A list which is to fill you with delight, like a menu. It is definitely not a todo-list to feel guilty about.

Erased key art Made in Abyss volume 1 cover

Erased

This is an anime series about an adult who hates his life and realizes that he ruined his chances of happiness by doing his childhood wrong. But don’t worry, there’s time travel! He ghost-possesses his child self, and then he and his friends intervene to stop some seriously dark shit happening in his small-town.

My anime pick of 2017.

Made in Abyss

This is an anime series about kids who notice that adults are useless (at best) and decide they need to spelunk I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Hell all by themselves. Well-written, legitimately distressing peril ensues.

My anime pick of 2018.

Worth the Candle

A story about a kind-of-milquetoast teenager being transported into a fantasy world that bears an uncanny resemblance to the dungeons and dragons games that he’s been running. Perhaps it is only I who connects so hard with this, but holy shit I connect with this really hard. Incredible worldbuilding, excellent plot. Protagonist gets better. (Written by Alexander Wales, if that sweetens the pot for ya.)

This is my fiction pick for 2019.

Erogamer

This is HPMOR but it’s about sex and being unattractive but having hope for the future. Mildly life-changing in the way that HPMOR was.

This is my fiction pick of 2018 (and note that 2018 was a bitterly contested year for fiction.)

Practical Guide to Evil

Worm, but fantasy. Huge, sprawling webfic with adequately intelligent characters. This is a universe in which narrative tropes apply as probabilistic laws, and everyone is aware of that and working to exploit them.

Feels pretty Young Adult in the first book, but it gets better. Gets worse again later, too; YMMV.

The Dark Wizard of Donkerk

If you like alexanderwales, you’ll like this. He wrote a big book! It has all of the excellent worldbuilding and well-reasoned magic systems we have come to expect from notorious A.W.

Shadows of the Limelight

Another Alexander Wales fic. A world where everyone has a superpower, and the strength of that superpower intensifies depending on how famous or infamous you are.

People pursue incentives rationally.

The first two Madoka Magica movies (4 hours in total)

These two movies, “Madoka Magica Puella Magi: Beginnings” and “MMPM: Eternal” are the supercut of the Madoka Magica anime. This is about a group of high school girls who make a contract with an alien entity, empowering them to fight evil. It is common to say “wtf is going on” for the first two hours.

These two movies are, together, my favorite christmas movie.

The Northern Caves

“An online fanforum tries to understand a fiction writer’s incomprehensible last book.” Death and cosmic horror ensue.

Bears the classic Nostalgiabrist stamp of slow, brooding prose and being a little up its own ass, but this one worked for me.

Homestuck

Ah, Homestuck. A story/forum game about a group of 13-year-old friends who accidentally annihilate the universe.

It gets tolerable around page 50, and enjoyable around page…500? 1,000? There’s 10,000 pages, though, plus twenty plus hours of movie, plus 200,000 words in the books, plus 100 plus hours of music, plus twenty hours of gameplay, plus ten years of convention culture. It is a sprawling juggernaut sincerely without compare.

Promised Neverland

Literally the darkest setting I’ve ever encountered, uh, bar none? You will watch this, and think “yeah, I know something bad is coming”, but it was executed really really well and something very bad is coming. Very intelligent, rational characters doing lethal-stakes counterintelligence games against one another.

My anime pick of 2019.

The Samurai Jack Reboot (Season 5)

This was some engaging-ass storytelling. Genndy Tartakovsky is really, really good at making tense, compelling scenes with no dialogue.

It’s not necessary that you’ve ever watched Samurai Jack before, and indeed it’s perhaps better than you not.

Mind Control University

A rational, intelligent, Lawful Good protagonist with a life-defining fetish for mind control is invited to a multiuniversal battle royale. Incredible worldbuilding ensues, with very intelligent characters being clever and ruthless at one another.

This is great. (This is also very horny.) I want to play the videogame of this.

Cordyceps: Too Clever For Their Own Good

“Someone wakes up in a mysterious facility with no memory of how they got there. This turns out to be the ideal state of affairs, and is swiftly ruined.”

…and then it actually delivers on that tagline, which I found delightful from a craft perspective.

Kokkoku: Moment by Moment

Basically a rationalfic anime about a family who has a magic ability to stop time for everyone but them.

It defies common anime tropes about “the villain has to be evil, and also needs to lose composure and start maniacally laughing sometimes”. Characters make intelligent choices sometimes, even.

Primal

Ugh, maybe I’m just a slut for Genndy Tartovsky’s stuff, but Holy shit, after every episode of Primal I have to sit down and just process for like fifteen minutes

The show has no dialogue; the show is not especially subtle. The show hits hard, every episode, evoking the blunt terror of a deeply unpredictable world.

A Daring Synthesis

Imagine a Worm crackfic, with the standard crackfic protagonist; an absurdly overpowered memelord spouting off disaffected one-liners.

But now imagine that only the protagonist is like this, and everything else in the world is not a crackfic, and they are in fact weirded out and cringing at the behavior of this clown.

And then imagine that the collision of the OP Coolguy Protagonist with the real world is very bloody and disquieting as Reality Ensues, and this collision gives him PTSD and teachable moments, and he starts to apprehend what a regrettable bozo he is…

This story is somehow, despite all odds, the Actual Best worm fanfic. I think this is the funniest story I’ve ever read, in terms of comedy-per-word, beating out Pratchett, Harry Potter and the Natural 20 and the FimFiction Hard Reset.

(Stop reading at the end of Book One, though. I mean it.)

Also worth your time

  • Harry Potter and the Natural 20
  • Hard Reset (FIMFiction)
  • The All Guardsmen Party

Worm fanfic:

  • Camera Shy
  • Weaver Nine
  • Cenotaph (of course)

Humpermonkey’s Ghost Stories

Sure, you know about Military Sci-fi. But do you know about Military horror?