Looking Ahead to 2021 - A Preview of This Year's Posts

Image description: Boromir from Lord of the Rings holding the asexual flag. If you're a regular on the blog, you know this is my blog header. Yes, I did make it, and yes, it is terrible - but it's still a great cover for the first post of the year!

Friends, fellow geeks, readers, lend me your screen time and take a few minutes to read this, my first post of 2021! If this is your first time with me, welcome! Thank you for joining me on my journey to analyze the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to asexuality in media and geek culture. If you were with me throughout 2020, then welcome back and thank you once again for helping make the first 10 months of my blog very special! I covered a lot of ground in 2020 and I am eager to continue my analysis in this new year. So, to kick things off, I thought I would give a little overview of the topics I am hoping to cover over these next several months. If my previous post was a retrospective of where I’ve been so far, think of this as a preview of where I hope to go – and where I hope you’ll come too!

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As I just said above, I took on a lot of topics in 2020. In fact, so much of the year was spent doing posts that I feel lay an important groundwork for further topics which I hope to expand upon this year. My “Tropes” series of essays, for instance, discussed the problematic ways non-sexual or non-romantic characters are often portrayed. I hope this previous analysis will allow me to spend 2021 doing a deeper dive into subjects such as how aphobia hurts allosexual people too, how media often frames a lack of sex or romance as a punishment for characters, and the ways in which non-sexual characters are often sexualized by the media they’re in or by the fans of that media. But more than just point out these and other problems, I also hope to start brainstorming out solutions to these problems – or at least what I personally believe might help on a small scale. I believe that starts with understanding the mechanics of what isn’t working and then thinking about what could work instead, which leads me to a new series.

Since I wrapped up my “Trope” essay series, I wanted to find another topic that could cover multiple posts like that one did and I’ve decided to do a series all about how to write asexual and/or aromantic characters. In 2020 I explored some of the many examples I’ve seen of writers portraying asexuality in ways that are misguided at best and destructive at worst. But how can those issues be fixed? What makes a good aspec and/or arospec character? I hope to use this series to offer my personal opinions – as both an AroAce person and a writer – on how to tackle ace identities in respectful ways, highlighting the do’s and don’t’s, discussing how to make ace characters of varying identities relatable, and even reflecting on how to write non-ace characters and stories that don’t invalidate asexuality. I’m very excited to dive into this weighty topic and hope both writers and readers alike will find it a valuable exercise.

In addition to this new series, I am hoping to do some posts that are similar in theme to each other, including posts about redefining certain concepts that have become staples in how we tell stories and how we view life in general. For instance, as a sci-fi and fantasy fan, I often find myself scratching my head to see stories full of dragons and magic or robots and spaceships, but where the same tired ideas about sexuality and relationships exist even in the far future or another world. As such, I want to explore that in a post I’m calling “Redefining the Future.” The sister post to that is planned to be my next post, in fact, which takes a broader look at how we as a society unfairly define the concept of love and the ways that definition should be redefined. I look forward to sharing my opinions on such a huge topic.

Speaking of topics that I consider to be big (slightly intimidating) undertakings, I am planning to do a post similar to my “The Dangers of Shipping” essay. That essay took a look at “shipping” (rooting for characters in a piece of media to get together romantically or sexually) and how this staple of fandom culture can push aspec people out of fandoms spaces. My similar post this year is going to focus on something a little more general in a post I am calling “The Trouble with Streaming”. Much like I still love shipping in spite of its problems, I am a big fan of streaming, but I really hope this post can shed light on how shows made specifically for streaming platforms can be alienating from an ace perspective. Often times, shows on regular television are bad enough, but they are still governed by certain limitations on what they can and cannot show. Streaming breaks down those barriers and thus can make the act of finding new shows on streaming platforms feel a bit like a minefield at times.

I promise, however, that not all my planned posts this year are going to be that heavy! I’m always striving on this blog to balance the intense stuff with things that are a bit lighter or more fun. For instance, I am hoping to do more book reviews this year, so stay tuned for those. Additionally, just as I did for my birthday last year, I am planning to do another Ace Safe Space list around my birthday this year, and I already have a special post planned for February 14th, my blog’s first anniversary! Plus, it would be remiss of me to not talk about one of my favorite “space ace” headcanons once we get close to a certain special day on the fourth of May. In fact, I want to use 2021 in general to talk to you about even more of the characters I headcanon as asexual and/or aromantic across even more diverse media, and to analyze the things we can learn from them. For instance, I have three Disney heroines in mind (hint: I’ve mentioned them in a previous post); I likewise plan to talk about why I wish a certain “wise” boy from a town called Hawkins would be asexual, and take a look at how his “upside down” journeys feel like they ring true from an ace perspective.

And of course, there will be plenty of old favorites thrown into the mix as well. It’s pretty much an inevitability at this point that I’ll be talking about Star Trek, and I am looking forward to an essay I have planned about other androids similar to Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and its related media. If you’ve read the blog at all, you know I talk about Data in a few posts; you also know, I’m sure, that I frequently talk about Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager, the titular ship’s half-Borg, half-human crewmember. I am planning on taking a deeper dive into the Borg this year, analyzing the terrifying Collective from an aspec point of view. Like all good villainous groups, the Borg can be looked at through a wide variety of lenses, and I look forward to using my own personal lens to analyze things like how the Borg weaponize loneliness, Seven of Nine’s interactions with the Borg Queen, and the way former drones like Seven, her young mentee Icheb, and other former Borg drones are treated by human characters throughout Star Trek.

Image description: The Borg Queen (left) with Seven of Nine. Analyzing the Borg is probably one of the topics of 2021 that I am most excited for.

So, whether you’re new to the blog or an old friend, I hope you can find something fun or exciting in these planned posts for 2021. I know I am certainly looking forward to the new topics I get to unearth, the old ones I get to revisit, and the challenge of diving into some of these intense but important issues. Naturally, as I go through the year, I may have to change up a few of these things, but never fear – all the posts I discussed will get covered eventually, even if they have to wait until next year or be combined with other topics. Overall, there are plenty of things to discuss when it comes to asexuality and aromanticism in media and I suspect I will be one busy asexual geek this year, but I am ready to tackle the challenge!