This year we wanted to take a play from every extra-long Twitter thread of self-love, but having our writers focus on their incredible work from this year. So here are 26 stories selected by their writers, showing off their immeasurable talent with short explanations of why they have selected these pieces.

We love our writers. And here’s some of the best of their writing this year.

The Burnt Offering

The Feels

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I like this one partly because I dreaded writing it, because I had no idea how to go about tackling the subject matter, and partly because I think about the idea of stories becoming manifest in reality a lot and, paradoxically, it is nice to have some of those thoughts on paper at last. - Stu Horvath

What happens when a horror story tries to manifest in the real world?

Documentary Sunday

The Bleeding Edge

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I am really proud of the extra research I did to contextualize my review here. - Megan Condis

The FDA has failed for decades in its duty to oversee medical technologies, with women disproportionately falling victim.

The Heavy Pour

New Gods

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Every now and then I like to step outside my own obsessions and make a little fun of them (and myself). Fandoms can be toxic and conventions can be grating, but each year I go to NYCC I find people of all ages as cheery as children. Ultimately, it's worth it to find the magic in the mundane. - Sara Clemens

New York Comic Con is a monument to hype with amusements deliberately designed to part fans from their money and/or time, but Sara would hate to miss the fantasy.

Here's The Thing

I Hate My Dream Job

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I've ranted and raved about most of this nonsense privately, but it felt really good to finally get it out in the open. Cathartic, even. - Rob Rich

After years of dreaming of getting paid to review videogames, Rob finally got that chance. Then, after almost a decade, he realized that he hated it.

Assassination Nation has Blood in its Teeth

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I like the imagery I pulled for this piece, about seeing a movie on the last day it was available in theaters, a movie about rage and violence and men being terrible and women finally getting to fight back. - Amanda Hudgins

The moral of Assassination Nation is that high school boys are terrible and you should kill them.

The Harmful Misconceptions Behind We Happy Few

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I'm still shy about sharing my "hot takes," but the ignorance fueling We Happy Few's development lit a fire under my butt. I just had to highlight what I thought was an injustice in representing mentally ill people, being one myself and all. - Alyse Stanley

Compulsion Games’ recent release rebukes psychiatric drugs in its attempt to build a commentary around them.

This Mortal Coyle

Top Ten Characters I Hate

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I enjoyed the change of pace writing about characters I hate instead of characters I love. And being mean to characters whose feelings you can't hurt is fun now and then. - Deirdre Coyle

September 2018 is the first anniversary of This Mortal Coyle and, to celebrate, Deirdre Coyle lists ten characters that make her blood boil.

 

Writer’s Choice: Favorite Unwinnable Stories 2018
No best of the year list is complete without a shout out to some of your other favorites, so we asked the writers to select some of their favorite pieces that are on the site from other writers. (Some of these stories were self-selected by the writers for the above section, so we just combined the commentary)

The Unstable Sexuality of Joji

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This piece is so so so so good. It delves into the emasculation of Asian men and the odd sensuality of Joji, who is so out of it and so comfortable in his sexuality, that it seems almost attractive. I wish I wrote this piece, but I'm not capable of doing that, so thank you Amanda. - Khee Hoon Chan

He’s got a dangerous sort of attraction, a wild romanticism that calls out for attention in ways that the standard Asian male stereotype isn’t necessarily ready to handle.

The Kentucky State Fair

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Amanda's writing is as refreshing as iced cold sweet tea. A fellow southern queer myself, I really connected to her experience, especially the dichotomy between how her grandparents were and the memory of them she still wishes to please. And her writing is really just so, so good. She could spin a tale out of nothing and I'd be riveted. - Alyse Stanley

I’m one of those rural queers you never hear about. You haven’t heard of me, only of the places I’ve been.

Analyzing the Historical Context of The Last of Us Part II’s Violence

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Brilliant through and through. Planning on assigning it to my graduate students next year. This line in particular is so so so good!: In the pursuit of portraying a realistic world, The Last of Us Part II actually reproduces a version of the world dreamt up by colonial administrators and the academics who aided in their destruction of cultures around the world. A world where violence naturally takes over, proving that central governments are the only way for humanity to organize themselves. I have seen no signs that the game tries to address the historical implications of this representation. However, this setting has a lot of potential to explore different kinds of ideas. - Megan Condis

Colonialism haunts the post-apocalypse.

The Uncomfortable Thoughtlessness of Spider-Man

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It opened my eyes to an aspect I hadn't considered, that despite doing my best to look critically at games, the fun of wheee and whooo swinging had completely eradicated. To me, all the very best writing does that, it teaches you something, but without necessarily taking on the tone of admonishment. - David Shimomura

I love how David always challenges how things in games are portrayed, and this is just another example of that. - Jeremy Signor

Spider-Man works hard to portray Peter as a guy good, but it fails to find nuance in incarcerated populations, foreigners and the ecosystem of New York itself.

here’s 2300 words on twilight and new moon

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This headline is an obvious undersell, a deceptive dare to get me, the non-Twilight demographic, to engage. From there, Amanda strips away whatever preconceptions one might have of the kidult vampire series, for fans and otherwise, like a surgeon peering into an arrhythmic heart. It's a compassionate but exhaustive series of incisions that splays open the relationships that center these works without resorting to side eyes or plaintive pleas. Amanda tackles this work for what it is without resorting to notions of value, making a case for meeting these works on a level beyond titillation, for Twilight and popular culture in general. This article made me want to watch Twilight movies, which brings me great internal confusion, the highest mark of critical clarity I can think of. - Levi Rubeck

Twilight at its core, is barely functional as a romance, but deeply fascinating as a tragedy where two distinct cultures interact and implode around each other.

Procreation of the Wicked

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A blood-curdling breakdown of a middling game through the lens of a more established and deeper rooted body of work. - Yussef Cole

“They rip him apart as he grins, nerve-endings aflame with the liquor of pain, finally accepting an eternity of obliterative bliss.”

Another Look

Hood Cyberpunk

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It was one of those pieces where the idea wormed its way out organically and made for a fun writing process. - Yussef Cole

I loved the way this piece used personal experience to illustrate a broader point about a major blind spot in the narrative perspective of not just a game, but an entire literary genre. It nails everything that good games criticism should be. - Ben Sailer

How the genre's formative works focus on white men, and what it could mean if they didn't. - Deirdre Coyle

Cyberpunk stories don’t generally want, or need, to change society. It seems, rather, that they’re perfectly content partying in the rubble.