Fans of anime and fans of old movies have one big thing in common: difficulty recommending some of their favorite things because of certain ideas expressed within them. Nestled within your favorite anime about time-travel may be a flamboyant character who is the butt of many offensive jokes; your favorite actor back in the day might’ve done Othello in blackface; et cetera.
When you’re engaged with this type of media, you as an individual have to decide how much of this you are willing to put up with — not absolve, but acknowledge — before it starts to hinder your personal enjoyment. Sometimes the issues may be minimal, like the blackface episode of Mad Men. Sometimes it may be deeply ingrained within the core of the show, like every single police procedural saying that if you exercise your civil liberties you’re a criminal.
Here, then, comes the issue of how to go about telling people about a piece of, for the lack of a better word, “problematic” media you enjoy in a way that makes it clear you’re not condoning those themes and issues. How often can you say “ACAB but Fox Mulder is a little guy and it’s his birthday he’s a little birthday boy” before people start to wonder whether you really mean “ACAB”? (Actually this is a bad example because Mulder is going ACAB in the show.)
For example, you might try to recommend Dune to someone and they’ll tell you that Dune appropriates Middle-Eastern culture and you can’t argue with that because it’s true, but your carrying capacity allows you to overlook this in favor of watching Oscar Isaac on a big screen while theirs won’t. Now you might be wondering, “Shit, does this person think I’m a little racist because I like Dune?” You’re left with starting every conversation about Dune with “Yeah, it’s a little racist, but,” or you just never talk about Dune and/or to this person ever again.
Then comes the separate issue of when certain themes are present and despite personal grievances, enjoyment of this media at any level is seen as a passive endorsement. When is something so harmful it is past redemption? At what point do you have to ignore your carrying capacity and throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I will not be tackling this issue. This newsletter is about something completely different — when you enjoy something so much but it is, objectively, a bad piece of media and you feel bad about enjoying it. Your cringe-ass comforts, your Barney stuffed animal when kids your age were in their “Barney stinks” phase, your Justin Beiber when kids your age were in their “Justin Beiber sucks” phase, your Real Housewives phase before everyone got into their Housewives phase (RHONY early seasons and RHOSLC supremacy), et cetera.
In no particular order, here are six of them:
Succession
Here is the moment where I finally tell the truth: I have only seen season one of Succession, episodes one through eight.
I liked the show well enough and meant to watch the finale but I found out the twist and didn’t bother watching the episode itself because, at the time, I didn’t think the show was anything special. I enjoyed it — and still do, through the posts and texts of a select group of people whose opinions I respect or at least acknowledge — and I love shows with Themes and Narratives, but the hype always felt excessive to me.
And that’s the thing: somewhere around the second season, Succession suddenly exploded online. Back in season one it was literally me and one other friend who were out here saying “Hey, is Tom… unwell?” but all of a sudden, everyone was talking about how Tom was unwell. At first I chalked it up to Tumblr being Tumblr, but once I saw Maggie Haberman liking a Which Succession Character are You uQuiz, I knew something was up. (By the way if anyone knows what results she got, email me ASAP.)
Then, what inevitably happens when multiple people who are perpetually online get invested in a piece of media, happened: discourse. Watching Succession is an endorsement of capitalism, Roman is the most evil sibling for being mean to that poor kid and Kendall is the best sibling, Tom and Greg are not gay, Tom and Greg are fucking, Roman/Gerri is an abusive relationship, Shiv is the worst, this is a serious show with serious themes, this is a NBC comedy produced by HBO, et cetera et cetera. Succession, to me, started feeling less like a TV show and more like a global homework assignment.
I loved seeing my internet friends’ takes on the episode of the week but at a certain point, seeing every single person talk about the same thing felt like being in the middle of the ocean surrounded by saltwater when all I wanted to do was see Sarah Snook’s ass.
Recently a relative of mine who is slightly younger than me asked for TV show recommendations. I suggested Succession. She said she didn’t like it.
Sports Night
My favorite genre of TV show is “cancelled after one to two seasons because it was too niche.” This includes NBC’s Kings, FOX’s Pitch, Netflix’s The OA and American Vandal, and others. Normally I love recommending these shows because they’re a short watch and then I get someone new to join me in my complaining about the TV industry picking the worst shows to renew.
Sports Night is perhaps my favorite Aaron Sorkin property. It’s his first TV show, very clearly based on SportsCenter back when Keith Olbermann was with ESPN, but you’ll rarely if ever hear him talk about it. One of the lead actors, Josh Charles, is notorious (to me) for making multiple posts about how much he hates Aaron Sorkin.
If you’re familiar with Sorkin’s works, you know that his favorite thing is to have whatever issue his characters are dealing with be the single most important issue in the world that day. This works well for a show like The West Wing where the characters work for the United States Government but Sports Night is a show about a late-night sports recap show. A whole arc of an episode revolves around one of the leads making a bad joke about drugs and then revealing on-air that his brother killed himself. The other lead is going through a divorce and wants to seem cooler. The network is constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.
And yet, somehow, it all worked. It didn’t feel kitschy to me that everyone on the show talked about sports as if they were debating national security policy. It didn’t feel weird that they were constantly fighting for their lives because they were only third in their slot. Even the laugh track didn’t bother me. The whole thing was just a cute little underdog story about a group of people who take everything too seriously.
Later episodes get a bit… weird. A character goes to therapy and falls in love with his therapist. Another has to deal with his internalized issues while dating an escort. A third gets her heart broken when a man she falls in love with after ages of tension between the two leaves in the dead of night. The show tried to become as serious as it thought it was when the issues were lighter and the stakes lower. But try as Sorkin did, he couldn’t quite take the charm away from the leads every time they were onscreen together.
Dan and Casey are one of my favorite sitcom relationships ever — episode one has a scene where Dan declares his undying loyalty to Casey and vows never to leave him for anything, even to the detriment of his own career. Episode one! And it gets worse from there!
So, why won’t I recommend it? Simple: if you’ve seen one Sorkin, you’ve seen them all. If you’ve seen The West Wing, you’ve basically already seen Sports Night.
Mass Effect
Video gaming is an expensive hobby. Newer games can cost up to $60 and stay that price for ages. Used games are available in few places and often aren’t much cheaper. Not to mention consoles, which run up to $500 — assuming you can find one in the first place. Even PC gaming is starting to become inaccessible to the average consumer with newer games requiring specifications that most average computers and laptops don’t have. I’m fortunate enough to have an older brother whose taste in games is similar to mine so we can share console games and a Steam account, but I still had to wait several years for a Nintendo Switch sale to coincide with a Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sale (and I have 0 regrets).
Most times, the only person you can recommend a video game to is someone who is already a gamer and unless it’s a very niche indie game or they’re exclusively a Fortnite/Overwatch/League of Legends player, they’ve already heard of it.
In the Mass Effect trilogy, you start out as a space soldier working with aliens then promptly get thrown into a galaxy-saving mission. The majority of the games are a first-person shooter against robots, mercenaries, and space-zombies, but the other part is rooted in dialogue. The studio behind these games are known for their many dialogue options, but not quite for how varying those options are. You usually get three per conversation — messianic, just your average guy, and facist. Unlike many games, however, the dialogue does impact the story: characters may live or die by your words, people will see you differently if you’re kind or mean, and your in-game appearance can take on a darker tone.
This isn’t the reason I enjoy the games. To be honest, it’s more like Stockholm Syndrome than anything else. The strength of this series lies with its side characters, your “squadmates” who travel with you and help you fight the fight — literally and metaphorically. In the 90-ish hours it takes to complete the entire game, you see these characters change and grow and, sometimes, die. A shy scientist becomes a steadfast and feared information broker. Your class-clown pilot who hates people falls in love with an AI learning how to be human. A by-the-books soldier from the first game who hates you in the second returns in the third, asking for forgiveness and love.
Sometimes the dialogue is bad, the game tries too hard to be many things, the ending could be better, but despite all that, when you spend so much time with a character and see who they become, it’s hard to forget them. That said, 90 hours is a long time to spend on a series when you could be playing something much better and much more rewarding (like Disco Elysium).
The Magnus Archives
The sunk cost fallacy is, according to Oxford Dictionary, “the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.”
Where Mass Effect’s ending is a brief part of why I wouldn’t recommend it, the Magnus Archive’s ending is entirely it (aside from the fact that it’s a podcast and recommending podcasts is inherently embarrassing).
What starts out as a fun horror story about paranormal researchers with little clues about how the story will proceed devolves into a depressing and ultimately boring trek through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, trying to wrap up as many loose ends as possible before the end.
My personal theory as to why this went the way it did was because the creators were an active part of the fandom, specifically the Discord server. Long have I denounced this practice and proclaimed that the fourth wall between creator and fandom must be rebuilt. While it seems on paper a good idea to get feedback from people who like your work and being mindful of things like racism and bigotry, often times it ends with the creator changing their plot to appease the masses rather than sticking to how they originally wanted the story to end.
It’s not a bad story — I love how it starts at the middle, when all the fun stuff is over and only the beginning of the end remains but no one knows it yet — but I can’t recommend it for how disappointing the ending was to me.
Final Fantasy X
This game is the reason for this newsletter. The first time I played this game was in elementary school, while my brother and sister weren’t around because they didn’t want to risk me accidentally deleting their save files. I barely remembered any of it, however, until I recently replayed it on the Switch during a flash sale.
The first half of the game is honestly terrible. The main character feels shoehorned into the plot with no good explanation for why everyone wants him around, the romance between him and his love interest is similarly disappointing since neither character is developed enough at this point to justify any interest in either of them, the voice acting leaves much to be desired considering this is one of the first fully-voiced video games of the time, they invent a light-skinned but discriminated race, I could go on.
The second half is where things start to turn. It still starts off strange — a character is being forced to marry with limited explanation as to why this is necessary and also who the man is — but it’s clear the story is starting to pick up.
And then it does.
The game is centered around a group of priest-like people called summoners who travel the land on a pilgrimage to various temples in order to defeat Sin (subtle, I know), a monster who periodically attacks the land for unknown reasons. The religious figures of the land said it was because of people’s sins and that by repenting, they could stop Sin forever.
The summoners pray in temples to fayth, dead spirits who have not passed on and are able to be summoned by summoners in order to increase their strength and help them summon the Final Aeon — a being said to be powerful enough to defeat Sin.
Religion and death are big pieces of the game, often combining. In the second half, it is revealed that the patrons of this religion are all dead, just living spirits called “Unsent” who refuse to pass on and haunt the living. It’s also revealed that they were lying the entire time about the origins of Sin — the founder of their religion created Sin, in order to protect a ghost version of a city created by the dreams of its former inhabitants, but controlling Sin took a toll on his mind and it began to control him instead.
The first summoner sacrificed her husband in order to create the Final Aeon and defeat Sin, killing herself in the process. However, Sin instead took possession of the Final Aeon and slowly built up its strength to fight again. And yet, it is always presented to summoners that sacrificing their friends and themselves is the only way to move forward. One of the bad guys in the game actually sacrificed his mother for her to become the Final Aeon, then gave up on defeating Sin and dove deep into madness.
A religion that lies to its people and is controlled by ghosts, who encourage others to summon ghosts to protect ghosts all at the cost of real living people, and is defeated by deciding to abandon harmful tradition and focusing on the future not the past is a super fun concept, to say the least.
But my favorite part is the story of Auron. I can’t put it into words without having to describe the entire plot of the video game but if you love tragic stories and star-crossed lovers and trying to kill literal gods and devils in a futile effort to save the one you love, then you’ll love this guy.
I can’t tell you to go out and play this game. If the voice acting doesn’t put you off, something else will. That said, this is perhaps one of my favorite games ever, if only for the vibes.
The Fourth Estate
Me watching a bunch of New York Times reporters on TV in the middle of the night one day on little sleep:
Anyway, hope you had a good holiday season and I wish the best for all of us. See you in an indeterminate amount of time. ❤️
would have been disappointed had this not included sports night