BW Media Spotlight’s Best Of Year 15

I need to double-check my numbering. I’m sure I’m off somewhere. We’re heading into year 16 of the site, but I thought Jake & Leon was heading into year 16 and that started almost a year into this site. Being off by a month is messing with my math. If this is year 16 that should be year 15. If that is year 16 this should be year 17. Shouldn’t it?

November 16th of 2008. Earlier that year I was stuck home recovering from Crohn’s disease causing inflammation that put me in the hospital. Twice. During the first recovery I discovered blogs like Slay Monstrobot Of The Deep, Comic Coverage, Siskoid’s Blog Of Geekery, and others. After the second recovery I realized I was writing comments that were way too long. Clearly I had things to say, as a lover of stories and storytelling and a goal of being one myself.

So it was that BW Media Spotlight, taking the name from my school time fake comic company BW Comics, was born. In recent years I’ve made actual BW Comics content, including a weekly gag comic, some video content, and would love to do more…if I could stop going to the doctor or being sick for long enough. That sounds worse than it is, but the distractions are just really bothering me this year, when I hoped to be a lot more creative than I ended up, not being able to create the workflow I had hoped to by now. I still enjoy doing this site, but there’s more I’d love to do and thus far haven’t been able to.

So it is anniversary time once again, and that means it’s time to go back through a year’s worth of posts, whatever the count is supposed to be. Let’s look at the best of this year’s content, from November 16 of last year through today (the actual anniversary is Saturday, but that’s Saturday Night Showcase time) and pick out my favorite reviews and commentaries through the year.

• MatPat Tries To Save The MCU…But I Have Some Notes: Before leaving the Theory channels (now he’s not even on GT Live, the only show he still ran), Matthew Patrick did an episode on what Marvel Studios should do to fix the issues of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I added a few thoughts of my own.
• The Original Beep The Meep Story: After the less interesting TV adaptation came out, I went back to the actual comic story as part of my Scanning My Collection series too compare the original to the remake.
• 6 Amazing Heroes…In A Wheelchair: Speaking of Doctor Who, returning showrunner Russell T. Davies undid Davros’ mutation stating that he didn’t want people to see someone in a wheelchair as “evil”. That’s dumb for a host of reasons, one of them being I can’t think of many actual villains in wheelchairs in fiction. Now heroes I had no trouble finding.
• Who Is Murdering Cinema: In this three part article (each word a different link), I responded to a video by Patrick (H) Williams going over why the cinema is dying. Part one is the video itself, which was so long I gave readers a break before reading my response, which ended up needing two bonus articles. In part two, I looked at his various “suspects” and went over where I agreed and disagreed with him. It was in part three that I brought out my own list of suspects. It was a long discussion but in my opinion worth having and being that long.
• Why I’m Done-ish With Doctor Who: Doctor Who was one of my favorite shows growing up. A friend and I made our own comics. I still enjoy the Big Finish adventures, the novels, and the comics. The relaunched show itself has not been what I wanted when it first started, missing elements I liked about the original, and now I really am not interested in the new show because Disney and Davies have basically drained everything I loved about the series out of it.
• When Adult Movies Became Kids TV: Why is it okay to adultify kids shows but not okay to kidify adult ones if they’re still really good stories?
• Suicide Squad: Kill Your Childhood Heroes: In a game where you play as the DC villains, whose mission to kill the Justice League is necessary to save the multiverse, the villains act exactly the way I expect them to. That’s why I hate it.
• What IS A Magical Negro?: From my Trope Shark series, when the Society Of Magical Negros movie dropped its first trailer, I looked at the origin of the trope name the movie got it’s title from.
• DiDio’s Darker DC (Still) Dominates: Dan DiDio himself may be gone, but the things he brought to the main DC comic universe are still in effect.
• The Continuing Damage of Modern Epic Storytelling: When every story is a large, universe-destroying threat, what used to be an awesome important story is just mundane. Awesomeness should never feel mundane.
• The Highs And (Mostly) Lows Of Hollywood’s Union Crisis: I hate that I had to talk about the current political climate as much as I have this year, but it’s getting harder not to, just as it’s getting harder not to discuss the culture war…which is what the activists want provided you support their point of view. 2024 seemed to be the year of union strikes in Hollywood, as so many different unions forced their writers, actors, and video game voice actors to petition for new contracts that supported the union leaders strikers. I looked at the real victims of the strike, and it isn’t the money people.
• Reassessing The Spotlight’s Future: With all the issues I’ve had making deadlines this year, plus the big reassessments and retirements on YouTube dominating at the time, I thought it was a good time for me to do my own thinking about what I want this site to be going forward. Pity I wasn’t allowed to do any of it. Can I be done seeing doctors and needles for a while and get to actually making stuff? Please?
• Japan Also Has Adaptation Issues: The suicide of a manga creator after the fallout of her complaining about how her work was adapted brought international attention to the fact that it isn’t just Hollywood who can’t seem to adapt anything right when they don’t want to.
• Mitigating The Mitigator: To prove what I meant earlier about being forced to discuss the culture war and current sociopolitical climate (I don’t use big words to show off but because they’re fun to say), here’s a story in which a man thinks that wiping women out of the Marvel universe is a good thing…and why that’s stupid culture war bullcrap written by a militant feminist to make men the bad guy.
• Dear Skybound, Please Don’t Kill Optimus Prime: An open letter to the new comic home of Transformers to give us at least one main continuity where Optimus Prime doesn’t go through the death and resurrection nonsense.
• They’re Remaking The NeverEnding Story…And I’m Okay With it: I try not to be a hypocrite. The NeverEnding Story is my all-time favorite movie…and it’s not a good adaptation of the novel. As someone who defends getting adaptations as right as possible, I don’t mind them doing a proper adaptation, even if I end up not watching it. Wish I could say the same for certain other adaptations and fans of the bad ones.
• Anthony Mackie: The Falcon Vs Twisted Metal: This is only on the list in light of other discussions recently. I’m not going to blame the actors for adaptation failures. That’s on the directors, producers, screenwriters, and maybe the casting director. I will, however, call an actor out when their defense of adaptation failure doesn’t make sense.
• Silver Surfer And Wiki Research: If I ranked these, this would be near the top of the charts. While the usual suspects do wiki research to find the thing they want to defend their bad decisions, I showed them how I can prove them wrong just using wiki research. It’s like trying to beat them at their own game. Note for one section: this was before the reveal that Doctor Doom was in fact coming with the Fantastic Four MCU movie. I did the same bit later going over the history of the Crow franchise, because wikis are only good research material if you use them right.
• Do We NEED A Live-Action Scooby-Doo Series?: Especially when the trial balloon being floated was for a drama instead of a comedy. The answer of course is no, and the article explains why.
• Investigating And Adjusting James Gunn’s Supersuit: Thus far the things that have been teased about the upcoming DC Gunniverse comes with notes but not yet pessimism. I’m hoping the end results waylay fears, but look where Marvel has gone and this is the same guy who wanted to age up Scooby-Doo. I’m not as hopeful as I want to be. For this, the first official images of David Corenswet in his Superman outfit were put out and…there were issues. I tried to work out a few with my limited photo editing skills, but before going live someone did a much better replacement. Actual set images didn’t quite help one way or another.
• The Current State Of Batman Is Odd: Absolute Batman hadn’t even been teased yet and already I was questioning how DC was treating their supposedly top character.
• The Warner Brothers Animation Situation: With arguably the largest animation library in the US if not the world, why is Warner Brothers Discovery not doing anything with it? Since that article was written Boomerang has been announced as shutting down streaming with rumors and theories that the TV channel is next, and none of the other things I’ve discussed have changed much, plus Max is still taking down shows, with Tubi and MeTV Toons picking up all the slack, and the money that goes with it.
• Celebrities In Adaptations Today More Interested In The Role Than The Character: And I complained this year about someone else’s too long title? Like I said earlier, I don’t have a problem with a character defending a role they played, depending on what that actual defense is. I’m not on their case for enjoying a part, but it’s clear that for most actors they want to play a role (sometimes as themselves) rather than play a pre-existing character. This came up again later in the year with Amandla Stenberg’s response to The Acolyte being canceled, which is where I referred back to an older article and dubbed it officially (for this site) the “Titans Effect”.
• Why The DCAU Should Be Allowed To Rest: With Disney Plus resurrecting the 1990s X-Men cartoon, there was talk that they could do the same thing with the DC Animated Universe, especially Batman and Justice League, maybe Superman and Static. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, and I make the case that you shouldn’t.
• The Recast T’Challa Remix: Here’s a rare opportunity for me. When the #RecastT’Challa hashtag rose up again I was actually smart enough to link to my older article on the subject. The host of a Black Panther podcast actually responded to the article, and I responded to the response. Don’t worry, he liked the article.
• In The “Shadow” Of Assassin’s Creed: The sad part is Ubisoft just keeps getting the taste of shoe leather because they can’t stop making their situation worse when it comes to Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Later articles would further showcase their failure to promote their game while pissing off every gamer in Japan and even the non-gamers. There’s not learning your lesson and there’s purposeful ignorance.
• Recess: The Next Bell–Modern Disney In A Nutshell [Part 1] [Part 2]: While I enjoy looking over writer’s guides (as of this writing I’m doing the original Star Trek TV show guide) I haven’t had the chance to go over a failed pitch. While I wasn’t a fan of Disney’s Recess when it aired on ABC, I was aware enough of it that this pitch just didn’t feel right to me, as it has “modern audiences” written all over it.
• Brand Loyalty Vs Fan Loyalty: “You aren’t a true fan unless you like this” was the battle cry of brand fans even if the end product was terrible. Now the corporate types and Hollywood elitists who think they “improved” Star Wars are using the argument to champion their cause (themselves), and I look at how that comment has always been a load of Bantha fodder.
• Japanese Media Under Assault: As Western audiences turn to Japanese manga, anime, and video games for actually trying to tell stories over “sending a message”, the usual suspects have opted to go over Japan. I guess we only care about “Asians” when they’re from China. As proven by taking the ideology out of the Chinese version of the movie and poster.
• Building A Better Heroine: Easy, really. Just do what made heroines great in past stories. I’ve done enough lists to prove it works, and they will have company.
• Why Finn Shouldn’t Be A Jedi: Rey’s problem wasn’t being a Jedi, it was giving her a poorly managed character arc. Finn didn’t need the Force, just a better arc, as I demonstrate in this article.
• The Suicide Squad Obsession: One good movie in a sea of garbage (including the previous Suicide Squad movie that bombed) and suddenly I can’t get away from these a-holes.
• The Three-Way Media War: In a battle for the future of entertainment, the studios, creators, and fans all seem to want something different. The end result is nobody’s happy. Fans hate the work, creators hate the fans, and studios are spending more than they get back. And neither of them can figure out what they’re doing wrong on their side of the battle.
• What Today’s Disney Can Learn From Walt Disney: What is the modern Disney company doing wrong that Walt Disney did right? Pretty much everything. That’s why he succeeded and they keep failing.
• Please Save Webcomics From Hollywood: Running out of main comics to ruin…somehow…could webcomics be the next thing to make poor adaptations of because they saw a way to rework their scripts to vaguely resemble this actually popular thing?
• Superheroes Are Outsiders, Too: If the attraction by modern writers to the villain is that the villain is an “outsider”, then I have a surprise for you. Here’s a list of five of the most popular heroes currently. They’re outsiders.
• Why Making The Sith The Heroes Are A Bad Thing: Like with a past article on the Transformers factions, there is a reason the Sith are the villains of Star Wars, and The Acolyte trying to make them the real heroes and the Jedi the real baddies is proof they don’t know the role of villains in a story.
• How Would I Do A Star Trek Series and What I’d Like To See From Transformers: Cyberworld: Two chances for me to flex my storytelling muscle. In the first case, I thought about what I’d do with a Star Trek story as a last-minute replacement for another article. So it’s not as fleshed out as I would have liked. For the second, TJ Omega went over what he wanted to see in the next Transformers for kids series, which inspired me to go over my own list of what I want them to do.
• The Dirty Little Secret Of Reviews: From the greats to two bit bloggers like me, if you think any reviewers are unbiased, I have news for you.
• The REAL Reason Fans Are Cheering The Fall Of The Entertainment Industry: It isn’t out of some cruel sense of payback. We don’t want them to suffer in life. We just want them off the properties, genres, and media formats we love because they clearly did not get the job for their skill and dedication to storytelling. Bonus if those people go out and attacking the fans for daring not to take whatever gruel they hand out and say “thank you”.
• Hollywood’s Favorite Colors: A problem in some genres more than others (and worse in some video game genres), but it seems bright colors are becoming passe despite all these amazing new Neo Ultra High-Def 4K+5-6 Super Smart TVs and projectors we have now.
• The Fantastic Versus The Mundane: Today’s game creators are trying to hard to make the fantasy world feel like our world, but with more dragons. It’s a problem reflecting other media and genres as well.
• How Trade Writing Has Ruined The Graphic Novel: While we talk about how writing for the trades have hurt the monthly “floppies”, we don’t talk enough about how trade collections and writing for that format has hurt the original graphic novel as well.
• Miller & Snyder: Why I Hate Their Views On Batman: Zac Snyder found a way to conduct a fanboy experience disguised as an interview with Frank Miller as they discussed Batman. And it made me sad.

I’m always worried I’m a bit more biased (told you) near the end, since they’re newer articles and fresher in my mind. Still, if you want to know if this is the site for you to subscribe and read, those are the best samples I can drop from the past year’s worth of commentaries. Did I miss a favorite of yours? What would like me to cover for next year? And did I indeed screw up my numbering? I’d like to hear your thoughts.