End of year thoughts
It's almost the end of 2019 and this year has been interesting, in terms of fandom. I've been able to find a bit more time recently for non-RL activities and trying to finish the subtitles for Gurenzaka.
Anime
I'm not watching much anime these days. I don't know if it's because there are fewer interesting anime nowadays or if I'm getting jaded and picky as I grow older. The highlight this year was finally seeing Levi's fight against the Beast titan animated as well as the remaining members of the Survey Corps taking on the Armored and Colossal titans. Kudos to the animation studio for making the entire sequence as emotionally epic as it was in the manga and Attack on Titan continues to be a favorite of mine. I also recently started Banana Fish and I'm enjoying it so far. And I'm just waiting for Vinland Saga to finish airing so that I can binge-watch the whole series.
Star Wars
Honestly, the first thing that came into my mind after watching The Rise of Skywalker was, what was the point of this sequel trilogy? Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who couldn't connect to any of the new main characters and didn't feel that the camaraderie between them was developed enough to warrant the strong emotions that the characters supposedly feel for each other, especially when new characters are introduced every episode instead of building on the existing relationships. The Force Awakens really played with nostalgia and I thought it was a way of getting fans of the original trilogy on board with the sequels. And I was on board until certain characterization choices pissed me off in The Last Jedi. With Rise of Skywalker, everything felt so rushed and certain story elements were clearly borrowed from Return of the Jedi.
As bad as the prequels were, they still successfully made Anakin's turn to the Dark side a tragic one especially with the way Palpatine manipulated him onto this path. This is why I still liked Revenge of the Sith despite all of its flaws as it added more to the character of Darth Vader. I'm not sure if I find anything really memorable in the sequels that isn't a retread of previous episodes and don't even get me started on the way they treated Luke Skywalker.
Game of Thrones
Another disappointment next to Star Wars. Apparently, the script for Season 8 was leaked early, so to make up for it, the writers re-wrote the season into a completely different animal just so that the audience wouldn't know what was going to happen. Like seriously? Season 8 had so many WTF moments that I wondered if the writers were just writing to deliver shock twists.
Chinese "Bromance"
From Guardian last year to the Mo Dao Zu Shi animation to this year's The Untamed, which is the live-action adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi, I'm starting to get into the world of Chinese BL masked as bromances to escape censorship. The Untamed was better than I expected and the two leads really inhabit their roles and have fantastic chemistry with each other. S.C.I. Journal of Mysterious Cases was another Chinese BL-turned-bromance adaptation I found which features a crime-fighting couple and is a pretty decent watch. What I'm really liking about all the Chinese BL I've seen so far is that there is no feminizing of characters to indicate who is the 'male' and the 'female' in the relationship, which is prevalent in Japanese BL and always irks me a little. I prefer seeing both men as individuals in their own right instead of heteronormative tropes.
Nirvana in Fire
And speaking of bromances, nothing compares to how much Mei Chang Su and Jing Yan drove me crazy with their hidden angst (in a good way). I love this series so much. I've already gushed about the show in my previous post but once again, I'm recommending this show to anyone who likes a good period drama featuring great characterization, plot and relationships.
The Expanse
This is another TV show I discovered this year that is still rather unknown and deserves more attention. Adapted from a book series written by James S.A. Corey, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say The Expanse is shaping up to be one of the best science-fiction television shows ever made and is the best sci-fi series of this decade. Now in its fourth season, I'm already enjoying it more than I did Battlestar Galactica (2004). I breezed through the first four books after finishing season 3 and what's interesting is that while the writing in the books isn't consistently impressive, the show-runners managed to take the most compelling parts of the story and expand upon (sometimes improving) them for the TV series. The premise of The Expanse is a very realistic and sensitive look at politics in a future where humans have colonized our solar system and to add onto the already mounting tensions comes the discovery of an alien entity in the system. The show explores the idea that humanity is not entirely ready to face the vast unknown of space mainly because people still struggle with divisions and differences instead of standing united as a species. I like that the show isn’t afraid to take its time to carefully develop its characters and story threads which ends up paying off really well. The first three seasons can be taken as a trilogy of sorts with the first two laying the foundations for an epic season 3 where nearly every episode was on fire, while season 4 starts a new chapter in the Expanse saga.
The Expanse fandom is also a particularly passionate one. They managed to generate enough attention when the show was cancelled on SyFy after three seasons to convince Amazon to rescue the series and that includes raising enough money to charter a plane to fly a ‘Save the Expanse’ banner over Amazon Studios headquarters as well as launch a model of the Rocinante (the main ship in the show) into space. I think it’s a pretty amazing fan movement, nicely shown in this video. And it’s obvious that Amazon is pouring a lot money into the show because season 4 looks absolutely gorgeous. I highly recommend this show to anyone who’s into science-fiction especially if you enjoy space operas and hard sci-fi. Check out this fan-made trailer.