And here is my last Hugo ballot post! We have my nominations and votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. I should note that I was done with the comics back in June... and didn't finish the film/tv stuff until two days before the deadline. I find it easier to organize my reading than my watching, I guess. (I have linked the titles if I have written a review elsewhere, or if the work is freely available on the Internet.)
Things I Nominated
I don't read many comics right as they come out, so my ability to nominate things for Best Graphic Story is always pretty limited. This year I nominated the same thing I did last year... a My Little Pony / Transformers crossover comic! Seemed unlikely to me that The Magic of Cybertron would make the ballot, but I did my bit...I nominated two tv episodes in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), both episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks season 2 that I enjoyed immensely: "wej Duj" (Klingonese for "Three Ships"), where the lower-decks crew of the USS Cerritos are paralleled by lower-decks escapades on Klingon and Vulcan ships, and "First First Contact", the delightfully triumphant season finale. To my surprise and delight, "wej Duj" actually made the final ballot! It's the first Star Trek installment to make it since an episode of Discovery in 2018.
I also nominated some random Big Finish stuff I enjoyed, though I have no expectations that any of it will ever make the ballot. Two Torchwood audio dramas (The Five People You Kill in Middlesbrough and Madam I'm) in Short Form, and one Doctor Who audio drama (Shadow of the Daleks) in Long Form.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
The first volume of this series was a finalist in 2020, the second in 2021. This is the fourth and final; I didn't enjoy those previous volumes enough to feel motivated to read the third before this, so I just skipped it. (It's about people trapped in a TTRPG, and each volume focuses on a different writer who influenced RPGs. The first did Tolkien, the second the Brontës, and this one Lovecraft; it turns out the one I skipped did Wells, so maybe I ought to go back.) I found this hard to follow—too many characters, and even though it came out as twenty issues across three years, it's clearly meant to be read in one go. It seems to be trying to say something interesting about queerness and RPGs, but I couldn't follow the story enough to tell you what. The most interesting part was definitely the backmatter, where Kieron Gillen interviews people about the evolution of RPGs.
This is a webcomic, now released in print, that retells the story of Hades and Persephone with modern trappings. The comics language here uses a lot of manga conventions, and manga tropes dominate the romance story, too. Overall I enjoyed it well enough. Some good jokes, nice art, but sometimes I struggled to keep the characters straight, and the emotions are a little overwrought. This is clearly the beginning of a long story (this volumes collects episodes 1-25 of a serial that has run 200 thus far), and I am not sure it is really aimed at me, though the end promises a darker turn that I would be curious to see the repercussions of.
This is volume three of a series about the Arthurian mythos rising up again in modern Britain; I read volume one when it was a finalist last year. (I didn't intentionally skip volume two; I didn't realize I'd skipped an installment until there were a bunch of references to Beowulf in this one.) It's pretty fun stuff, with strong characters, good art, and occasional moments of genius... but like all the original Kieron Gillen comics I've read, I have this sort of vibe that he's almost but not quite as good as Brian K. Vaughan. Unfair but there you go.
1. Strange Adventures, script by Tom King, art by Mitch Gerads & Evan "Doc" ShanerAs soon as I finished this, it was clearly the best of the four Graphic Story finalists I had read thus far. Beautiful art, thematic complexity. There are snatches of greatness in, say, Once & Future, but this is the kind of thing this category ought to be rewarding.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Encanto; directed by Jared Bush & Byron Howard; script by Charise Castro Smith & Jared Bush This is (if you need to be told) an animated musical about a Colombian family who lives in a magical house, where each resident of the house has a magical power... except one. I really enjoyed this; it's a solid film with some great songs and interesting thematic beats. I really liked "Surface Pressure," about one sister's need to never stop doing what the family needs, and "Waiting on a Miracle," about the protagonist's desire to do something to help the family. It's a good depiction of the complexity of family dynamics, about how people want to contribute to a system that has disappointed them. I think it deserves awards, but I'm not convinced it deserves this award. Sure, it's got magic, but is it really in dialogue with the genre of science fiction and fantasy? Or is it more a contribution to the genre of children's animation? (if that makes sense) This is to say, don't let its low ranking leave you thinking I didn't like it. I just don't think it's in the core sensibility of what I seek to reward with a Hugo.
I have never been a Dune partisan. I largely bounced off the book as a teenager (though I probably would find it more digestible now), I have seen the Lynch film a couple times, and I remember enjoying the Sci-Fi Channel original miniseries. This adaptation is probably the best one you could imagine, with room to breathe due to the increased running time but also the budget not afforded the Sci-Fi Channel mini. It's impeccably cast, and like all Villeneuve films I've seen, it looks great. But I felt... somehow unmoved by it all. Magisterial, but I didn't feel invited into either the world or the characters' emotional lives. It's like you're at a remove the whole time.
Last year, my wife and caught up on Marvel films (at the time, Spider-Man: Far from Home was the most recent), and I felt like that was it: following Avengers: Endgame, there was nothing more I wanted out of them, and I was ready to move on. I haven't seen one since, though I guess I ought to go see Thor 4 in theatres given I saw the other three in theatres. All this is to say that I was actually quite charmed by this, which follows the Marvel origin story formula, but is a reasonably strong execution of it. It has a real sense of style and flair, a good soundtrack, some great set pieces, the best villain I can remember in a Marvel film for a long long time, and a totally gratuitous but excellent comic relief character.* On the other hand, I thought star Simu Liu was charismatic and likeable, but his emotional arc didn't really seem to be present, writing-wise. I really struggled with ranking this. Is it a better movie than Dune? I don't know. Certainly it is less ambitious, and do the Hugos need to award (what is by my count) the eighth Marvel origin movie? Anyway, as it often is, my tiebreaker was the question, "What am I more likely to rewatch?" And the answer to that question is definitely Shang-Chi.
Thankfully, this was the only complete-season finalist this year. I found this pretty fun at first: the sitcom pastiches are excellently done, and the language of television is abused to disconcerting effect. Moments where the camera angle suddenly shifts out of the sitcom standard, or the credits roll and things keep on going, or the crossing over of the better Quicksilver, are wonderful. Elizabeth Olson and Paul Bettany get to show off more here than in every Avengers film put together. Plus the episodes that are basically just sitcoms are very well done ones! I found this less interesting the further away it got from that basic set-up, however. There are a lot of characters who ultimately don't serve very important functions, narratively or thematically, and by the final episode, the show has abandoned its interesting meta play in favor of a somewhat-above-average Marvel punch-up. The sitcom stuff was ultimately a puzzle to be solved, not an idea to be explored. The idea that someone who lost her real family life and found solace in sitcom families might try to make her own sitcom family seems ripe with possibilities for saying something about family, but the finale doesn't go there, and it has none of the playfulness that characterized the rest of the series. Still, we have a number of episodes of really enjoyable stuff prior to that point, and I was definitely more involved than in Dune, and I would happily see this win.
Space Sweepers is a Korean space film, about space scavengers who end up in over their heads when they discover a robot with a hydrogen bomb inside it aboard a derelict spaceships... a robot in the form of a human child. Okay, look, it's not a great movie. The villain (played by Richard Armitage!) has no real motivation, and a couple of the characters' backstories feel tacked on, and I found bits of it confusing and/or clumsy. But, you know, group-of-underdogs-in-a-spaceship unite to do great things has basically been my favorite genre of sf film since Star Wars, and this is a charming example of it with a lot of heart. A special shout-out to the character of Bubs, who at first seems to be a quippy murderous robot, but is soon revealed to have extra dimensions. Is it really the second-best thing on this list? Probably not; I think on any objective measure of "good film" it goes below Dune. But would I be excited for it to win a Hugo? More than anything else on this list.
I didn't know much about this going in beyond that it was based on an Arthurian medieval text (one with which I am unfamiliar) and that it was controversially received. Well, I really enjoyed it: it reminds me of the kind of 1980s pre-Lord of the Rings fantasy film I might have randomly plucked off the shelf at Blockbuster as a kid, and been weirded out but entranced by, before the fantasy genre of film became codified as massive epics. Well, that crossed with a Tarkovsky movie! Beautiful, jarring, potent. Exactly the kind of thing I like the Hugos to expose me to (doubt I would have bothered otherwise), and the kind of thing I like to reward.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
I'm sure this was quite exciting to people who had been watching Loki, and indeed, there was some fun stuff in it: I liked Loki getting punched by Sif again and again. But, like, what is a "nexus event"? Maybe someday I will watch all of Loki, but until then, this didn't quite work on its own. My friend Christiana hates it when I evaluate tv this way, but I need some kind of limit. If I am obligated to watch the previous three episodes of Loki, am I not also obligated to watch the previous nineteen episodes of For All Mankind? And that's not happening.
As I always say, I stopped watching The Expanse during season 3 (not the show's fault), but since I read the books, I was mostly able to follow this out of context. It's another perfectly competent episode whose emotional beats might have landed better had I seen the previous nine episodes of the season, but landed well enough regardless, especially the bits with Naomi. The Expanse has made the ballot five out of the last six times, and this was the best Expanse finalist since "Leviathan Wakes."
This did work on its own, to my surprise. For All Mankind is an alternative history show where the Space Race continued unabated after the 1960s. This episode is set in the 1980s, and America has a base on the Moon, Apollo-Soyuz is going ahead, there are missile platforms in space, and so on. I am a sucker for shows about competent people working together to solve difficult problems, and this is one of them. (I particularly liked Wrenn Schmidt as Margo Madison, director of Mission Control.) There are lots of good moments in this, a show about how even in dark times we can work together, and it very much made me want to go back and watch the first two seasons. Except, you know, it's on Apple TV+ (surely one of the less necessary streaming services; I signed up for a week-long free trial to watch this).
1. Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x09: "wej Duj", written by Kathryn Lyn, directed by Bob SuarezLike I said above, I nominated this. This was a great episode of the overall strong second season of Lower Decks, with the story of the lower-decks Cerritos crew paralleled with their counterparts on Klingon and Vulcan ships, all coming together in a satisfying way. The character of T'Lyn, the Vulcan prone to "outbursts," was particularly fun, as was security chief Shaxs doing pottery. It's Lower Decks at its best, and you bet that if a show I actually watch gets a Hugo nomination, I am going to rank it highly.
Overall Thoughts
* After the Mandarin reference, I reminded my wife of the events of Iron Man 3, which we saw some time ago. I figure that was it: we explain how this move relates to the other one for the continuity nerds in the audience, then move on. Little did I expect that five minutes later Ben Kingsley would turn up! If you told me that as originally filmed, his character left them before they went through the portal, I would believe it; I don't think he interacted with a main character again after they crossed over, so you could have totally beefed up his role in reshoots.
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