Babblings of a Muppet-Loving Freak

I did okay with movies, seeing 33, largely because I pushed to see some of the Oscar nominees last year, looking forward to a fun, entertaining night. Gosh, thanks, Will Smith.

Anyway, leaving aside movies I rewatched, here are things I saw for the first time in 2022 in a vague order:

Encanto - Brilliant. I cannot state strongly enough how much I loved this movie. It is now my favorite Disney film, which is saying something.
Cruella - I was stunned by how much I liked this. Honestly, it was one of my favorites for the year.
Tick, Tick...Boom! Another one I loved (Miranda had a really good year). I remember when Larson's work started catching fire, and the tragedy that he died very young is still enormous.
Drive My Car -Phenomenal film. I loved this one.
West Side Story - It's like trying to redo the Mona Lisa. Except it's Spielberg. Which means he made a really good Mona Lisa.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - This needs to win an Oscar for something. Seriously. This thing was a ride.
Don't Look Up - The problem with this satire? It isn't satire. It's a little too close to pure realism at this point, which depressed the hell out of me.
Being the Ricardos - Kidman was amazing at Lucy.
Flee - Yeesh, this poor kid.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - This may actually have been better than the first one, which is saying something.
Attica - What a nightmare. I'd never heard of this.
Luca - Very cute. Nicely done overall, good plotline.
Black Widow - This needed to be released before Endgame somehow. Occasionally the tone changes gave me whiplash, but I did like it.
No Time to Die - I really liked Craig's turn as Bond, and this was a good capper.
Dune - I saw this on my TV, and I think it really needed to be seen on a big screen, kind of like Lawrence of Arabia.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye - I felt really bad for this woman by the end, which was an accomplishment. Also, Andrew Garfield had a very good year.
Summer of Soul - Generally very good, but the line about killing white people made me a little nervous.
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special - Just madcap enough, in my opinion.
Ant-Man and the Wasp - First, Pfeiffer has aged really well. Second, Ant-Man is ridiculously underrated. I really like his character.
Captain Marvel - I like Carol. Having her wander around most of the movie not knowing who she was kind of felt off, though.
Robin, Robin - This was up for short film, and it was really cute.
Spider-Man: Far from Home - This was... odd? I liked it, but I was expecting the tone to be different after Endgame.
Thor: Ragnarock - Finally got around to seeing this one. I'm not a huge fan of Waititi's take on this. It's a little too screwball comedy when I expect something almost Shakespearean with Thor and Loki.
The Lost Daughter - I felt like something flew over my head in this one. Excellent acting, but I never quite understood the point.
The Queen of Basketball - I didn't know anything about this woman. She led a very interesting life.
Nightmare Alley - A few bits of this I honestly couldn't watch. This was intense.
King Richard - The point made at the Oscars stands: the Williams sisters were the top tennis stars of all time, so somebody made a film about... their father.
The Batman - I could stand to see more of Pattinson's Wayne.
The Power of the Dog - Excellent acting, but ultimately it isn't something I'd ever see again.
The Long Goodbye - I don't know whether the sound mix was off-kilter when I watched this. It was frightening, though.
Three Songs for Benazir - Maybe I'm just not good with documentary format in general because this also felt strangely incomplete.
Lead Me Home - This documentary felt unfinished somehow.
The Windshield Wiper - Meh. Didn't really stick with me.

Okay. This year has been highly unusual. Like, off the charts. Not only is this the first time in a long time that I had no dead spots, I also completed several multi-chapter works, participated in two ficathons and pinch hit in one of them, and did an entire Advent calendar from Dec. 1-25 without missing a day (I did pull up "Sleeping Loony," which I wrote a long time ago but never posted to AO3 before, to fill in some spaces).

The upshot is I wrote ::drumroll:: 87 fics (not including one post on here on my head canon of Loki, but charting chapters of works separately). I have never written anywhere close to that in a year before. In 2009 I wrote 44, and 2008 was 40. Those were the next two highest, and I was double that. Yikes.

( And they are... )

So, what changed? I'm honestly not sure. I think letting myself play with new fandoms helped. Three of these were for ficathons. Two others were inspired by other works (and "Sunset and Sunrise" spawned a fic by someone else, the first time that's happened that I know of other than one person using the format of MFTAM for a different fandom). I did comedy, angst, parody, romance, and sort of let things be flexible rather than rigid. I have more ideas that I can go back too, which I'm trying to remember to write down.

I also found I like to finish an entire multi-part fic before I start posting it. I might go through and edit it as I post, but I like the idea that it's basically done before I put it out there. I did that with "Hearts and Lies," "Incomplete Erasure," and "Apples and Eternal Love." I did it the other way with "Game Night" and "Christmas Special Night." Both can work, but those are more free-form rather than plotty, similar to MFTAM.

I've also come to the conclusion FF.net is just this side of dead, but in a weird way. People do read there, but comments are really sparse. AO3 does have kudos (though only 1 per fic, regardless of number of chapters), so that helps some, but it does seem like people don't do feedback much anymore. I tend to think Tumblr's format had something to do with this.

On the whole, it's been a heck of a year fic-wise. This one went pretty well.

ETA: Oh, and also, since he seems to be my muse at the moment, here's the not-really-a-fic, Weird Headcanons for Loki.

Stolen from an article posted by petzipellepingo. There are some weird omissions on this list. Bolding ones I've read in total, italicizing ones I've read in part.

( list )

Still seems weird that the diary of Anne Frank, Life and Death in Shanghai, and Origin of Species aren't on here.

ETA: Okay, the website stipulates these written in English since 1923, which rather belies the "all-time" title, but I think Life and Death in Shanghai was originally written in English. It does explain Frank and Darwin, though.