I'm thinking here mainly of things in 'popular culture' or at least easily accessible to the public. Like, a movie, a comic, a webcomic, a game, a mini. Also a book. But you can put in anything if you want to.
You can do music but I am a little music-blind so it might not do me much good (could help someone else reading though).
And as to original, I prize boldness, ferocity of imagination, strength and depth of feeling, colour and beauty.
What has been done that has never been done before? (Don't bore me with political jokes. This isn't about that.) What has been imagined most powerfully and most vibrantly? When the cultural history of that year is told in the future, what do you think will stand out?
Nothing that I did can be included. The further you can get away from the OSR circlejerk the more extra points you get. Anyone bringing up either the MCU or Star Wars films will be dragged into the street and shot.
TELL ME! TELL ME WHAT I HAVE MISSED!
'Train to Busan' is actually quite an original take on the Zombie movie Franchise. Very cool ride.
ReplyDeletePlus it's South Korean.
Also it wasn't new in 2016 but I discovered it in 2016 - it's called 'the Genius' and it's a South Korean game show like no other. The Hunger games but with Games inseated of killing. Really fun.
PLEASE write a novel in 2017!
Happy new year.
Speaking of south korea movies - "The Strangers" seemed to me to be fresh and surprising, switching seamlessly and without feeling too artificial between several (mostly horrorific) subgenres - demonic possession, ghost story, folklore, family drama, a little bit of zombie invasion... also, a very nice atmosphere and Kwak Do-won playing a convincing dork.
DeletePlenty of good indie games, from cerebral The Witness to psychedelic Adventure-Timey Zelda quasi-clone Hyper Light Drifter. Also Orwell, Oxenfree, Duskers, Inside... I no longer follow the intereactive fiction scene but there was at least Midnight Swordfight and its time-loop shenanigans.
The new version of Doom reinvented First Person gaming as less about angry grey military men with guns and more about acrobatically punching colourful demons in the face
ReplyDeleteNot exactly mainstream, but a thing I'm excited about.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.salon.com/2016/12/25/gift-of-the-fungi-mushrooms-yes-mushrooms-could-help-save-the-world/
Tldr; dude wrote a giant book on mushrooms being useful and it's great
Everything has influences but Kill Six Billion Demons' influences have never come together before in quite that way.
ReplyDeleteArrival was an incredible movie. I don't want to give anything away, but it's very much worth your time.
ReplyDeleteDavid Bowie put out Blackstar, an album about immortality and death, and then died. You should give it a go.
Headlopper is a fun graphic novel. Heads are lopped. Giant wolves, undead giants, regular people, all lopped.
if you can pick up Tec Chiang's book of short stories that has the tory Arrival is based upon.
DeleteIt's a cliche, but the short story is much better than the film, and a lot of the other stories he's written are gold.
I actually read a a few years ago, but thanks for thinking of it.
DeleteThe game Hyper Light Drifter, 2D action roleplaying game set in a colourful, high-tech dying earth, with music by Disasterpiece. It's a bit like Legend of Zelda as directed by M. John Harrison or something. Your character is a dying energy-swordsman with some kind of unknown, vaguely tubercular affliction. Dark Souls difficulty boss-fights and cryptic but rich world-building conducted without dialogue. Something of a quiet critical darling.
ReplyDeleteAlso: Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning. A novel set in the middle future, a "hard-won utopia" that has revived ideas from the Enlightenment much as the Renaissance revived ideas from Classical Greece and Rome. A vaguely golden-age future complicated by questions of metaphysics. The geographic nation is obsolete due to ubiquitous flying cars, replaced by seven philosophical affiliations - Humanist, European, Mitsubishi, Mason, Cousin, Brillist, Utopian. Neo-Epicurean family units. Written in a gorgeous 18th century style. The author is a professor of the history of ideas at the University of Chicago. It took her 5 years just to do the world-building. Her chief influences are probably Voltaire, Diderot, Alfred Bester, and Gene Wolfe.
ReplyDeleteSo, judging by comments here and on G+ so far, originality seems to be located mainly in indy computer games and South Korea.
ReplyDeleteOh as far as music goes: Run The Jewels, the alt-hip-hop collective continue to put out creative music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUC2EQvdzmY
ReplyDeleteNotes from the Shadowed City by Jeffery Alan Love. Beautiful illustrations with single sentence captions that tell the story of the protagonists journey to regain their memories while in a wonderfully strange city.
ReplyDeleteCaptain Fantastic is pretty cool. I don't know if it's been done before, whatever "it" does.
ReplyDeleteAlso Event [0], while very short and too expensive, is a videogame about interacting with an AI (think Zork + Hal 9000 + Cleverbot). It's not groundbreaking, but it's original and interesting.