It’s Thwippin’ Time: A Game of the Year Post

Sure, it’s got superheroes and a whole guy made of sand, but it’s humanity that’s at the core of Spider-Man 2

I normally don’t do “of the year” posts. I’m not a professional reviewer; everything I review is something I watch or play in my free time and I have my own limitations and personal likes and dislikes. When I do make lists, I always try make sure I couch it as simply my opinion and not try to present it as a definitive list. I don’t say “best”, I say favorite. My top five Christmas movies, not the five best Christmas movies, you know what I mean? When it comes to video games, not only is the initial investment higher than waiting for it to come to a streaming service, the time it takes to experience a game meaningfully is much higher than a movie or TV series. Sure, Rebel Moon may feel like it’s 70 hours long because of how rote and by the numbers it is, but it’s not actually. Even at my busiest, I can manage to get through a movie in at most two or three sittings (except for The Meg 2, somehow they managed to squeeze all the fun out of the first movie and make it borderline unbearable to watch). So when I talk about my Game of the Year, it’s just that. My game. Two or three games have really been at the forefront of GOTY discussions and of those, I’ve only played one for a short time and the other two I haven’t played at all. So, suffice it to say, I don’t have a complete knowledge of every game that came out this year. But one game did make an impression on me that was surprising, lasting, and deeply affecting.

Of course Baldur’s Gate 3 has dominated the Game of the Year conversation, along with Tears of the Kingdom, the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sequel, and to a lesser extent, Alan Wake 2. And with good reason. I personally haven’t given Tears of the Kingdom a go yet; I didn’t really enjoy Breath of the Wild for a few reasons, despite the fact that every time I booted it up, I did spend a good twenty minutes just in awe of how beautiful the world was and how amazing it looked and felt to move around that giant space (really kind of mind-blowing when you consider that was a launch title and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet launched 5 years later and doesn’t look or perform half as well). But, it seems that TOTK took BOTW and improved on it and was a very rich and rewarding gaming experience for those who do enjoy Zelda games. I’ll eventually get around to it, even if I have to use guides to get through. I’m determined to eventually get firsthand knowledge of why Zelda is such a beloved franchise—I was a Sega kid, after the original NES, I went to Genesis and never really played many Nintendo titles, save for Pokemon and a few random Game Boy/DS titles. BOTW was my first Zelda. I’ve also never come close to an Alan Wake title, but boy does it sound interesting.

Now, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece. A perfect 10 out of 10 on IGN. 96 Metascore. On the podcast The Besties, Griffin McElroy described it at “miraculous” on numerous occasions, at least three times over multiple episodes. So it’s only fitting that it’s one of the most talked about games in the GOTY conversation and that it indeed won The Game Awards’ Game of the Year. But it’s not my game of the year.

There’s nothing I have bad to say about Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s amazing. I don’t have that much play time in it, but what I have done so far has been exhilarating, satisfying, and rewarding. I’ve played in a few stalled Dungeons and Dragons campaign, loved the movie (boy did that come out of nowhere, I never thought a D&D movie could be so fun or well done), and generally enjoy being able to do roguish things in video games, so it’s generally a good fit. I love that there are completely and meaningfully different ways for you to approach just about every problem in BG3. A lot of games give you the illusion of choice, a dialogue tree that eventually gets you to largely the same conclusion regardless of your choices, but BG3 doesn’t feel like that. Your choices feel like they have real consequences and consequences that are unique to your playthrough; including ones that are unforeseen. I can’t take anything away from Baldur’s Gate 3, but for me, it had some of the same problems that BOTW has. Part of it is just that the scale is so massive, it’s intimidating. That’s probably the biggest one. Trying to jump into BG3 felt like swimming the English Channel while I’m still getting used to wearing my floaties. Even the opening sequence is almost impossibly large in scale. Perhaps it’s my own failing, but in the face of BG3’s expansive narrative, deep lore, and massive map, I felt immediately lost and quite small. Launching the app became a daunting task, an Everest to climb before getting out of bed. It is a game that demands—and deserves—your full attention and dedication and at this time, giving it that just didn’t seem on the cards. I will, no doubt, revisit BG3, and soon. Though I may only have about 5 to 10 hours in the game, I want to play more. I feel the drive to get in and master my character, learn more about the game, and immerse myself in the world.

But there’s one game from 2023 that made me feel all those things as well; one game that had me spending idle moments waiting for the slivers of free time to jump in and get going, one game that had me coming back everyday because of how amazing the gameplay experience is. And that game is Spider-Man 2.

A thrilling opening sequence gets you right into the game and adds to the cinematic feel most open world games lack

Now, there’s no way I can sell you on Spider-Man 2 being the technical marvel that BG3 and TOTK are. I know that. But there’s still a lot to love here and for many reasons. As a narrative action open world RPG, Spider-Man 2 doesn’t skimp on any aspect of the experience. The combat system here is refined, changed only slightly from the previous games, and while I did miss some of the old features that made crowd control easier and gave you a feeling of invincibility at times (my kingdom for a Web Blossom every once in a while), I can’t fault the changes they made. Sure, there were times where the game felt more like Arkham, where Batman’s brutality was doled out in smaller doses before having to retreat to the darkness, leaving enemies frightened and nervous (especially those with guns). I did find myself having to strike quickly, lay a small beat down on some enemies, and then swing to relatively safety to catch my breath and evaluate my strategy for the rest of the fight. I did lament the loss of that feeling of invincibility, but as the narrative unfolded, I realized how important it was that the combat helped you remember that you’re Spider-Man, not Superman, and that things very well can come to an end for Peter or Miles. They’re not invincible, anything but. I came to appreciate that I felt more vulnerable in fights; after all, I think it’s Spider-Man’s humanity that makes him such an enduring and appealing hero. I’ve never really read any Spider-Man comics with regularity, I watched the cartoon in the 90s, but ranked it behind X-Men and far behind Batman: The Animated Series, I enjoyed the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films (emo Peter’s dance number aside), but I skipped the Andrew Garfield movies and the MCU’s No Way Home left a very bitter taste in my mouth even though I like the first two movies (it felt a lot more like Jurassic World than Jurassic Park, if you know what I mean), but despite all that, I’ve always ranked Spider-Man as one of my favorite heroes.

Traversal has never been more fun

But more on the narrative later, let’s get back to gameplay. Now, I’m usually one to say that I generally look for one of three things to do in a game—shoot bad guys in the face, be a Premier League club manager, or pet and/or battle with Pokemon. Failing all that, it better be a racing game. Spider-Man 2 offers almost none of that (there are some missions where you get to zap some bad guys in the face, they offered a fun departure from the regular combat loop), but I still found the combat in SM2 (as well as SM1 and SM: Miles Morales) to be incredibly satisfying, if not the most satisfying combat of any game I’ve ever played. It’s not just fun, it’s the right amount of challenging and the right level of difficult to engage you on both a reactive and strategic level. For a game like this to hold my attention at all is a minor miracle, but for me to wake up thinking about what I want to tackle in-game during my free time that day is a completely different feeling. I’m not a completionist by any means, and even in games that I’ve spent 80 to 100 hours in a single player campaign like Red Dead Redemption 2, getting to 100% is just something I’ve never cared about. But despite the fact that I’ve finished the story, I’m going to go back and get to 100%, just because the experience of being in the game is so much fun. Much like the previous games, traversal is an exercise of pure joy, as you zip, swing, and thwip your way across a simulacrum of New York. New for this game is the ability to glide using  “Web Wings”. Personally, I found it largely a practical inclusion because of the distances you had to travel and the smaller buildings in some of the new areas of the map, like Brooklyn and Queens. And yet, after I spent a little time trying to master the new mechanic (and spent a few points upgrading my character), I found the flight to be almost as satisfying as the webslinging, though it still doesn’t hit the same way. I mean, lots of superheroes can fly, it’s almost a given in the superhero world, but only Spider-Man webslings. SM2 introduced a new way to fast travel, something I only tried once because I heard that it was something you had to try at least once (and it was cool). Getting around is just such a good time, I never found a good reason to want to get to my destination any faster than I already could. Traversal this good makes this game such an amazing experience. I remember in the early days of the pandemic, when quarantine was still new, I used to boot RDR2, just do go for a ride on my horse, go fishing, and play some poker at a saloon. Now, that’s a testament to just how much you could do in that game and how well it was all executed, but despite being a smaller scale of game, I did find myself playing just to have a quick swing around the city and stop a few crimes rather than always jumping into missions. That’s how enjoyable the game is. It took everything about the previous games and just made it better; and those were both fantastic experiences to begin with. So the gameplay is slightly different, but still somehow much improved.

A passing familiarity with Spider-Man lore would leave you quite worried at the sight of Peter’s cool black suit

The way the story unfolds is different as well. While in the previous games we get a taste of Miles’s origin story, these games have benefitted from largely avoiding the origin trap and giving us an established Spider-Man to pilot around the city. Now that both our Spider-Men have gone through their beginnings, you get to see levels of growth that you haven’t really seen in the movies, which seem to be rebooted every decade or so in a weird licensing tug-of-war hell. Peter is in a different phase of his life; still dealing with the fallout of the events of the first game, Peter carries the weight of loss on his shoulders. Miles has a different journey than Peter, one that sees change in his life as well. And despite the fact that in any other situation, I’m extremely tired of superpowered teenagers, Miles’s problems are palpable and relatable—surprisingly grounded for a guy who can swing around on webs and punch people with electricity.

Everything here is more mature and nuanced than the previous games, letting you slow down and take a breath and live in the story with the characters. This game’s New York feels very real and lived in and the fact that the main characters and their support have their own issues that they’re dealing with and working through makes it feel all the more real. There’s a real sense of grief, of loss, of coping, of rage and anger. All these characters, not just Peter and Miles, feel like real people. When you interact with them, it feels like they’re living their lives and you’re just jumping in for a small vignette, rather than feeling like NPCs are waiting patiently for you to interact with them.

Spider-Man 2 reminds us that the people we surround ourselves with are a source of strength and support

Much has been said about the side missions of the previous games and how the ones in this game are better, and they are. But they’re not just better because they’re less repetitive, less annoying, and more rewarding, they’re better because they tell stories. Some of them echo the feelings of loss and regret that the protagonists are going through. Some touched me more deeply than others, more deeply than I thought video game stories still could. But by the third time I was wiping away tears from my eyes, I knew I was playing something special. The key word to this game’s narrative is empathy. The way the story shows empathy to not just the protagonists and the people that they care about, but to the random person on the street who simply needs help and to the game’s villains themselves puts empathy at the forefront of the game’s core set of values. As you work through the missions and more of the story is unveiled, you feel for the characters, even the so-called villains. The game makes it a point to humanize just about everyone you deal with, minus the scores and scores of nameless criminals you beat and web up with gleeful abandon. But hey, you can’t stop and smell the roses at every mugging, kidnapping, arson, or monster attack. I know that rightful praise has been heaped on Baldur’s Gate’s narrative and I’m sure it is every bit as deep and rewarding as Spider-Man 2’s or more so, but the way this feels so human and so easily understandable is remarkable. I couldn’t help but feel like a part of me was in almost every character. The anger of Miles, the grief of Peter, the fear of the New Yorker looking for her aging grandfather, the yearning of Harry to feel healthy and normal, the need for MJ to make a difference, the quest for peace of Howard the homing pigeon keeper; I saw a little bit of myself in each and every one of them. And yet, despite all this, despite the game making me face feelings I didn’t particularly want to face, despite the greater heft of the story,  I found myself able to dip in and out and do some regular superhero stuff to re-center myself before going back to the story missions. The relatively seamless switching between Miles and Peter gives you a back door when the story leaves you needing a break emotionally. If things are getting too deep with Peter, swap to Miles for a bit and do some of his missions and vice-versa. There’s always an out so the weight of the story never becomes too taxing.

More focus on Miles means wonderful new confusingly named Venom powers

And here lies one of the biggest reasons Spider-Man 2 is the Game of the Year for me. Approachability. The size and scale and openness and consequence of games like Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3 can be paralyzing at times. Permadeath adds a level of pressure to the gameplay that isn’t always welcome; I understand its inclusion in games and I’m not against it in general. Giving real consequences such as character death in the game raises the stakes, the intensity, and does leave the palms sweaty. It’s not like it’s a bad thing, but I’ve found that I’ve become the kind of guy who wants everyone to make it home at the end of the day. If put in the role of a leader of people, I want to get them all to the end of the game alive. I don’t know, call it a flaw, but I want to be a hero. I want to save people, including my own party of course. But yes, much like character death in films, sometimes it’s necessary and I completely understand that. However, it doesn’t lend itself to a super casual experience. And not everything needs to be a casual or relaxing experience; there’s room for all this in gaming (and in film, for that matter), but at this point, where I am mentally and emotionally, it’s an added stressor to the gameplay and makes it a little more difficult for me to engage with a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 because I have to get into the right mindset (or manage a hell of a lot of save files) to play and I can’t just pick it up and play to lift my mood.

Spider-Man 2’s New York map is huge. It feels so much bigger than Spider-Man and Miles Morales. But it never feels daunting; it’s New York, I’ve been there a hundred times physically and virtually thousands more. In film and TV, New York is nearly 50% of all the cities in the world (the others being Los Angeles, and occasionally “London” or “other”), so no matter how big it got, it always felt familiar to me. Perhaps people who grew up playing games like Zelda or other Baldur’s Gate games feel the same sense of familiarity with those maps and that helps it feel like less of an enormous playground to get lost in, but for me, it’s like learning a new language. But that familiarity definitely made things easier for me to jump into and out of SM2 as necessary.

Harry’s back and he’s happy, healthy, and alive, like the Nutriboom founder’s wife

Everything about Spider-Man 2 felt comfortable. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a challenging game or that I want games to be easy, but I often look at media as a form of give and take. I look at what experiencing an uncomfortable piece of media, for example, say The Power of the Dog, gives me and I think about it in terms of what it takes from me to watch it. What emotional distress it causes, what personal feelings it may dredge up that I’ve spent a lifetime neatly packing away in a little box in my brain, and what it gives back; the experience, the engagement, the enriching of my life. When something gives more than it takes, it’s usually worth it for me, whatever frustrations or distress that may come along with it. And Spider-Man 2 gives me a great deal and doesn’t take too much, despite the very real, mature, and sometimes depressing story points that make me face things in some of those tiny little brain boxes. And that’s why it’s my Game of the Year. It was an experience that will not only stick with me for the rest of my life, but one that I will come back to over and over again, like rewatching a favorite movie or replaying an Uncharted game (which also often feels like rewatching a favorite movie; but my god, the Uncharted movie was unwatchable drivel).

Spider-Man 2, much like the Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse films, proves that I’m not suffering superhero fatigue as much as I’m tired of seeing the same old thing with a different filter on it. Just like choosing a Street Fighter character with a slightly different colored outfit isn’t nearly as exciting as playing with a new character that feels different, watching the same movie with a different actor and slightly different powers doesn’t excite me. But Spider-Man 2 weaves together a story that was familiar in a way that I hadn’t seen it before and it benefitted greatly from the balance between the new generation in Miles and the older in Peter, while giving them real people and support structures that make everything feel real. Even if it is a game about two separate people who get bitten by two different radioactive spiders. I’m so looking forward to where the next game will take me.

If you’re still here, I want to thank you for reading my blog. Whether this is your first time or you’re a regular, I appreciate every moment you spend on reading my content and I hope you enjoy it. With 2023 coming to a close, it’s a good time to reflect, and I wish for you all a better 2024, with much more content to come!

What’s more human than fighting for what you love? I’m a lifelong MJ defender.

Back to the Studio…How Hard Can it Be?

The Grand Tour boys plan their next move while on the hunt for buried treasure

So, it turns out The Grand Tour is coming to an end. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ve probably already seen the news, but if I’m the one breaking it to you, I’m sorry you had to find out this way. As it turns out, this news has hit me way harder than I expected it to. After all, it’s the end of a show, shows I love end all the time. They come to a natural end, like Succession, they come to unsatisfying ends, like Dead to Me, they get unceremoniously and unjustly cancelled well before their time, like Lodge 49, The Tick, Terriers, Firefly, Infinity Train, and countless others. You’d think I’d be used to it now.

But this feels different. It’s not just the end of a show. It’s the end of an era. It’s the end of a phase of my life, and perhaps a phase of the world, that I was not prepared to see ended as I casually scrolled Facebook looking for people to wish a happy birthday to. If you don’t know, The Grand Tour is basically a continuation of the BBC’s revitalized Top Gear, starring Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond. It’s a show about cars, but also not about cars. It was equally scripted as unscripted (perhaps tilting towards scripted more and more as the years went by), equally a spectacle as a documentary, equally a comedy as it is nonfiction. But it’s always been a comfort to me. I discovered the show when I was in undergrad. I won’t go much into details, but undergrad was a very bad time for me. I was away from an unhappy home, but still in an unhappy situation. I was at the same time halfway escaped and yet halfway in an emotional prison. Needless to say, in a place like that, you try to find comfort wherever you can.

Richard cooks his signature dish, beans, in the back of his WRX living space

This is before the time streaming services were available. Netflix hadn’t even started mailing people DVDs, Hulu was only introduced around the time I was graduating. Amazon was shopping site; Prime didn’t exist yet, and Prime Video even further away. I retreated into my DVDs to drown out the reality around me, even to fall asleep. But, completely unprepared for my circumstances, I only had a handful of movies and a couple TV seasons that fit into a small bag with my CDs (CDs were like small circles that had music on them before iPods were replaced by phones). And, as it turns out, you can only listen to the first season of The Office on repeat while you try to fall asleep so many times before your sanity suffers. I’d always loved cars, ever since I was a small child. This blog, in its original form, was about the joys of driving, and was originally called Acceleration Therapy. My monthly drive out to Barnes and Noble to pick up the latest issues of Evo and Car magazine, UK publications, was just a brief refuge. As a friend turned me on to Top Gear, the only way then to get it was to torrent it. So I did. I immediately fell in love with the show. It was hilarious, eye-opening, and focused of course on European and Japanese cars and locations, places I’d never come close to seeing at that point in my life and cars that I’d never heard of from all over the price scale. It was nothing like the car TV I’d seen before, usually dry retellings of the printed magazine conclusions accompanied with a reading of a spec sheet. It was dynamic, fast-moving, filled with comedic observations and easy chemistry among the hosts. It gave me everything I wanted in a car show, especially for a young man hundreds of miles away from his PlayStation and his copy of Gran Turismo.

Driving one of the most dangerous roads in the world in SUVs that really shouldn’t be there

In only a short time, I started making playlists in WinAmp so I could fall asleep to the episodes as well as watch them as soon as I, ahem, downloaded them. Top Gear became a part of me. I shared it with my friends. I would go on car forums and discuss the latest episode. As my life changed, as I moved on from undergrad, I still watched Top Gear as regularly as I could. Over time, streaming services started to carry it, and I followed it around as it bounced from platform to platform. I ended up with a 2 year subscription to Motor Trend just so I could watch it on their woeful streaming service. When that iteration of Top Gear came to an end because of Jeremy Clarkson’s antics, I was crestfallen, but I understood. And yet, I was overjoyed when I heard the trio was returning on an Amazon Prime show called The Grand Tour. I followed that through its teething issues, got to its relatively perfected third season, and then again felt torn up when I found out they were ending the show. But it was only that format, mostly a copy of the old Top Gear format, where they had a studio, or in this case a tent, and audience, with different segments, car reviews, and celebrity guests. They’d continue on doing specials, arguably the funniest and most memorable episodes of either Top Gear or The Grand Tour. It made me so happy. But now that’s ending too.

It’s not that I don’t understand. Pretty much everything about the show is questionable now. Clarkson himself is no stranger to controversy; he’s made casually racist comments, he’s been sexist, homophobic, I think he threw a phone at someone once. Or maybe he just punched someone. He’s no angel. Cars have been on the decline for over a decade now, I don’t even keep up with the car market anymore. Almost nothing comes with a manual transmission and cars are so fast these days, they’re made with such high limits that they’re no longer fun to drive at anything close to legal speeds. Sensation and feel have been replaced with spec sheet one-upmanship and a greater focus on technology integration. Instead of trying to get people to stop texting and pay attention to what they’re doing, cars started being designed to make it safer. I guess if you can’t stop people from texting while driving, that’s the right thing to do. Still, it makes me sad. Then there’s also the whole climate change of it all. I’m not a scientist, but I choose to listen to the scientists who, well, are, and they tell me cars have a negative impact on the environment. I’m not in love with that information, but I get that driving is a thing we have to do less. So an extravagant, globetrotting comedy show celebrating the automobile in its modern iteration can seem a little tone-deaf in this age. Not only that, Jeremy, James, and Richard are not young men anymore. Time eventually comes for us all; when I think about things I am too tired to do in my 30s that I did in my 20s, I can’t imagine mustering the energy to drive through mud in a modified Caterham with no roof or doors or sleep in the back of a WRX wagon while searching for the source of the Nile or build a truck by hand in a Mongolian desert in my 50s and 60s. I don’t even like camping now. So I understand. All things end.

Honestly, I need a shower just looking at this photo. I’m not built for the outdoors.

But I can’t help this feeling that there’s a hole in me now. Something missing. That some part of me has ended too. What an odd way to face your mortality. Mourning the loss of a television show about cars. And yet, here I am, doing just that. Mourning and facing my mortality. It’s funny how some things sneak up on you and others just punch you in the face. Life starts out so big. At one point in your life, everything you do, you do for the first time. The world is huge and you are so, so small. It’s full of wonder. Then, time passes and life gets a little smaller. You find out Santa’s not real, and even if he were, your house isn’t in his address book. You have your first heartbreak, maybe you fail your first test, maybe you get your driver’s license and taste freedom for the first time behind the wheel of a car like I did. You move away from the place you called home and come to the point where it’s not your home anymore. Dreams for the future slowly become the practical realities of today. Life keeps getting smaller.

Top Gear, The Grand Tour, and the boys Jeremy, James, and Richard kept that sense of wonder alive in me at a time when things weren’t good for me. They kept it alive for many years after that as well. They helped create an emotional home for me when I didn’t really feel like I had another. Other shows and movies helped me there too, and they’ve come and gone. But Clarkson, May, and Hammond have been there so long, I’ve seen myself grow from a Clarkson into a May (well, not perhaps exactly the man affectionately known as Captain Slow or Mr. Slowly, but I have found that his love for small, simple, honest sporty cars has rubbed off on me and I enjoy them a lot more than the latest winged hypercar with a million horsepower). They’ve been part of my life so long, I started to forget that there’d be a time they wouldn’t be anymore. And yes, I can be comforted by the fact that they’re still going to be making content. James May’s Our Man in Japan and Our Man in Italy and Oh Cook are shows I truly enjoy. Clarkson’s Farm, which I’ve written about in this blog before, has another season on the way and perhaps even more after that, I can only hope. Richard still has DriveTribe (with James as well) on YouTube and even though his show with Tory Bellici from Mythbusters, The Great Escapists, was largely unsuccessful, it’s still there to watch. But it’s not the same as the three of them doing something horrendously irresponsible in a car together. And while there’s such a large back catalogue of episodes I can revisit any time I want (for the moment, until the streaming license changes hands once again), it’s not the same as seeing them do it all for the first time.

I suppose, however, that if you look hard enough, change isn’t only a destructive force. Something new will come, some other way to keep the wonder alive. And maybe then, life will feel a bit bigger again. The holidays are coming up, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to note that art is a gift. Entertainment is a gift. And along with that, wonder is a gift. In a way, I write this blog for myself. I don’t know how many of you out there are reading this, but the analysis I do here, the praise I enjoy heaping on projects I love, the scorn with which I criticize properties that I think are best avoided, that’s my way of trying give a gift to all of you. I’d love to tell you all you have a car under where you’re sitting, but since I’m on the other side of Oprah, sharing with you all the things that I love and create that sense of wonder in me is my way of giving you a gift (I mean, logistically, I would have no idea when or where you’d be if you’re reading this, so how am I going to put a Pontiac G6 under your chair? Oprah had a studio, that’s a huge advantage). One that I hope you’ll take and share with other people. So we can all come together, regardless of the time of year, and help keep wonder alive for each other. And we can keep life feeling big.

Thank you for making it this far. I know this was a more personal post than most, so I appreciate you reading it. I’d like to end here, not with despair, not with mourning, and not even with a hopeful message for the future. I’d simply like to thank Jeremy Clarkson, James May, Richard Hammond, and everyone who ever worked on Top Gear or The Grand Tour, all the crew, all the health and safety folks, the guests, anyone who contributed in any way to make them the shows that had the impact on me that they did. Thank you all for being a part of my life. I will miss your work dearly and share it with as many people as I can.

One Piece: Live Action Anime for the Ted Lasso Era

They’re not a crew. Nope. Not a crew at all.

I should probably preface this by saying that I am not much of an anime fan.  I’ve tried, I remember watching shows on Cartoon Network’s Toonami after school and not really connecting with most of them, save for one.  Gundam Wing.  I was immediately drawn in; the show had everything I was looking for.  Political intrigue, giant robots, complicated moral quandaries, giant robots, likable and (relatively) relatable characters, giant robots, and giant robots.  As I write this, I have a Tallgeese action figure (my favorite mobile suit, as the giant robots are called) and a Gundam Deathscythe on my desk.  Needless to say, it left an impression on me, that even subsequent Gundam series haven’t matched.  Much to my simultaneous chagrin and relief, there’s never been a live action Gundam series, so I don’t have to fret about the fidelity or quality of any adaptation.  So after watching live action anime adaptions fail one after another when not even the source material for most of them resonated with me, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit when I heard about Netflix’s One Piece live action.

Monkey D. Luffy points out over the East Blue towards adventure.

Truth be told, I was so unfamiliar with One Piece that I often mixed it up with One Punch Man, another anime that I didn’t watch.  However, one late night, I found myself drawn to it.  With no familiarity with the source material, I thought I could at least approach it with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions as to how the show is suppose go, look, or feel.  And, frankly, it was kind of a liberating experience.  So many of the things I watch are steeped in decades of lore and nostalgia and my own experiences as a kid with an IP such as, say, Star Wars, colors how I engage with and enjoy it now.  I can’t sit down and watch Ahsoka without being reminded of how much I disliked the prequel trilogy, but on the other hand, I am also reminded of how much I liked the Clone Wars series and how much I loved Rebels.  However, with nothing to draw on, I could just dim the lights and watch.  I could do something so rare in media these days, especially when you consume as much of it as I do—I could watch something novel and experience it for the first time, completely clean.

And I loved it.  I did.  I had no idea what to expect and yet when all the pieces of the puzzle were in place, it just felt right. Every character was likable and when you can pull off that minor miracle, you can get away with almost anything.  At least for me, anyway.  If I can connect with the characters, sympathize and empathize with them, care about their plights and journeys, it can cover all manner of sins in the other aspects of storytelling.

Emily Rudd puts in an excellent performance as Nami, seen here doing boat stuff. Probably, I’m not a sailor.

But, before I get into that, I guess I should give you a little bit of a background on One Piece.  It follows the story of a young man who wishes nothing more than to become a pirate and find the “One Piece”, which, if I’m completely honest, I don’t exactly know what that is.  I don’t believe it’s a bathing suit that covers the stomach, but rather the treasure hidden by notorious pirate Gold Roger, its existence he divulged as he was publicly executed by the Marines.  Or possibly it’s a map to that treasure?  The young man, ridiculously named Monkey D. Luffy, dreams of finding the One Piece and becoming King of the Pirates.  I’m not sure what that title entails or how it’s supposed to work, but he barrels forward with the enthusiasm of a young Ash Ketchum, telling everyone who will listen both his name and his goal, and the relentless positivity of Ted Lasso eating cotton candy while chewing bubblegum.  Seriously.  It’s a lot at first, but Iñaki Godoy plays Luffy with such convincing sincerity that you can’t help but root for him.  As he recklessly moves through the seas, he picks up a ragtag crew (as if there is any other kind) as well as picking up a fair few enemies along the way.

Pretty bold of them to slip in an episode of The Bear and think I wouldn’t notice.

Each one in the crew gets a full backstory, three dimensional characterization, and depth that often main protagonists can lack in television shows.  They’re not just support characters—they’re real people and they feel real, at least in the context of a world where a person can eat a fruit and gain physics- and logic-defying powers.  That alone is a kind of a triumph in storytelling, as many shows use their secondary characters as a mechanism to simply drive the plot forward—they pipe in with the jargony explanation at just the right moment, they do the real investigative work while the main characters flirt with each other, etc.—but not here.  One Piece is Luffy’s story, sure, but it’s also theirs, and the show makes sure they never get left behind.

At the core of each character in Luffy’s crew is a deep goodness that radiates through all their actions.  None of this is more evident than with Luffy himself, as he bids farewell to a friend who is joining the Marines—the enemy of pirates everywhere—and Luffy commends him in following his dreams and assures him that they’re friends no matter what side of the fight they’re on.  But whether a gruff swordsman, tale-spinning raconteur, misanthropic thief, or skilled culinary artist, each of Luffy’s crew has kindness in their hearts, even if sometimes it takes Luffy to help bring it out.  And much like the show itself, initial impressions are only part of the story, as the characters unfold and grow and endear themselves to you in properly magical ways.

“We are men of action, lies do not become us” is not something Usopp would ever say. That’s Princess Bride.

I’ve always felt that live action anime adaptations don’t work and can’t work because anime is such a specific thing—it’s hard to pin down what makes anime special or different from other media as someone who doesn’t watch much of it, but I can tell from what little I’ve seen that it’s not much like other genres of entertainment that I do watch regularly.  So in an effort to smooth out the strangeness, for lack of a better word, of many anime titles, live action adaptations lose that je ne sais quoi that anime has, simultaneously losing fans of the source material and failing to bring in new ones.  And yet, standing tall in the shadow of Cowboy Bebop’s failure, One Piece manages to take the biggest heart stuffed into a show since Ted Lasso and win me over completely.

At first, when I watched the show, I thought it was good fun—a bit silly, a bit over the top, but a fun show in a time when fun is very much welcome.  But as the episodes progressed and the outer layers of the artichoke were cut away, revealing the heart, I was stunned by the surprising depth and emotional affect that it had on me.  I laughed wholeheartedly, I cared about the characters, and I shed more than one tear as their journeys and stories unfolded.  I don’t want to go into too many details, because if you aren’t familiar with it, like I wasn’t, I don’t want to spoil your ability to go in fresh and experience it for the first time without being colored too much by prior knowledge.  I will say, though, that there’s a guy who carries three katanas and that is awesome.  One time through the first season wasn’t enough for me, I’m going to have to watch it again.  And maybe a third time.  But not a fourth.  Okay, probably a fourth, but definitely fewer than eleven times.  Well, we’ll see.

Times change; when I was a kid, they used to say not to sleep in a hammock with your sword because you’ll cut your stuff off. I still think it’s good advice.

[If you’ve made it this far, I would like to change gears for a moment and say that I fully support and stand in solidarity with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.  Though it means that projects I love may be delayed or cancelled, what they are fighting for is important and I support their efforts for fair pay; none of the wonderful works of art we get to enjoy beamed into our homes would be possible without them and they deserve fair compensation for the work they do that delights us on a daily basis.]

The Big Door Prize Answers The Most Painful Question Imaginable

Maybe you missed the Ted Lasso train.  Maybe, like me, you still haven’t come around on Jason Segel, so you were hesitant to watch Shrinking (which I’m glad I did, despite my reservations about Segel).  Maybe someone split your brain in two and you watched Severance at work, so you don’t remember it when you’re at home reading this.  So you didn’t watch Wolfwalkers because you thought it was just for kids.  Maybe you’re well-adjusted and without insecurity, so you didn’t cry for 34 minutes straight while you watched The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.  In case you missed all those shows and movies, I’m here to inform you that Apple TV has some really good stuff on it.  And the latest triumph of Apple TV’s short tenure is The Big Door Prize.

Apparently the early 2000s have finally reached the small town of Deerfield

While the pilot goes to some very pilot-y lengths to set up the season’s story by throwing you off the deep end into a swimming pool of trailer-friendly, heavy-handed one-liners, the show quickly settles into an interesting narrative.  Using its small town setting to its advantage, The Big Door Prize plays with the spread of information through Deerfield’s denizens against what it shows you to great effect.  Information spreads through the town like a virus, but you don’t always get to see it when you want to.  The show makes you wait, makes you all but plead to find the information it teases in front of you.  The premise of the show is a new manifestation of that old video game urban legend.  Like so many Polybius machines that allegedly mysteriously appeared and then as mysteriously all disappeared, a large, butterfly-themed Morpho arcade cabinet shows up in the local grocer’s store while the stock boy Jacob is out back getting blazed.  No one knows where it came from.  No one knows how it got there.  The owner of the store didn’t order it, he was as confused as his stoned employee.  Jacob posits that it’s some kind of game, after he tries it out for himself.

Unlike a regular arcade cabinet, however, you climb into it through a butterfly wing door, insert your coins, and enter your social security number and hand prints.  Once the data-mining (the alleged purpose of the Polybius cabinets) is complete, rather than play a game, the machine promises to deliver you a little blue card with your life’s potential on it.

Right there.  In writing.  The most your life can amount to.

Why the hell would you ever want to know that?

Maybe I’m just getting old, but the more I look at the doors that have closed behind me, the more I find myself wondering why anyone would want to know what possible life could have existed behind them.  The protagonist of the series, Chris O’Dowd’s Dusty, is a high school history teacher with a daughter in high school, so there’s naturally a large age split in the characters.  So, maybe I’m not looking at this through the eyes of the high schooler I once was, but being in my 30s, the idea of knowing my full potential is the worst possible thing I can think of.

One by one, like little confused penguins, the citizens of Deerfield succumb to the temptation of the Morpho machine, whether enthusiastically or begrudgingly.  Some hide their cards. Some throw them out.  Some get their picture taken with them and put on the wall at the market, like some kitschy restaurant’s tacky sports memorabilia.  Some residents even make their potentials into sweatshirts and wear them in the same brilliant shade of blue that the cards are printed on.  I get it, it’s a pretty shade and blue is my favorite color, but that’s a bit much for me. .

It’s a lovely play on temptation; a classic Tree of Knowledge situation.  No good can come of knowing what that card is going to say, but not knowing can feel even worse.  Dusty grows obsessed with the Morpho machine, often derailing his own lesson plans to discuss the machine with his students.  He finds a card with an upsetting potential in the trash and it sends him down a different direction, spiraling towards and against the Morpho machine at the same time.  People’s cards seem to have the same effect on them; the town residents go on making huge life changes after getting their fortune told by their modernized Zoltar machine.  Buying a motorcycle, William Telling in the front yard with your kid’s head holding the apple, or taking a full on life pivot to be the next David Blaine, it seems at every turn Dusty’s friends and neighbors are making major life changes based on a word or two printed on a card that came from a magical machine that only takes quarters.

I’m not clear how many quarters it takes to tell you your life’s ultimate potential, but it seems like it would be a lot

It all makes me return to my original question.  Not every potential can be great, right?  A rural town where every single person is destined for greatness would be quite the geographical oddity indeed, even moreso than the town that’s two weeks from everywhere.  Why would you ever want to know it?  If you’re a young person, maybe it would be interesting to know how far you could go.  Or maybe the weight of expectation would rest on your shoulders like Sisyphus’s rock, a daily burden to be carried until the end of time.  If, like me, you’ve got a few decades under your belt, why would you want to open the door to what could have been?  What could ever be printed on that card other than a road map to pain?  All you’ve got are two possible answers.  Your life is all that it can be.  Your life is not what it could be.  Sure, if you’re happy in where you are, an elusive state of being so hard to find, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even an attainable goal, finding out you’ve reached your potential could be a comfort.  Although, it does beg the question; if you are content with how your life is going, what does it matter what some card says anyway? You could just be happy the way things are and never look for any external validation. But even if only one percent of you wanted more or wondered what could have been different or had any regrets, how could knowing that where you are, what you are, is as far as you could possibly go be a good thing?  And if it’s not, if you find out you could have been or still could be more, you’re faced with either the realization that you’ll never reach your greatest potential or you have to weigh blowing up your life to reach it.  Or still, and possibly even worse, do you decide that your potential is something you won’t strive for, something you’re not willing to throw away everything you’ve built, not willing to fundamentally change your understanding of yourself for?  Do you settle for the life you have?  What does it mean if you decide to change?  What would you leave behind? Who would you leave behind?

I know I don’t need to know, but I just need to know. Don’t I?

How can you even boil down a person’s life potential to a one or two word statement printed on Vistaprint’s card stock?  How do you sum up a person’s life into a business card that you can sit around and compare with others?  It can’t be possible.  There’s no way the nuance and facets of a person’s life could be summed up in a book, not even an Infinite Jest sized tome; people are far too complex to be made into a business card.  You’re not your fucking khakis, you’re not what a card says you are or can be.

But that’s the brilliance of the show.  Even having said all that, knowing what I know, feeling what I feel about the Morpho machine, stating unequivocally that there’s nothing good that can come from inserting your quarters into that machine, I know, I just know, I’d be tempted by it.  I’m not sure I’d be able to hold my curiosity.  I know that I don’t want to know if this is all I could be.  I know that I don’t want reassurance that my life will never improve, I get enough of that from that annoying voice inside my head.  People are striving for better everyday, in all walks of life, whatever better means to them, and it’s hard work.  There’s no magic turnaround, no card that can make it happen.  But at the same time, knowing that it’s out there, that some machine is capable of telling me that I’m going to become a best selling author (or at least I’ll finally finish my novel) or I’ll argue in front of the Supreme Court or that more than the five people I send this blog to will read it, I’m not sure I’d be able to keep myself from finding out what that destructive little card will say.  In the face of such temptation, what saint among us could possibly resist?  The Big Door Prize, at least after watching the first three episodes, is not the feel good romp that Ted Lasso is.  It’s not the deep, lore-laden mystery of Severance.  It’s not the story of someone struggling to pick up the pieces like Shrinking.  It’s a story of people tearing themselves apart in pursuit of what could have been.  Of temptation overpowering their better angels.  And I don’t know what they’re going to find at the end of it all, but I want to find out.