• PERSONAL

2020 Media Wrap-Up

At the beginning of 2020, I decided I wanted to be better about finishing things. I have a very bad habit of seeing a new book, game, or show, and starting it instead of working on ones already in progress. To help keep me on track, I decided to record every piece of media I had in progress, and write down what I finished in 2020. My roommate and I also made a pact that if either of us wanted to buy a new video game, we had to beat 3 of the ones we owned first. Which means that now that 2020 is over, I have fun lists of everything I finished during it!

A few notes before we get into the lists:

  1. I’ve ordered lists alphabetically, not in order of when I finished or what I liked most.
  2. For tv shows, anime, comics, and manga, I marked down what chapters, seasons, issues, etc. I finished if I didn’t finish the entire thing. Since some are ongoing or very long, I figured it’s a distinction worth making!
  3. If it wasn’t the first time I’ve read, watched, or played something, I’ve noted it.
  4. If I explicitly decided to not finish something, I’ve marked it down in the completed lists but with a note of when I abandoned it. (I think this only happened with one piece of media.)
  5. Just because I finished something, it doesn’t necessarily mean I recommend it!
  6. After each list I’ll post a paragraph or two with some quick thoughts on my favorites of the year.

Alright, let’s get into this!

Books

  • A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle - #1)
  • Dawnshard (The Stormlight Archive - #3.5)
  • Dune (Dune - #1)
  • Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive - #4)
  • The City & The City
  • The Shadow of Kyoshi (The Kyoshi Novels - #2)

Overall, I didn’t really read a lot of books this year, which makes sense given that this is the year I really got into manga and comics and so a lot of my reading time was taken up by those. On the upside, I really liked every book I finished this year! If I had to recommend you pick up one out of any of them, I’d recommend Dune or The City & the City. Dune because it’s a classic that I finally tackled this year (after trying once back in middle school) and I think it holds up, and you can see it’s influence on a lot of our current sci-fi. The City & the City because the city it takes place in is incredibly fascinating and slowly unraveling how the society works is a very good time. I picked it up after seeing it compared to Disco Elysium, which was one of my favorite games of 2019. Mysteries set in possibly supernatural cities are very much my jam, and while I think Disco Elysium is the better experience of the two, The City & the City is still a great read.

Movies

  • Children of Men
  • Dragonheart
  • Dragonheart 2
  • Dragonheart 3
  • Dragonheart 4
  • Dragonheart 5
  • Enola Holmes
  • It’s a Wonderful Life (rewatch)
  • Lu Over the Wall
  • Onward
  • Palm Springs
  • Pom Poko
  • Summer Wars
  • The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
  • The Tale of Princess Kaguya
  • Velocipastor
  • Weathering With You

Okay, so first off, please don’t judge the amount of Dragonheart on this list. I watched all of them with friends online, and also, they kind of rule? Except for Dragonheart 2 (which was kind of actually bad), they’re very fun cheesy fantasy movies.

My favorite live action movie on this list is probably Children of Men. My roommate had me watch it with him (he’d already seen it), and it gripped me in a way a movie has not in quite awhile! Incredible movie. I also really loved the almost… war reporting style the film was shot in sometimes? (I have no knowledge of cinematography, sorry to anyone reading who does and is screaming the actual terms at me while reading this.)

On the animated side, I watched my first Masaaki Yuasa film (Yu Over the Wall), which was incredibly animated, even if I felt the plot weakened slightly in the last third. I also watched through a few Madhouse films (Summer Wars and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) which I both enjoyed very much, and kept working my way through my collection of Ghibli movies (Pom Poko and The Tale of Princess Kaguya). I was very excited to watch Weathering With You after Your Name. made me a big Makoto Shinkai fan a few years back, and while it was incredibly beautifully animated, the plot didn’t feel quite as coherent as Your Name. Overall still a very good movie though!

TV Shows

  • Avatar: The Last Airbender (seasons 1-3) (rewatch)
  • Better Off Ted (season 1) (rewatch)
  • Community (seasons 4-6)
  • Letterkenny (seasons 1-9)
  • Letterkenny (seasons 1-2) (rewatch)
  • Nathan for You (season 1)
  • Over the Garden Wall (season 1) (rewatch)
  • Person of Interest (season 3)
  • Seinfeld (seasons 2-9)
  • The Legend of Korra (seasons 1-2) (rewatch)
  • The Queen’s Gambit (season 1)
  • The X-Files (season 1)
  • Wild Wild Country (seasom 1)

Aside from rewatching a lot of comfort shows this year, I finally finished Community and Seinfeld. Both incredible comedies, definitely try them if you haven’t yet! Seinfeld in particular was fun to watch because I watched it with my roommate over the summer. He had already seen the show, so it was fun watching him get excited for a particular episode when it popped up, and there’s something very calming about falling into a rhythm of watching a show every night or two with a good friend.

The other show that was very big for me this year was Letterkenny. I went in very skeptical towards the premise, and within the first 5 minutes I was 100% sold. All of the characters are very charming, and it’s nice to have a show where the main character is just a really solid dude and never really strays away from that for drama. Plus, a show that is 90% wordplay and 10% interpersonal drama is right up my alley. Give me more puns, always.

Video Games

  • A Short Hike
  • Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout
  • Control
  • Dishonored
  • Dishonored: Knife of Dunwall (DLC)
  • Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches (DLC)
  • Hades
  • Katamari Damacy
  • Kentucky Route Zero
  • Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (DLC)
  • Monster Train (beating Covenant 5 = “beaten”)
  • Ratchet and Clank (2016)
  • Rock Band
  • Rock Band 2
  • Sagebrush
  • Superhot
  • Watch Dogs 2

My roommate and my agreement turned out pretty successful for completing video games this year! There are too many games on here to really talk about, so I’ll just say that you should 100% play Kentucky Route Zero. Spooky Americana is just, chefs kiss. Also, Rock Band rules. (I can finally play Expert guitar consistently!)

Anime

  • Carole & Tuesday (part 1)
  • Dororo (season 1)
  • Fire Force (abandoned partway through season 1)
  • Great Pretender (season 1)
  • Haikyuu!! (seasons 1-2)
  • Hyouka (season 1)
  • JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders
  • JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood
  • Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (Season 1)
  • Naruto (seasons 1-5) (minus filler)
  • Naruto: Shippuden (seasons 1-7) (minus filler)
  • Noragami (seasons 1-2)
  • Silver Spoon (seasons 1-2)
  • The Promised Neverland (season 1)
  • Tower of God (season 1)

As you can see from the fact that Naruto and JoJo are on here, I’m continuing to work my way through big shonen shows. What can I say, I’m a big fan of the power of friendship and weird powers. For the past few years I’ve been getting together once every week or so to watch anime with a couple good friends, and long-running shonen anime has been very fun to watch through with them. It’s like the equivalent of getting together to watch wrestling every week, but with cool animation and eye-rolling at anime tropes. (I love anime, but man can the fanservice be frustrating sometimes.)

If I were to recommend watching one show off of this list (especially if you’re not into anime), I’d recommend either Carole & Tuesday or Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! Both are concerned with the creation of art (music and animation, respectively) and are very sweet and charming. Also, very light on frustrating anime tropes!

Ooh, or watch Silver Spoon. It’s about a boy attending a boarding school about farming, and it’s very cute. And also by the author of Fullmetal Alchemist, one of my favorite shows!

Comics/Manga

  • Bakuman (1-176) (finished)
  • Blue Flag (chap 1-26)
  • Burn the Witch (chap 1-4) (finished)
  • Chainsaw Man (chap 1-55)
  • Demon Slayer (chap 52-205) (finished)
  • Giant Days (vol 1-14) (finished)
  • Let’s Play (chap 1-127)
  • My Hero Academia (chap 191-295)
  • My Hero Academia: Vigilantes (chap 1-92)
  • Nisekoi (chap 1-229)
  • One Piece (chap 1-999)
  • Silver Spoon (chap 75-131)
  • The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal
  • The Promised Neverland (chap 1-181) (finished)
  • Tower of God (chap 1-417)
  • Witch Hat Atelier (vol 2-6)

Like I mentioned previously, I got very into manga and comics this year. It started with me getting impatient and wanting to see the rest of the story of some anime that either weren’t caught up to the manga or were never going to catch up due to being canceled, and then it just slowly transitioned into me reading a bunch of manga and comics.

The one that surprised me the most was One Piece, which I very much did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. Granted with how popular it is I should have figured it was probably good, but the plot and worldbuilding was a lot more planned out and in-depth than I expected, and I am a huge sucker for worldbuilding. Very fun read, and now that I’m caught up I’m excited to see where it goes!

And those are my lists of completed media in 2020!

I’m aware that my emphasis on finishing things is probably a little odd given that finishing media that you don’t enjoy isn’t necessarily a good thing, so I will try to be mindful this year of falling into that trap in my quest to finish things I start, but this process has been a nice limiter on my urge to hop around to every new and shiny thing. Plus, on the whole I think I enjoyed a large majority of what I finished in 2020! Overall I’m pretty happy with how this media tracking experiment went, and so I think I will be doing it again for 2021. Which means if you enjoyed this wrap-up, you get to look forward to another one of these posts on New Years Day in 2022.

Thank you very much for reading! If you would like to discuss any of the media I finished this year with me, feel free to shoot me a message on Twitter, I’d love to chat!