#it's a very long and complicated lore based daydream

[lady-raziel]

tell me about the brotherhood of steel in your head please i want to know so badly

ok so there's a chapter of the brotherhood of steel that exists in the rocky mountain region that split off from the western chapters many years ago and was successful for a while but has been in a slow decline and the nail in the coffin was when caesar's legion rolled into the area and essentially killed the chapter off. most of the remaining members have either been killed or wandered off to other parts of the wasteland. those that stayed with the chapter officially, only a handful, got caught in a radiation storm that lasted for weeks, and it irradiated them so bad they, guess what, got ghoulified. but the brotherhood hates non-humans so they had to do some serious soul-searching and realized that in the beginning when the brotherhood was founded it was more about preserving technology to keep humanity from falling into the dark ages again and preventing another nuclear war. the surviving members of the rocky mountain chapter realized they could continue this mission and further the goals of helping people rebuild even as ghouls.

well then fallout new vegas happens and caesar's legion gets the axe. suddenly the rocky mountain region is up for grabs again. the rocky mountain chapter realizes that in order to have stability in the region, they need to gain control of the area so another caesar doesn't show up and the land doesn't fall to raiders again. they've also heard rumors of a place called vault 0, which was the command center for all the vaults and used to be NORAD, america's missile command bunker. all they know is vault 0 is they key to securing the remaining missiles in america's arsenal and that the place is rumored to be held by the enclave. caesar's legion tried to breach the vault but never succeeded. but the rocky mountain brotherhood realize that if they open their chapter to anyone who wants to join and make a difference, they might have a shot. so they start recruiting ghouls and wastelanders, and even a few supermutants (they build custom power armor for the super mutants, because i think that would be sick as fuck). They even get a few synths who have escaped the institute.

so with their brand new recruits they uncover the enclave and take vault 0 and basically gain control of all the remaining operational nukes and then nobody wants to fuck with them, which is actually fine because they're super chill and interested in actually helping people in the rocky mountain region. but fast forward to them wanting to reconnect with the other chapters of the brotherhood of steel which are either 1) at war with the ncr or 2) asshats. They're basically like "roger maxon didn't die for you to perpetuate the same bullshit that got us in this nuclear mess in the first place" and "not being assholes and racist actually works well in your favor, actually" and decide that with their nuclear arsenal and planes salvaged from the enclave, they're gonna take control of the rest of the brotherhood and put a stop to this nonsense.

so then they show up in Boston and basically tell Arthur Maxon that he's a little racist baby bitch and to sit the fuck down because elder Lyons actually was dope af. and he'd be super disappointed in you if he were alive and hadn't disappeared under mysterious circumstances, arthur. There's also a whole subplot in my head about how arthur got to the east coast from the west coast brotherhood that involves a lot of attempted murder and a hot air balloon but we don't have time to get into that right now.

anyways the rocky mountain brotherhood mary-sues their way into the fallout 4 plotline, defeats the institute with the help of the sole survivor, frees the synths, and makes the eastern brotherhood look like racist fools. which makes them then question everything and makes arthur maxon realize that everything he thought he stood for was a total lie.

idk there are more pieces and it's all very long and complicated and somewhat based on tidbits of lore from things i've read on the fallout wiki and very much existing in my head

but, you asked.

[acircusfullofdemons]

AU LIST

I like making AUs for my paras....it may or may not be a problem.......these are all canon but also not, its basically russian roulette on which ones I decide actually happen at this point.

Romeo & Juliet AU — regrettably my first ever AU for my paras, which is ironic because I hate the story with a burning passion.

Saints & Sinners — idk if this is actually canon now due to some lore changes from when I first made it, but basically one of my paras lives instead of dies lmao.

Human AU — my paras are...fully human lmao. this is usually used as a base for other AUs tbh.

Youtube AU — my paras are youtubers, also a general Social Media AU sometimes.

APOCALYPSE — technically an AHS: Apocalypse AU but I've taken some...creative liberties. generally speaking, just a regular apocalypse au I guess.

Despair's Peak — Danganronpa AU.

Lacuna — Riordanverse AU 1, featuring my INtO paras.

The Light the Gods Sent — Riordanverse AU 2, featuring my LE paras.

Survive the Night — FNaF AU 1, featuring my INtO paras.

FNaF: SAFE HAVEN — FNaF AU 2, featuring my CF paras.

Constellations — Superhero AU for my INtO paras.

Magical Girl AU — my paras are magical girls/boys/kids. Similar to a Superhero AU tbh.

Moonlight Mysteries — Werewolf AU.

And now for my ✨fandom paras✨

Fatal Error — Superhero AU for my Fandom Paras.

RESET — this ones kinda complicated but uuhh long story short my Fandom Paras meet their younger selves & sort of just live with them?? Its basically just them going to therapy years earlier ngl. (this one is probably canon due to how much I daydream abt it jdndks)

Don't Wake Me Up — I daydream abt this very rarely but its just an AU of a movie I like but with the focus on my favorite character instead <3.

[heeres-suffering]

Be More Alluring: a Personality Swap AU

[pic description and source will be at the bottom of this post, under the read more]

Start of summary:

“You need to be more alluring.”

"... don’t you mean attractive?”

“I do not. Your attractiveness is adequate, Brooke; if you want to mask your apparently latent queerness, you have to make them want you straight. Isn’t that why your step-father defended you?” 

Brooke Lohst is a loser.

But you know what? That was okay.

She always knew she was a weird one. The intensity of her affection for puppies, picture books, and near-constant daydreaming has lasted well-past a normalcy she can’t seem to grasp; when coupled with her inability to befriend anyone (besides the similarly self-identified loser Michael Mell), it’s not a surprise the rest of her peers have left her behind.

However, there were... ah, worse things in her life to worry about then some mild bullying. She liked her passion well enough, and all of her true insecurities went largely unnoticed, so any insults or weird looks rarely lingered in her mind. It’s not like she was a constant target either, which helped a lot. All in all, she just planned to hunker down, wait out the awkwardness of High School like everyone else, and move on to the rest of her life... 

Except.

When Brooke develops a crush on a girl she’s never talked to, after years of avoiding fairy tale romance and trying not to think about the inevitability of marriage (or how finicky her attraction to boys is in the first place), it feels like her whole world is about to cave in. She’d do anything to make sure her parents, especially daddy, never find out... including buying an edible super computer from the loudest, tiniest guy in school.

End of summary.

Alright!

Hi, hello, it’s Mod Seb, and here’s an AU I’ve been rolling around for a few days! You are free to do with this concept whatever you want, but I wanted to introduce it with a good chunk of the info I’ve already worked out in my head.

So. As the CWs are... too numerous, I’m going to go with a blanket “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” label and encourage you not to read the rest of this if you have any big darkfic triggers that could be upset by mere mention; this isn’t a fic tho, so descriptions of anything awful won’t last long. 

Although, I will mention upfront that Brooke isn’t a binary lesbian. I know the description might read like I’m setting her up to be 100% homosexual; she’s bi with a strong preference for girls, and anyone who presents soft enough in gender or appearance. If it wasn’t for the end-game pairings, her unfamiliarity with smaller details/history of the LGBTQ+ community, and general “gay newb” status, she’d likely ID as a bi lesbian!

(ships and everything else under the Read More)

Okay. That out of the way, there’s quite a number of pairings; I’m pretty sure it’s a super polyamorous and sexual AU, though you’re free to change this list as much as you’d like:

[bolded are end-game ships. italics physically hook up at least once. strike-through means they were in a relationship but break-up in some way before the ending. (H) stands for healthy, while (T) is toxic and/or noncon. underlined characters are pining for the other and may never confess their true feelings]

Brooke/Christine (H), Brooke/Rich (H), Brooke/Jenna (H), Brooke/Michael (H), Brooke/Chloe (T), Brooke/her Daddy (T), Brooke/Squip (H), Brooke/Jeremy (soft T at first bc of mirrored canon-compliant manipulation, H later on), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy (H), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy/Rich (H), Rich/Moses (H), [insert every form of Rich/Mo/Squip/Jeremy here] (H), Jeremy/Chloe (T), Jeremy/Michael (H), Michael/Christine (H), Michael/Christine/Mr. Heere (H; no, seriously), Madeline/Brooke (H)

This is, of course, a role swap AU where Brooke and Jeremy trade places based on my personal lore for their home lives. I always have some pretty fucked ideas as I don’t imagine MB is a great place with great adults, and I pick and choose which parts of canons I use and which I don’t. 

There is no definite ending planned in mind as this isn’t an outline; it’s meta (or an imagine or w/e) for an AU that you’re free to do whatever with. 

So,

The big difference is that Brooke was picked by Michael, while Jeremy was picked by Chloe. Jeremy is trans and hadn’t come out yet; if Chloe had known he was a boy, she wouldn’t have grabbed him. In contrast, Michael’s never gave a shit about potential friends genders.

Jer and B’s personalities... are altered some. Not ALL the way, but kiiinda fusing into their roles, kinda tweaked (I'll get back to that).

The main point of this for me was Brooke/Squip/Jeremy, with B/Jer having a MUCH stronger focus than in canon, and a really bad Chloe acting as one of the major villains.

Michael gets roped into Chloe’s shit, even tho he's still generally a good guy here, bc he's worried about B and thinks she can't properly take care of herself.

While B DOES have a strong crush on Christine, she’s the opposite of the Squip’s “goal”; that’s (obvs) masking, or making passably digestible, her queerness.

Her Mom and step-’Daddy’ have reacted to her friendship w/ ‘openly gay moms, also very flamboyant and GNC’ Michael... poorly.

Michael thinks the solution has to be “act as aggressively yourself as you can, and if they reject you, you know me and the mom’s have a space for you”. This works for him bc he’s permanently hyper-visible, what with all of his own marginalized identities. But, not only has she flied under the radar in comparison to him for years, he doesn’t know everything about her life.

In fact, he doesn’t know most of it. She’s very good at hiding things.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, one of the more popular ‘boy... ish’ (we’ll get to this, too) people in school, is mid-psychosis and self-destruction. He actually has schizo-affective disorder--as is the case with all of my versions of Jeremy--which he needs medication for. Combined that with so many bad influences and trauma, he can no longer fully control himself or his life.

The way he handles this (badly) is to ‘whore around’--which, besides being Chloe’s pet, is kinda why he’s so popular. Nobody respects him, but he’s viewed some form of favorably.

Jeremy is in a relationship with Rich, but he won't let him get as close/protective as Rich wants; Mo and Rich were doing their own man-whoring (but healthy, just droppin’ panties and making dudes and chicks swoon--yeah, Rich is out as bisexual, this is a very ‘the Squips are a good thing’ AU) to gain their standard reputation, but in the course of that, they got together with Jeremy and it became... complicated. Both of them are very "nnn" about how bad his life is for Jer.

The way that their personalities are altered is... okay. To explain this, I have to talk about my characterization of canon-Brooke and Jeremy in relation to this, starting with Brooke:

I imagine B as just a liiittle below the line of "all the way there" for sorta-similar reasons to Jeremy here: trauma, and Chloe (which is why that’s what Jeremy gets in this, it’s just WAY worse when compounded by everything else). She’s also--like me, and like almost every character I write as a result--autistic, in a near-permanent state of “not enough accommodations” and over-stimulation. This leads to a lot of dissociation and a very wandering mind, as well as being perceived as a bimbo or dumb blonde or w/e misogynistic bullshit is projected onto her by the boys she dates (she’s also much more down the middle bi outside this AU).

So, going back to how she is for this AU: she's actually not super nerdy, despite the close connection she and Michael have. Honestly, it’s their general neurodivergent weirdness that bring them together, and so she’s mostly adopted her nerdy interests through him, whether directly a thing he likes, or finding a whimsical variant that fits her tastes.

Obviously, unlike Jeremy, she doesn’t mind being called a loser. She does any insinuation she might be queer. This including anyone who calls her gay or a dyke.

She has too much Cis Male Trauma (unlike canon, where it comes from both cis angles) to really entertain the idea of a Traditionally Male Partner. This means she skews HEAVILY towards hard GNC guys at the very least, and generally finds herself most interested in the idea of enbies and women. she's also not super into butches tho, bc her trauma mixing with her sexuality has latched on to Strong Masc People Are A Threat. 

An expansion on her interests, in canon and otherwise: animals, ASMR/sensual service work (including massages and stuff), spending hours just sorta sitting by herself and letting her imagination wander, fairy tales, and YA-and-under fantasy books.

(Here, she tries to avoid het or f/f romance... except that, this past year or two, she’s started really like m/m stuff--esp after getting REALLY into drag shows, which she could enjoy safely since girls like Chloe have gotten into them too; in canon, she’s a romance fanatic)

Now... this is one of the really darkfic element; she's fucking her step-dad. 

She does this so that he doesn't walk out on her, her mom, and her little sister*. Her mom has a good-enough job as a standard office woman, but he makes enough to pay the rent on their nice townhouse and all the bills she can’t. So, after he expressed interest in Brooke and then casually mentioned he could always just leave if she wasn’t comfortable, she reluctantly entered a relationship with him

(* = her sister is currently know as her brother; he’s like 12 or 13, and started showing signs of trans/queerness which have been Heavily Discouraged. Brooke worries about him a lot)

((I didn’t use she/her pronouns bc I’m not entirely sure he would change them? This is an OC Oli created at the beginning of our interest in BMC, and we haven’t worked on him at all since, so how his characterization will be is up in the air))

Canonically, Brooke's "in love" with her daddy, which is a self-imposed delusion; if she actually addressed it, she’d says she’s well aware that’s not true, but it's so much easier to pretend when you’re cornered like that. Brooke’s life blows.

She’s a lot more honest to herself about hating him here; still, she tries to be as polite and generally-friendly as she can, doing what he says whenever he wants.

OKAY, THAT’S BROOKE. If any of that is badly described or potentially-offensive, it’s just bc I glossed over SO MUCH DETAIL, even in that amount of it!

So. Jeremy.

I don’t have to go over him much and we’re all mostly aware of how I feel about him and also I don’t have the energy to do this again--

(just... read my fics The Devil at your Door or hello yesterday or something... eyyy actually do that, my ao3 username is Sedusa, blah blah blah ANYWAY)

--but basically: He's still very nerdy, like, he’s super into film as well as video games (which is another constant for me), but after being largely ignored in elementary, he's been trailing behind Chloe at her orders since they were in 6th grade. As a result he isn't very open about... any of his interests.

In 7th grade, he came out as trans to everyone. Chloe was furious, but at the same time, intrigued; this was around the time Chloe gets her own... ah shit I gotta go into that too--

--yet another hc of mine is that Chloe gets a Squip on accident around this time at a party (there was one in a “”candy bowl””), and from there, she claws her way up the ladder. I... will not go into that much, but her Squip was crippled by the drugs and alcohol in her system, and therefore largely at her mercy. She’s used his power to manipulate certain things about herself and to sharpen her focus on popularity to the point she’s full-blown Alpha Bitch.

Man, I’ve had to go on so many tangents, I apologize.

Anyway, she drags Jeremy around as a punching bag. She constantly mocks Jeremy's transness, even though she usually calls him by his correct name and pronouns.

This has made the rest of the school follow her lead, hence why I said “boy-ish”; he’s popular, he’s technically ‘well liked’, but nobody really takes him seriously. This is compounded by Chloe’s refusal to let him dress in 'dorky' casual clothes, and, as he’s both too poor to afford designer clothes and also generally hates popular guy fashion, he has to wear the hyper femme clothing Chloe specifically tells him too/

As such, people call him a boy but largely see him as either an idiot, a slut, an attention seeker, or all of the above.

So of course, in Brooke's place, his neurodivergence is more prominent than ever; every day he slips further into this psychosis and self-infantilization haze, as his his mom leaving, his dad severely depressed, Chloe's sexual violence, and other repressed trauma (see: my fic hello yesterday on ao3) all weighing on him. This makes him INCREDIBLY regressed, like, all the time by Junior year.

And then Brooke's Squip (IE: canon Squip) falls in love with Jeremy extremely fucking hard. He pushes her to date him as a way to compromise on her queer desires, since Jeremy is technically a boy, and certainly a few other straight-ish girls have hooked up with him in the past.

WHEW. That is a fucking lot. To wrap this up, lemme go over the interpersonal relationships not already mentioned, and what directions I think it takes.

First off, Madeline has a more prominent role, as I quite like her tbh; she’s a sex worker, she has her own Squip, she’s one of Chloe’s most hated enemies, and she gravitates towards both Brooke and Jeremy. She’s also Actually French, Chloe’s just weird.

(Anyway she prolly sees through Brooke’s straight act and asks her why she’s pretending to be a good little cishet. It rattles Brooke.)

Chloe is scum. This bears repeating. She DEFINITELY rapes Brooke at the Halloween party, and becomes obsessed with her, along with already being obsessed with Jeremy and Jake. 

Jake, by the way, has a lot of regressive behavior and impulsiveness bc he’s been in an abusive relationship off and on with Chloe for years now.

Speaking of Jake, moving on to his best bro: Rich doesn’t set himself on fire. He’s having a good time with his Squip.

But.

He IS set on fire at the Halloween party.

Instead of the Smartphone Hour being about Rich's instability, it's actually about the mystery of Someone Did It To Him But No One Saw Who It Was, They Were Disguised.

The answer relates to the fact that Rich and Brooke are ALSO hooking up, after she’s already with Jeremy, bc he Properly introduces her to him and the three of them hit it off really well.

(She initially wasn’t interested, but while Rich is loud and still kinda abrasive, his Squip doesn’t drive him to act like a bully--and in private, his nerdiness is really obvious and he’s extremely gentle with her and Jeremy. Add to that that he’s bi and trans*, when Brooke connects best w/ queer men over cishet one, and it off-sets his masc-ness enough to make him an Exception.

* = I always imagine him as trans. See: all of Vanceypants fics.)

Sooo... the culprit is actually Brooke's daddy, who sees her with this obvious heartthrob and Cannot let that be.

Chloe convinces Michael that the Squips are Very Very Bad and has him team up with her to force Brooke into drinking Red, with the intention to convince him to kill himself after to get him out of the way, bc she’s really going nuts at this point.

Eventually, he snaps out of it when he and Christine get together (he’s thought he was Full Homo all of his life, but Christine’s prolly genderqueer-ness makes him realize “oh shit, I’m bisexual”) and she starts to question why he’s acting the way he is towards Christine.

He also definitely has a crush on Jeremy and during his time with Chloe he kinda tried to flirt a little but couldn’t really... he’s not up for dating someone as sexually active and a push-over as Jeremy is in this.

However, when he snaps out of Chloe’s manipulation, he and Christine approach Mr. Heere to convince him to straighten up and help Jeremy and also bc they really need an adult to successfully fight Chloe.

This requires a month+ of Christine getting him to see her psychiatrist (the one who prescribes her ADHD meds). Jeremy spends the majority of his time staying with Chloe, and very rarely comes home to gather things or to make sure his dad is eating/still alive, as much as he can remember to in his own haze of mental illness. Anyway, point is, he doesn’t know Christine and Michael are there often... not that, in the course of growing close to Mr. H, they both fall for him hard and it becomes one of my stranger OT3s.

(God, Jeremy goes through a lot of shit in this, tho.)

Pre-Squip, Jenna was kinda-sorta Brooke’s friend--or, well, friendly. However, she’s actually full blown “oh my God she’s wonderful” in love with Brooke.

Brooke isn't aware of that, esp since Jenna tries her not to be around her a lot. She's also trying to hide her own queerness, bc she’s a trans woman and she knows Chloe finding that out would be extremely dangerous.

Eventually, Chloe succeeds in making Brooke take the Red months after canon usually ends, w/o Michael’s help. If you’re curious, Red doesn’t affect her normal Squip bc she’s had him too long and a lot of his receptors and stuff are damaged, so it’s the second one she gets in canon that turns off.

This plan backfires, however, as Brooke’s Squip comes back with a physical body w/ help from Rich and also-bodied-now Moses.

With a body, and shenanigans, Mo and Squip take out Brooke’s daddy too. His life insurance more than makes up for the loss of his income, as it’s a sizable amount. Now that Brooke feels more empowered and strong, she overrides her mother’s neglectfulness and takes control of the household w/ her boyfriends*, comes out as queer, helps her sister transition, and begin to heal from all of this trauma.

(* = Rich and Mo move in, as does Jeremy eventually, after graduation; Jeremy gets a psychiatrist and a therapist and prolly has to go through some intense outpatient care and possibly a stay in the hospital, before finally making major breakthroughs and looking like himself again. The five of them are now happy and in love.)

Chloe, after her arm gets twisted by the Squip’s protective presence so thoroughly, gives up on Jeremy and Brooke to focus on Jake. This too gets abandoned when Rich and Mo help him cut her off, and so she stays in her own popularity bubble, bitter, until graduating and going to a community college in a different state.

All in all, things work out well in the end, but getting there is a long, difficult process. This AU fascinates me immensely and feels like a great way to examine some of my really dark headcanons about MB, as I think it’s a town similar to Derry in Stephen King’s IT--as in, just chronically The Worst Place Ever, with this, like, miasma of low-key despair around it. People adjust and don’t question it, which is why so much of BMC is this flippant dark humor in the face of some highly questionable shit.

I’m so sorry this post is so long (I’ll be uploading it to AU under my usual Sedusa account, as metas like this are more than allowed), but I really adore these characters and the way they can be twisted around, so I had a lot to say!

Thank you for reading <3

-mod Seb

image description: virtual-like stairs pointed forward and bathed in neon yellow and blue to represent Brook and Jeremy, which I’ve modified from the original blue-only design.

source: x (link description: a free Wallpaper Flare image that I found off Google Image’s “filtered by ‘labeled and reuse with modification” feature) 

[juushika]

I try to do this every year: here's the best media that I encountered, but which was probably not released, in 2017. It’s long!! oops!!

Books

I read 176 books in 2017. My primary reading goal was to prioritize authors of color, ideally making them half of my reading material. This fell apart somewhat in the face of various and intense life stresses, but in the end 40% of the books I read this year were by PoC, up from 10%* from last year, and I'm proud of that. It's something I will continue to prioritize.

* a metric which may be somewhat out of date, as I discovered neato things while looking into Jewish authors!! but I'm too lazy for recalculations, so let's let it stand

Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller. I love this book so much that it took me five months to write a review. Miller wrote it with precise, peculiar inspirations--the identity of a mysterious artist; sessions with a ouija board--and while I traditionally resist the idea that the author is a conduit rather than a creator (yes to authorial responsibility! boo on authorial intent!) I think there can be moments when an author reaches above and beyond themselves. I believe Beagle did this in The Last Unicorn:

A lot of things appeal to people out of their own histories in that story. I feel sometimes like Schmendrick, when the first time he actually casts real magic summoning up the shades of Robin Hood, Maid Marian and the Merry Men...people who never existed, really they’re myths, and yet there they are. And at that point he falls on his face, picks himself up, and thinks: "I wonder what I did...I did something..." Which is very much the way I feel about The Last Unicorn. Finally, fifty years later. (source)

And I believe that Miller does it here. This is an exceptional novel; its purpose and joy and energy is remarkable, and it may be safe to call it my favorite book of the year.

Graceling series by Kristin Cashore. The books stand alone and are all perfectly good; but it's Bitterblue that won me, and I think it benefits from reading the entire series. This uses a speculative concept to explore trauma and abuse in ways that are simultaneously metaphorical, literal, and unique to the worldbuilding. I admire a narrative that's able to capitalize on the potential of its genre in that way, and there's interesting narrative-in-absentia techniques at play here, and, crucially, it's thoughtful and compassionate.

Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. I adore the companion animal trope, and am dubious of dragons; I did not expect that this would be so thorough an exploration of the former as to totally negate the later. It engages almost every question that surrounds this trope, especially re: sapience, personhood, power dynamics; the long-form adventure allows for a diverse and evolving culture. And it's tropey in every way it needs to be to give its premise emotional weight. Multiple books in this series won a 5-star rating, and as many made me cry. It's as in love and as engaged with this trope as I am. Simon Vance's audio narration makes these an especial delight.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr. I read this in the same year as my first Joanna Russ book (The Female Man)--and neither are perfect, but both are invaluable, and the combined effect has stayed with me. But nothing lingered moreso than this Tiptree collection: so exhaustive, so exhausting; the tension between her profound bitterness and daydreaming, between her (presumed, implicit, assumed) male PoV and persistent feminist themes, elevates this collection beyond the limitations of individual stories.

The Devourers by Indra Das. It would be insincere to say that this is what I wish every werewolf novel would be--I love them all uniquely--but this is what I wish every werewolf novel would be: this visceral, this vivid, this inhuman, this engaged with the concept of the Other.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The only real goal in life is to love or be loved as Virginia Woolf loved Vita Sackville-West; the energy that emanates from this, passionate and playful and irreverent, is incandescent. I always expect historical books about sex and gender to be restrained or dated, and for good reason, but this has aged so well; it's fluid and complicated, but too quick to become heavy. In every page, a delight.

Honorable mentions in books

Ursula K. Le Guin. I read a handful of her books this year; I didn't love them all equally (The Beginning Place is hardly her most famous but it's my favorite so far) but I'm consistently impressed, no matter how minor the work. She's profoundly skilled; she integrates and expands her central theses in ways that capitalize on the speculative genres she writes in, to great effect.

Octavia E. Butler by Gerry Canavan. I hesitate to say that I loved this biography more than Butler's novels themselves, but that reflects how it felt to read this: it summarized, contextualized, and celebrated Butler's cumulative effort and impact in a way that made me appreciate her anew.

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore. I read a lot of YA I bounce off of, a lot of magical realism I don't think works; but this I loved, for its specific images, for the way that the fluidity of its style suits its issues of gender, for its beauty and love.

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson. The energy in this is infectious, and needs to be, as it's as much about a love affair with a speculative premise and a place as with a person--and all those elements are accessible, distinctive, alive.

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner. Fairyland which feels truly transporting and fantastic, truly fae, is hard to capture. This is such a quiet book, unassuming in structure and frame, but its depiction of fairyland is one of the most convincing that I've ever seen.

Games

Nier: Automata. I watched this played on release, and called it then, in March: game of the year. I was not mistaken. There's more this could do, further it could go; but what it does, with its androids and tropes, its meta elements and narrative structure and soundtrack, is phenomenal. One of the most remarkable things that a game can do is be profoundly wedded to its interactive medium, because few other platforms have the opportunity to interact with the consumer so directly--and Automata achieves that, to great effect.

Kirby series. I have no particular love of platforms, Nintendo, or nostalgia; but these looked cute, and: they are. Kirby is shaped like friendship, and the softness and colors of level design, the creative gameplay of Kirby's transformations, the sincerely impressive interaction with level elements in games like Epic Yarn, are a complete package. These brought me unmitigated joy; that's not something I often find.

Honorable mentions in video games

Dishonored 2. The plot and setting hasn't stuck with me as much as the first game. But to internalize criticism and then go on to make a more diverse game is fantastic (and it pays off, in Meagan Foster especially), and the small, almost-domestic moments and ongoing lore/religion in the worldbuilding are very much my thing.

Dark Souls III DLC. The base game was on my list last year, so this entry feels like cheating--but these were substantial additions, big worlds and significant narrative and so many new monster designs, all of which compliment the base game. It's an impressive product, and I wish more DLC resembled it.

Closure. A little indie puzzle platformed that exceeds expectations for that genre because the way that its core game mechanic interacts with player, art design, atmosphere, and narrative is so successful. (It even makes up for sometimes-finicky physics.)

Visual Media

Car Boys. I'm disappointed that Nick Robinson proved not to be the person we wanted him to be, but that doesn't change the profound impact that this series had on me. Not only is it a fantastic example of emergent narrative, it simultaneously embraces my fear of existential horror and my profound longing for a greater meaning. This served a similar function for me as did Critical Role last year, despite dissimilarities in tone and content.

Dark Matter season 3. The boy and I have been watching this together, and with few misstep we've been consistently satisfied with the way this series combines found family tropes and genre mainstays. But season 3 is a cut above. It's still all those things, but the ongoing, consistent character development, particularly of the female characters, most especially of the Android, is phenomenal. There were episodes that made me cry, that I would call legitimately perfect.

Blame! I've enjoyed everything I've seen by Polygon Pictures, including Knights of Sidonia, but this is the best they could be: tropes I love, a perfect setting for their visual style and capabilities; great pacing, writing that does interesting things with its subgenre. Without competition, the best film I saw this year; it looks great and it’s just so engaging to watch.

Person of Interest. Found family/AI feels is in essence all I've ever wanted from a narrative, and this delivers, delivers in droves: it has the crime serial format I love but, like Fringe, deviates from format to great effect. But it's the particular combination of themes that sold me: using AI as a launchpad to explore all varieties of personhood and socialization.

Honorable mentions in visual media

Yuri!!! on Ice. There is a need in the world for stories like this; queer love stories, stories about what it means to become one's best self, stories which are funny and sweet and profoundly empathetic. This year started poorly (and just kept on keepin' on, but:) and there was a sense of karmic balance that this existed post-election. It's escapism without being hollow; it's how I want the world to be.

Polygon. Monster Factory goes here. So does Awful Squad. But the boy and I have been branching out and watching almost anything that pops up on this channel; the balance between inoffensive good humor and video game nerdom is really likable.