete and privilege of its figurehead makes it unable to say anything politically worthwhile. I think all the songs on it are pretty solid, but I like the ones where Addison’s more vulnerable, revealing her real problems. Sue me for wanting a pop star to reveal things about themself. Sue me for having an obsession with grounding celebrities in the theatre of my mind. Addison tiptoes around these ideas in the album, and I can palpably feel her desire to be mysterious, to protect herself. That’s an interesting notion on its own, I suppose.
The only song on the album I feel is political in any concrete sense is “Times Like These”, a strangely vague but bittersweet song that I have an obsession with, because I feel its simultaneous immaturity and maturity captures being twenty-five, for me. The whole album, even, is an attempt at sounding mature that only succeeds because it fails, in my opinion. She clearly knows nothing but has seen too much. She is a privileged, shallow person who had to work hard and knows more than you think. Who are we to stop her? Who are we not to?
The chorus to “Times Like These” is a jarring admission towards the end of an album that creates a fantastical world of feminine nonsense, of beach-ridden romances, of fame that eats you alive but that you’re letting do so. I want to talk about this chorus specifically for a moment: “My life moves faster than me / Can’t feel the ground beneath my feet / No matter what I try to do / In times like these, it’s- it’s how it has to be / It’s not my fate in the end / Let go of all that could have been / No matter what I try to do / In times like these, it’s- it’s how it has to be” There’s something so potently sad in this to me, but it also is the crux of the album, I think. Life’s no fun through clear waters, and all that. What isn’t her fate in the end? Why do I know what it is without being told the words? What do I do, when my life is outside of my control, when I feel people have an idea of me that I both want to manipulate and don’t want any say in at all? I have too many questions. I feel older than I am, and yet I know that in ten years I’ll laugh at myself. There is a precipice I am standing on and I know the contours of every rock below the water I’m jumping into. Why must there be a precipice? Who decided to put me on a fucking precipice? I have to breathe; I can’t see anything in front of me, but I can feel it. How do I describe this feeling… Head out the window, my song on the radio? My life moves faster than me. I listened to this song on a train in Germany. I remember it now. I listened to it on the plane ride to Los Angeles. I kept thinking, Is it better to know how it unfolds? I guess I’ve formed some sort of answer.
The production of that song feels beautifully expansive, as do most of the songs on the album. The two producers, notably both women, arguably do more for the album than even Addison herself, who talks in interviews with an airy tone about not having any musical training or experience before her first EP. I don’t say this to make Addison sound stupid, and I don’t think people have to play instruments to do what Addison’s doing, it’s just interesting how her very direct lyrics wouldn’t work as well with another team. I think that’s the influence of Charli XCX’s alleged mentorship of her, which I enjoy. There is something brat about Addison, certainly; I mean, “New York” is an obvious ode to Charli, but the simplicity of songs like “Headphones On” works in the same way that “Von dutch” does, and so on. If you like pop music, or Charli, or want something dreamy that makes your life feel like a music video, then there’s Addison. And, also, Addison. She’d like you to be interested in both, I think.
Twinless (2025), directed by James Sweeney (9/10)
The trailers don’t do this movie justice. You should watch it. It’s a film about a guy whose twin dies and meets another guy at a support group for people whose twins have died, and that other guy becomes obsessed with him. I won’t tell you anything else, because you should go in completely blind. I found it to be a nearly technically perfect film, and the way it builds tension and plays with the audience is extremely impressive. Every time you think you know everything that’s going to go down, the film says, Yeah, you do, and then pushes you somewhere else that you didn’t expect to witness. Dylan O’Brien is amazing in this, genuinely, but so is James Sweeney, who is such a specific person in this that it almost hurts, and Aisling Franciosi’s character hits in a similar way. It’s wonderful. It is a very gay movie, if you like that sort of thing, but it’s a fucked-up gay movie, if you like that sort of thing. I do, of course, and the undercurrent (overcurrent?) of sexuality through the whole movie is delicious and exciting to me. Like, fuck Saltburn, y’all should be watching Twinless! It’s a story about grief, definitely, but it’s also about otherness, and performance, and voyeurism. Does something false still mean something if it felt like it meant something before it was false? You tell me.
“Virgin” by Lorde (2025) (9.2/10)
Hmm… what to say about Virgin, when I’ve avoided reading and interacting with most discourse or criticism of it? lmao. You know, I think Lorde is ahead of her time, in a certain way. People have always said this, but this album solidified it for me. Is Virgin an album of literal bangers? Not really. Do I listen to Virgin every day? Not exactly. But when I do listen to Virgin, I really have to fucking listen to it. When I say Lorde is ahead of her time, I feel similarly to when I think about how people right now seem to going backwards with many things, obviously, but especially with gender. Reading people’s random thoughts on Lorde’s nonchalant statements on gender is a exhausting nightmare for me, a person who wants people to use neopronouns and honestly thinks a large part of humanity is in the midst of a mass-psychosis where they’re still idolizing cisness, but that’s just me, I guess. I think Lorde is living a life I want to live, though Virgin is kind of manic, isn’t it? There’s a sense that she’s gone a little crazy. Whether or not that insanity is good for her is unclear to me, but I’m glad she feels more comfortable with herself. I did feel that Solar Power hit like a detached performance of something Lorde felt was necessary to perform, and it’s interesting to learn that through Virgin in the way we do. I know a lot of people don’t like Virgin, which is fine, as I do agree that it’s a work that isn’t for everyone’s pure enjoyment, though I do think you should have an objective sense that it’s good. Maybe not perfect, but quite good.
She does make this album feel like New York. There’s always a palatable sensory aspect to a Lorde album, and this one is very blue. If you want to try listening to this album but feel wary for whatever reason, I think you should just try it from front to back. I was going to write a list of more accessible highlights, but I don’t know what your taste is, and the latter half of the album is just song after song of specific sublime emotion. I like it when “female” singers use the word “man” to describe themselves very directly; it’s very Be the Cowboy, you know? I also love the production of the album, though I agree with the criticism that it’s a lot like Melodrama and doesn’t do anything extremely exciting. I think the progression in Lorde’s work is most prevalent here in her lyricism and ideas, which are the most mature I’ve ever heard from her. Somehow I also enjoy the blatant talk of heterosexuality, like about pregnancy tests or cum or the other stuff she talks about, because it’s real and I think she should be able to say whatever she wants if it’s how she feels (I value specificity in art pretty highly) and clearly is trying to be aware of the traps of her sexuality and gender, unlike some other albums this year (cough TLOAS cough whatever). And lastly, I enjoy Lorde’s weird commentary lately about watching Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape or whatever else like that, because again, she’s being honest and clearly has no malice (at least, in my opinion). I think people should be stranger, without malice. I think this album is uninterested in adjusting to others’ ideas of a life, which I find admirable.
My favorite song is “Current Affairs”. Though it sounds a lot like Melodrama, certainly, it feels fresh. It’s deranged, it’s in-the-moment, it’s desperate. It’s the feeling of growing older and wondering if your mother ever felt the crazed bursts of sexuality you do. Are you the craziest person who’s ever been alive, or does everyone feel this way and not talk about it? Virgin as a whole begs someone to tell Lorde that she isn’t the only one, but it doesn’t actually want to hear it. The begging is fulfilling enough on its own. Maybe.
Hacks (Season 4) (9.3/10)
Season four of Hacks came out this year, by the way. It’s a life-changing show for me. It’s a dramedy about a late 20s writer named Ava who moves to Las Vegas from Los Angeles to work for an older famous comedian named Deborah Vance, who treats her like shit, but also it’s complicated. I suppose there are good comparisons to make to it, but it’s hard for me because I feel it takes the tropes and cliches of any of its predecessors or inspirations and polishes them while completely contemporizing them. It’s a feat of script-writing, of acting, of production design, of everything. I guess that if you like exploring mentor/mentee dynamics or if you like stories about being an artist or the entertainment business, this will be completely up your alley. And I find Hacks is even more accessible than the show I Love La, which I love immensely but I’ll talk about here later, so I recommend Hacks to everyone I can while I Love LA I cushion with caveats. The jokes in Hacks are funny and it’s Gen-Z in a way that isn’t demeaning of our generation and instead portrays the real experience of living right now as a young creative. Perhaps that’s a small group of people, I don’t know. There’s also homoeroticism between our two main characters that is actually addressed, and it makes me crazy. If you want complicated, mean, ambitious women in your stories, Hacks has got you. But it’s also got deep love and affection buried beneath it, too, as well as an extremely earnest reverence for the history of comedy and the city of Los Angeles.
I think every Hacks season is better than the last. The last episode of every season has always been an emotional hurricane that makes me cry, and this one did in fact make me cry, good job. I was impressed by this season’s exploration of how being a woman in a historically misogynistic field (comedy) makes it so you have to work harder than everyone else, and that selling out seems like the best option when you can barely get your foot in the door or get any respect without it. The tension between Ava the radical artist versus Deborah, someone who has had everything taken away from her by a system that wasn’t built for her, is at the core of this season in a way I found really interesting. Obviously the Emmy they had just won made the crew of Hacks very excited and the budgets really big; there’s a point at around episode 3 where I was like, did they lose it? Is it stupid now? The only time I’ve felt the show truly fumble was during those extended scenes of them in Las Vegas with the new writing crew, where Ava and Deborah are racing cars or whatever and everyone feels like cartoons of themselves. It felt clear to me that they just wanted to have a fun time on set, I guess, which is awesome for them but felt pretty goofy to me. Immediately after, though, the show dives into weirder, more specific character dynamics and Ava’s negative development because of Deborah (Whiplash style) continues to damage the both of them, and I felt it worked really well. When Deborah goes to save Ava in the ocean, my god! I think often about the finale’s scenes of them in Singapore and the season’s efforts to portray materialism and the hollowness and isolation of extreme ambition throughout all of the episodes. The Dance Mom plot is crazy and somehow works super well. There’s that scene where she dances for the first time on the show for way too long and I remember thinking, THIS IS CRAZY? It’s so great. And every actor brings their A-game.
I trust the team of this show to pull through for the next season, which will be the final one, apparently… Guess I’ll die? Also every time I go to the Americana I think of the scenes where Ava lives at the Americana because I live extremely close to that stupid fucking place and I’m always like oh my god she’s just like me.
Berserk (Manga) (10/10)
I’ll sit at my artist alley tables and get questions like, Who’s that? from someone pointing at Griffith. Berserk, I’ll say, and they’ll grimace. I’ve heard of that one. A joking tone. YOU SHOULD READ IT, I say, slobbering all over. They brush me off. I think it might be a little intense for me, but maybe someday…
Someday is around the corner. Someday is on the horizon, my friend. Is Berserk for the faint of heart? Nah. But I think more people can handle it than are aware. If sexual assault or extreme physical violence are serious triggers for you, then it’s best to tread carefully. But if they aren’t, then perhaps I can nudge you down the path of reading one of the best artistic works of our lifetime. Not only is it visually gorgeous and impressive, but its story is one of the best ever, seriously. It’s a dissertation on childhood trauma, on the cruelty of the world, of the horror of being alive in the Dark Ages. Berserk asks if one is born with cruelty or if it’s thrust upon them. LOL! Berserk asks if the true cruelty is being forced to be alive in a world so awful! LOL! How edgy, you say, but I’m crying. But Berserk also asks whether tenderness can be formed in the face of true evil, if love can still exist when people are so terrible, so bloodthirsty. Yes, it answers, over and over again, before the worst happens. Yes, yes, it wails, as God fails to save anyone and someone born with power abuses it, over and over again, before someone comes in and tells them they don’t get to fucking do that anymore. That someone is named Guts.
People often tell me they are reading Berserk in short bursts. They say they need to take breaks. I binge-read all of Berserk over the course of a few weeks after traveling for almost two months straight and then spent day in and day out drawing a comic about Griffith for several weeks. I was losing my mind. More on this later, I have a whole essay to write about that feeling, blah blah blah, but, yeah, I was losing my mind a little. There was something pretty Catholic about it, my immense sadness at reflecting on my childhood trauma that I funneled into a ritualistic duty: painting strange illuminated manuscript-style images with text in big, shakily handwritten letters that read, “WHY DO WE HAVE TO BE CHILDREN?” I cried when writing that comic. I went to sleep at five in the morning almost every night. I would think about the people I knew when I was young who are dead now and I would stare at Goya’s series of Black Paintings and think of how the fact that he hid them makes them even more powerful, more wrong to see. I asked myself if I should even get to see them. The answer is no, but we do. Did Kentaro Miura, author of Berserk, deserve better from the world? Yes, but he died, and nothing could have stopped it, not really, not at that point. Who decided not to stop it? Who decided to make the world like this? There is the age-old question of how God could be real or even good, if he is real, when he created something as terrible as this existence. I think often of Guts screaming, IF YOU SEE GOD, TELL HIM THIS… LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE! I have been trying to sleep better. I’m not working all day and all night anymore since then. I am eating well and touching sunlight. I have looked at my Griffith fancomic so much that the feelings I used to have are now massively diluted, so I’ve stopped reading it. But people tell me it’s touched them, and I’m proud of it. I hope it means something to someone in the vast scope of their life. I hope it acts as some sort of tribute to a story that changed me so much. I love Berserk more than most art I’ve experienced. It is a masterpiece, and I think Miura was an incredible genius.
Well, anyway. If you want to get into Berserk but are unsure about reading the manga (which is the best version, but I watched the anime first too, I get it), you should watch the 1997 anime. It’s only 25 episodes and it has most of the essential stuff from The Golden Age arc, which is the most famous arc and is destined to get adapted repeatedly until humanity explodes, I guess. I actually do love the 2016 anime (which were originally a set of three movies and are now cut into pieces with new parts added in) and find it to be super opulent and loving but some of its production flaws and the weird whitewashing of the characters even it out with the other one for me. But if you like Berserk, it’s definitely worth a watch too. I have the art book and I love the art direction, it’s one of my favorite things ever. The 1997 anime is kind of censored and not as graphic at the more explicit parts of the manga and I personally like how the 2016 anime goes far with everything, even though I know that probably makes me sound like a weirdo. Berserk to me is a maximalist story of extremes. I don’t value most stuff that has insane, flavorless violence for the sake of it, though I do like that sort of thing, all right. But Berserk’s thesis is VIOLENCE, actually, and everything else is trying to be Berserk, I’m so serious. Or Devilman, maybe. But, yeah, stop telling me to watch Vinland Saga, I’m not watching that shit, okay. Everyone who tells me to watch Vinland Saga has not watched Berserk, and this is because Berserk will, like any other good story, ruin everything else in that genre for you because they just don’t compare. And read past The Golden Age, I beg you. The Conviction Arc (very soon after The Golden Age) is my favorite arc but it’s all incredibly, incredibly worth it.
Homestuck (Webcomic) (9.5/10)
Yeah, bitch, I read Homestuck this year! I’ll write about Homestuck later. It’s coming. For now I’ll say that it’s really fucking good and you should read it and also read the Epilogues and Beyond Canon if you’re not a little bitch! ← not a joke
“Man’s Best Friend” (2025) by Sabrina Carpenter (7.2/10)
I was pretty annoyed by Sabrina Carpenter and her career and its reception in the popular culture when her last album Short and Sweet was released. Which everyone seemed surprised by. Listen, I just felt like it was all very contrived. I didn’t like how she didn’t seem to have her own voice and was a collage of every other pop artist before her. I didn’t feel like she had a purpose in her art and felt that normies were jumping way too eagerly on the next white-girl-pop-star-train, and I didn’t feel it was deserved. I still don’t feel like Short and Sweet is a particularly exciting or good album. I’ve always been intrigued by Sabrina’s production and lyricism thriving from having something off about it- I’m talking about, for example, how the lyrics in “Espresso” are intentionally stupid, sometimes jarringly so. I think a good comparison to look at is Troye Sivan’s latest album, Something to Give Each Other, which is a gorgeous exercise in pop music but is so sleek in its production that someone who “doesn’t really like pop” or perhaps doesn’t think about it would not think twice about hearing it. But the Sabrinas and Chappells of the world are purposefully messy, purposefully a little raw. The problem is that I don’t think that concept is strong enough to carry a whole album. Another problem is that I was getting pissed seeing all these tweets from people being like “ive streamed espresso 400 times this summer. song of the summer they don’t make music like this anymore. all pop music is bad except espresso”. Like, fuck off. EVEN ARIANA IS DOING A LITTLE MORE THAN THAT AND I DON’T LIKE ARIANA?
Well, whatever, here came Man’s Best Friend. I think it’s a great album. I think it’s solid. It has cohesion and actually says stuff that I find interesting. Sabrina in this album is being pretty vulnerable with gender and her experience with heterosexuality. There is even more of that self-flagellation that we hear whispers of in her previous work. I like when Sabrina is all like, I’m crazy about men but it’s killing me! But what else can I fucking do! It’s awesome. I think great pop music has a tension between immense sadness and immense joy. ABBA songs often do this. It taps into the deepest loneliness of humanity but makes it simple and dunks it in sounds that make you want to dance. I like pop music that understands the power of disco, essentially. Of course I like Man’s Best Friend, a tight 38 minutes with only a few songs that aren’t really good (“Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry” and “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night” are the weakest in the lineup, I think). If you know me, you know I like Jack Antonoff’s work (usually) and so it’s probably not shocking to you that I enjoy the production on this, but I like that Sabrina leans into campy caricatures of previous eras, especially country and disco. This makes sense for her aesthetically and adds to the meaning of the album. I also admire her marketing genius (or the genius of her marketing team?) with the album cover and everything else. I often wonder if I like her more now because everyone was so mean to her about it, because I like an underdog. I don’t know. I think it may be that it’s clearer to me now that she wants to say something and is willing to sacrifice the public’s goodwill to say it. I’m only ever really mad at artists that sell out and pretend to be something to get money, etc. Man’s Best Friend felt surprisingly honest, though perhaps not the most groundbreaking or important. I listen to it a LOT. I’m looking forward to what she does next.
The Fall (2006), directed by Tarsem Singh (9.4/10)
One of the most gorgeous movies I’ve ever seen, but also one of the most whimsical storytelling experiences I’ve had in a while. It’s been a long time since visuals in live action have gotten me THIS excited. It’s just so insane! Ahhhh! Without spoiling anything, this movie is about a little girl who is a hospital patient in the 1920s who befriends another patient who tells her a fantastical story in pieces that we see in tandem with their hospital life. It’s whimsical, it’s emotional, it’s genuinely unique. It made me think about morality and how we speak to children, and how fragile our lives are and how fantasy is important in the face of extreme poverty and the lack of autonomy that comes from being a laborer under capitalism. It’s about movies? It’s about the relationship between a grown man and a child who needs kindness? Perhaps it’s about violence. This may sound sacrilegious to some but it’s like if The Princess Bride was EXTREMELY AWESOME.
Pluribus (Season 1) (8.8/10)
Pluribus is a show about an alien disease infecting everyone on Earth that makes them all connect in one giant, blissful, pacifist Hivemind, except for a few immune individuals that include the protagonist of the show, a depressed romance novelist named Carol Sturka!
I haven’t seen any analysis of Pluribus yet that I actually find truly interesting, but I’m not really looking for it, so link me anything you’ve got if you have it. I bring this up because this means I’m not clear on what the consensus is on what the creators are doing with it, or what the Hivemind is an allegory for or if it’s an allegory for many things at once, but I do see a lot of people talking about the yuri, which is fine. I think it’s a show that doesn’t really interest me in that way. I’m not looking up fanfics of Carol and the Hivemind having sex or whatever because I’m busy thinking about the significance of the portrayal of labor in the show, or if the Hivemind is a colonialism thing, or if I’m strange for thinking being part of the Hivemind sounds kind of awesome, in a lot of ways. I find the worldbuilding of the show to be super interesting and thought-provoking, which I haven’t seen from a sci-fi show for a long while. I’m also thrilled at the portrayal of Carol’s sexuality and the character work in general. I love Manousos and am very happy about his character and want to see him onscreen forever. I think he and Carol’s dynamic is awesome. I wonder constantly, though, on whether the show wants us to find Carol to be stupid and kind of racist in that way that a lot of USAmericans are and analyze that, or whether we’re just supposed to take it as a jokey character quirk. I don’t know. I’m not familiar with Vince Gilligan’s work other than knowing about Breaking Bad’s place in contemporary culture (and I don’t want to watch Breaking Bad at all because it annoys me /sacrilegious), so I’m not sure if I can trust him as a writer (/sacrilegious /idgaf).
So. We’ll see? This season was great. I felt that the first episode dragged a bit with the action scenes, but I understand that the show often makes viewers sit with the characters’ physical acts for excruciating amounts of time, 2001 style, I guess, so maybe it’s fine. I wasn’t super bothered by it, but, yeah, I thought the first episode was the weakest. My favorite episode was “The Gap”, because I hadn’t felt so physically entrenched in a TV episode like that in a while and my mouth kept falling open from the sympathy I was feeling for Manousos. Did I mention that I love that guy. And in general I feel that the cinematography is fucking awesome and the imagery is great. The grenade! I love the realism of everything, the specificity that still feels a little bit like it’s out a fable. It’s hard to describe. All the actors are incredible at what they do and every moving part works so well. If you haven’t watched it yet, just watch a few episodes and see what you think. I think pretty much anyone can watch it and get something out of it. It’s one of those.
“THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!” by JADE (8.5/10)
A fucking amazing pop album. I’m always interested in artists writing about being artists, and Jade is tormented by stardom in this work, she’s in love with it, she’s trying to mold it and shape it and make you fall in love with every trial run, too. And it works, I think. The production is almost always surprising, the vocals are always incredible, and the art direction of every piece of this album is stellar. It’s underrated; people just don’t get this shit. And it is, in fact, the shit. The song “Angel of My Dreams” had a music video that ranks in my favorite music videos of all time, but the outro of “Headache” changed my life. I want pop music that yells, that has a mania to it! I want my pop music to have women wailing and telling everyone they’re the problem and owning that! I want my pop stars to be sexually weird! “Midnight Cowboy” is funny but opulent, always a banger, and “Silent Disco” is a gorgeous closer. I think there are songs that are fun but not showstopping, like “Natural at Disaster” and “Self Saboteur”, but that’s fine, I don’t skip them. If you liked Beyonce’s Renaissance, or any sort of dark club synth pop, or just kind of weird, high production bangers that could fit in the current kpop girl group sphere, then you should add this to your rotation. I LOVE IT!!!!!
Sinners (2025), directed by Ryan Coogler (9.3/10)
Everyone already has talked about Sinners, but I’m here to remind you to watch it or rewatch it if you haven’t already. Seeing this without knowing anything about it in theaters was not like any other movie experience I’ve had in recent memory, and I was sobbing because it was so beautiful at many moments and laughing my ass off at others. Just a feat of moviemaking. It stands on its own and I don’t need to explain it to you.
MAYHEM (2025) by Lady Gaga (6/10)
I’ll say my piece, okay, I think Lady Gaga is a singles artist, and most of her albums have a bunch of random songs that are like, mid at best, and then like four or five songs that change the goddamn world. This happened with MAYHEM, which I think mostly says nothing of value but is a fun listen-through if you want to listen to that sort of music (which I often do, admittedly). The best songs are the first three, and then the rest are, like, fine. But “Abracadabra”, “Garden of Eden”, and “Disease” are just, like, insanely good, like, peak-of-pop-music good, and we’re all going to have to admit that. It’s an objective truth. I hate “Die With A Smile” but like, okay, WHATEVER. I hate that sort of Gaga, the sellout Gaga, the one who makes music that plays on the radio in your Uber to the airport, I don’t know. Sometimes that music is good in a semi-ironic way but Gaga doesn’t utilize that sort of irony well. I like when Gaga creates a narrative, even if it’s a flimsy one, and a lot of these songs don’t really have any sort of narrative at all, like it’s her just dinking around in the studio, but not in a novel way. I love Gaga; she’s my top-played artist this year, but I’m rarely listening to her albums front-to-back. I’m someone who loves a front-to-back album experience, but Gaga just doesn’t do it for me like that. You know I’m all about the Telephones and the Babylons and the Scheißes of her discography. I don’t listen to Joanne and I probably never will. I will not be watching A Star is Born, fuck you. I think about the “Abracadabra” music video like every day. I listen to mashups of that song with BLACKPINK’s “JUMP”. That’s the shit I think she needs to make and that she’s amazing at. I’ve said my piece.
“Either/Or” (2022) by Elif Batuman (9.6/10)
Either/Or is a novel. It’s a sequel to the Putlizer Prize finalist The Idiot, a sort of autobiographical 2017 novel about a girl named Selin, a Turkish-American freshman at Harvard in the 90s. Now, it’s hard for me to pitch this succinctly, but if you like reading contemporary literary fiction, you should read this one and see what you think. I think that Either/Or might have been written for me and people who are largely like me, specifically, but I think it’s one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read, and it’s worth getting to. I think it’s even better than The Idiot, though The Idiot is more accessible to more people. In The Idiot, the main character gets into a weird relationship with an upperclassman named Ivan, and it analyzes language (!!!), being eighteen and stupid, naive, and privileged as hell while also being very smart (there’s something Addison about that, actually), as well as heterosexual dynamics.
Either/Or doubles down on all of this, especially the heterosexuality. Either/Or is a very feminist work that has changed how I look at writing and sexuality, and has more or less convinced me I’m not someone who wants to be with a cis man romantically, ever. Both books involve the experience of being part of the Turkish diaspora, and the otherness caused by Selin’s experience as a young person in general. I was always excited at the feeling that Batuman was speaking to me. It just felt so personal, so real. I love how autobiographical the books are, how direct the prose is. I love the slow, detailed pacing of both of them, I love how they capture what it feels like to be eighteen and nineteen in a very honest way, so honest it’s abrasive, maybe. I admire Batuman immensely as a person and feel like she gets it. What a fucking book! If you feel the urge to read these books, just do it, but if you tend to read books like Bunny by Mona Awad, or My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but don’t feel like those are like, that good, then try The Idiot, which I enjoyed so much. The audiobooks are great too, read aloud by the author, adding another layer to the tone of the books that I thought was enlightening. If you read them, let me know.
I Love LA (Season 1) (9/10)
This show is another thing where I’m like, maybe it’s made for me and ten other people, but you might be one of those other people, who knows. It’s the most Gen Z show I’ve ever seen, which I find very exciting. I am someone who is part of the brat school of thought, where direct contemporariness is most important, and this show captures that spirit in a way that makes me want to make it my entire personality. The character writing is incredible. Again, I am also someone who wants mean queer women on screen, and this show provides. Are a lot of jokes about very specific LA things? Yeah. Am I making this my entire personality? Yes. It’s a show about me and my friends (LOL), and also about the ambition that is devouring our generation, the capitalist fucked-up bullshit that’s killing us and making us crazy but also is making us into incredible, weird machines that sometimes do work. But we should probably be stopped. It’s true. You know? It’s also about influencer culture, and about the intense Snotgirl dynamics that you can have with a best friend. Everyone’s queer and super online, it’s awesome. I love Rachel Sennott. I love everyone. The cinematography is beautiful and the styling! is! amazing! I want everyone’s outfits. This is MY Sex and the City, okay! This is my Girls (I have never seen Girls). I think all the people working on it are clearly so funny and talented and understand the nuance behind such things and I never want it to end. Everyone watch it now so I can have my cake forever.
“Who’s the Clown?” (2025) by Audrey Hobert (9/10)
I need my fellow pop-enjoyers to get on this shit, okay. Audrey Hobert helped Gracie Abrams write several songs, all of which are my favorite Gracie Abrams songs (“I Knew It, I Know You”; “Risk”; “That’s So True”; “I Love You, I’m Sorry”) and then made this album, and it’s really fucking good. I literally only have ever truly enjoyed those specific Gracie Abrams songs, so it was insane for me to go and listen to this and be like, oh, I can just have even more of that, wow, thank you. I think that the narrative of this album is so fun, and so of this time, and so goofy and yet so manic (what did I say) and I love it. I can listen to it from start to finish and not skip a single song. It’s obviously inspired by early 2000s Disney Channel music production, which I find to be unique as hell. I love that Audrey has such a specific voice, literally and lyrically. She’s just so RESENTFUL all the time in this, and so cocky about it. This has little to do with anything but I find it so funny that she was a writer for The Loud House after college. I am always shaken when random people have experienced the animation industry like that. Like, are those guys she’s writing about guys that worked with her on The Loud House? I just think about this sort of thing. Sue me. Everyone’s sleeping on this album, I’m telling you. The song “Phoebe” makes me cry and feel crazy and “Thirst Trap” makes me dance and feel crazy. It’s all self-deprecating and yet also self-obsessed and pretty vulnerable. Try out this song/video if you want.
“LUX” (2025) by Rosalia (9.9/10)
I’ll write about LUX very soon… I have a lot to say but I’m in the midst of research about certain things. You know the drill. Go listen to it.
Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (8.5/10)
I read this in the two nights before seeing Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, which I hated profusely. I know I’m in the minority there (as far as I can tell) but it’s a bad movie, and it disrespects this original work. I’m going to end on a hater note, it seems, but so be it! It’s also a lover note! I think this novel is monumental and changed everything. It’s such a dense, weird, feminist work, and I recommend reading it instead of watching the movie. My biggest problem with the movie (and I have many problems with it, dear reader) is that it rearranges the story into a narrative about abusive fatherhood, and that this narrative is horribly on-the-nose and poorly executed. I suppose it could be fine to make the story explicitly about fatherly abuse, as yes, Frankenstein is an abusive figure towards the monster, but that’s not really what Shelley was writing, was it? Fine, then, if you insist, then I need it to be well-done. But it isn’t. There’s a distinct homoeroticism to the original novel that is lost in the Del Toro film, and a subtlety to it that is also lost. The original novel includes these beautiful, sprawling moments of Victor Frankenstein being exposed to the sublime in nature (giant, godlike mountain ranges, horrible storms at sea, the glaciers up north), nudging the viewer to think about how he is playing God; the movie removes all of this. The book has us consider what it means to have a secret that kills others because you created it to be such a secret; Victor creates a creature that kills people close to him out of a meticulous plan of revenge, that kills children, that kills his family members, and it’s all because he won’t show it love, because he was hubristic.
Does that make him a bad person, if his creation kills? Is it his fault after all? No one even believes that he created such a monster when he tells them, this thing destroying his domestic fantasies of marriage, of family, of wealth. His ambition to “play God” has ruined his life. His journey to true knowledge has taken everything from him. He has created something cruel that hates that it was created and hates him, and Victor finds it abhorrent. Is Victor a mean person in the book? Not especially. He is afraid of and closed minded towards a creature he should be showing kindness to, but he is also just kind of stupid. The movie’s Frankenstein is a narcissistic man that we’ve seen many times before, and has no true friends or real loves, not like in the book, where he is unbelievably in love with his family and his lover, to a point that seems excessive, in my opinion. He is obsessed with the sanctity of heterosexuality and privilege and gets it all taken away from him. In the movie, we watch Frankenstein whip the creature in some pretty goofy scenes and then the creature - who has the mind of a newborn, essentially - has strange erotic tension with Mia Goth’s character from then on, which is never properly developed, though the amount of fanart online would have you believe differently.
I don’t want to see the creature get with a woman. I don’t want to hear lines in a movie like “YOU’RE the monster, Victor!” I want to see the really earnest and frankly homoerotic love Frankenstein has for his childhood friend Henry, whom the monster brutally kills. I want to understand why seeing something that looks like you but that has a violent sort of freedom compared to you is so jarring to someone like Victor, and not in the on-the-nose I-hate-being-a-father way that the movie does it. When I went to watch the movie at the Egyptian, there was a clip before the movie of Del Toro thanking us for seeing it and then explaining that he had grown up with an abusive father and then essentially been an absentee father to his children because of his moviemaking career and how this movie was about that. I don’t like to primarily analyze movies through this sort of lens, usually, but it’s obvious his adaptation was self-centered. I hate how the ending scene has the creature literally forgive Frankenstein for his abuse. How self-indulgent can you be, lol. Is this what Shelley worked to capture? NO???? I won’t get started on the cinematography, but I just feel like taking Shelley’s feminist work for your own masculine analysis is annoying as hell, and I’ve found Del Toro nowadays to be a hack, Tim Burton style. Like, I wish I could stan, but here we are. Pinnochio was really awesome, but he honestly only has a few great movies. Frankenstein was not one of them. There is something so powerful about the idea of a monster created who is the only one of its kind in the world, who will never be understood. The isolation of that, the otherness. The true cruelty of human beings, outside of familial dynamics. I think of those people at that farmhouse who are horrible to the creature for no reason other than fear and disgust, and I think of the buildup of the creature creating fantasies in his head of living domestically with them, of them loving him, respecting him, nurturing him. The 1818 novel is very advanced and nuanced for its time and changed literature. We can’t even imagine what Shelley lived through emotionally to get people to even read her shit. I am a huge fan of the genre of the gothic novel, and find Frankenstein to be an advanced, pivotal work that everyone should read.
Marty Supreme (2025), directed by Josh Safdie (9/10)
OKAY, WAIT, NO, here’s a narcissistic man movie that’s actually good. I watched this after I started writing this but it was still 2025 when I saw it, so. Here. I didn’t care about Marty Supreme’s ad campaign, not really. I guess it worked on me regardless. I didn’t care for its trailer and was amused by everything surrounding it. It felt like such a plant of a movie. But it’s not as saccharine as all that leads you to believe. It is in fact an incredibly tight, incredibly emotional experience of a film that rewards its viewers who allow it to do so. It’s entertaining and also depressing as fuck, a damn fun time and a harrowing watch. It works on a shallow level and on a deep one. It’s gorgeous to look at and it never slips up in a technical sense, not once, and it forces you to confront what capitalism means to an artist, to an athlete that no one wants but that should be allowed to exist, and what it means that some people just get what’s fucking coming to them. Whatever that means. I think that’s the thesis of the movie, that sometimes things are coming to us and we made it happen but also we didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t. Marty is an asshole who also should have just been allowed to play table tennis, a thing he was good at, but then again, what is table tennis to Marty, really? Surely not a pure act of love, but a path to fame and fortune. Ping pong! The movie laughs at him, we laugh at him, but the movie also makes you feel bad for laughing, for watching any of it all, from where you’re sitting. There is a price to allowing a charismatic, racist, misogynist guy like that to continue doing what he does, but why is there always some bigger fish eating him, and a bigger one eating that one?
I find myself thinking about the caste system capitalism puts us in, and despair. I find myself thinking about how we must sacrifice our self-expression for a mask of politeness, and despair. Why must we play games. Why must we pretend and lose our pride and why must we even have pride in the first place. Marty’s win is hollow, it isn’t a win at all, he wants it so badly and they’re so cruel to him as a Jewish person and yet- the U.S. as an imperialist force is not valid, it’s not something he should align himself with, their wins are hollow, he is an asshole. He shouldn’t have been with Rachel in the first place. He shouldn’t have fucked her and he shouldn’t have used her and used everyone around him; he runs off after many scenes of intense verbal conflict with a “LOVE YOU!” He’s not the worst man in a world, he’s twenty-three. He’s the worst man in the world. He thinks he’s winning and he thinks he can get out but he can’t, he can’t, nobody wants him there. He can’t force himself into someplace he doesn’t belong. It hurts, as an audience member, to be reminded so intensely that sometimes we DO NOT BELONG. THEY WON’T LET YOU. What to do with such a thing. Everyone’s gotta learn sometime. He brought his mother a piece of a pyramid. It’s just a rock. It’s not his to give. His balls are just fucking balls, painted orange. He’s twenty-three. He should have never taken that man’s dog. He should never have been rude to the man who runs the association. But is the punishment all that necessary. Shouldn’t they have put him in a nice hotel, if he’s the champion of the world. Is ping pong worth anything at all. Is a sport just a series of coincidences or is it a culmination of our values of masculinity or the lack of it. Do we all get what’s coming to us. Is what’s coming to us terrifying, because the notion that there will be more of us, more of ourselves, terrifying? Must we have children? Was it all pretend, the idea that some of us could get out of having more of ourselves that we didn’t ask for?
I write to you now at two in the morning. I am a passing fancy, I am an eternal companion. I didn’t thoroughly proofread this yet so forgive me for any stupid typos. I have some ideas for essays in the near future, which are all pure acts of passion, surely. Hopefully they’ll come sooner than later. Thanks for reading. SEE YOU NEXT LEVEL XOXO