Alright, okay, that’s stuff with a central theme out of the way. How do I have more good articles from 2021 that I want to highlight still?
Because like I said, two days ago, 2021 was full of bangers.
- The most successful, in terms of hits, article I wrote all year was Being Asked If I Am An Egg.
- The article I’m probably the most proud of is the inexplicable-Nazi-featuring article about Henry Orenstein, who is kind of the original father of the Transformers franchise.
- I had an article about defining Himbos which I found fun to do, which I wrote so I could title something ‘Himbography.’
There was a host of fun stuff about churches, conspiracy theories and messed up things people believe, which included
- very important things (like what it means to resist vaccination)
- very unimportant things (the johnlock conspiracy)
- young earth creationists
- historical mormon artifact counterfeiting
- one of the weirdest zero-stakes Catholic cracker conspiracies
- Nazis (why did they show up twice) recruiting gamers (oh that’s why)
- the Mars Base no really
I wrote some articles that I’ve been meaning to write for a while, like an explainer on the grouping of online awfulness known as TERFs (and their cousins, the SWERFs and BLERFs). I wrote an article that waited almost a year to drop about Americans talking shit about non-American food culture. In greater media discourse, I dug into the Mikado, into the existence of sex scenes in movies, and into the coding of Garfield in media (and why Heathcliff is probably black).
There was also some delving into the characters of Akane Tendo, how she was represented in multiple iterations in multiple ways, and the varying distances from an original ‘source’ material. I wrote about the Yandere archetype, which I think is great and interesting, despite, you know, how they’re treated and executed. I also did a single inexplicably deep run down on the character Kaede, from Last Blade, which, you know, there’s not a big demand for that, but one person asked and that was great.
Finally, I had a goal in 2021 to write more about Bleach, and I managed to find room for four articles on that subject. There were two articles about couples in that story – The Tatsuhime Ship and the Soi Fon/Yoruichi ship. I also wrote about the way Bleach’s central metaphor (of your powers being a kind of sword) let you express and explore characters.
And… yeah. I think all of these articles are really good.
You should read them.