Looking Ahead to 2022 - A Preview of This Year's Posts

Image description: A collage/moodboard, made by yours truly. The two flag pictures were obtained from Google Images, but the other two pictures are photos, also taken by yours truly. They seemed appropriate and on theme, so what better place to use them than on my first post of 2022?

 

Hello and welcome to my first post of the New Year! If you read my “Redefining Belonging” post – one of my last posts of 2021 – you saw me discuss my own personal dislike of the transition between one year and the next. But, despite those feelings, I am here today with a post that I’ve been looking forward to: a preview of topics I hope to cover on the blog in 2022.

Just as with last year, I acknowledge that not all of these topics may get covered this year. In fact, some of the posts I have planned for 2022 are topics I was originally going to cover in 2021 and ended up moving off due to the circumstances of the last few months. In general, I tend to shift my list of topics a great deal depending on a lot of factors, including timeliness of a topic, or new topics unexpectedly presenting themselves to me. I don’t doubt that will happen quite a few times this year as well, and thus a topic I mention in this post might end up getting moved off, dramatically altered, combined with another topic, or sometimes cut entirely. But for the most part, the posts I mention here will get their time eventually, and many of the topics I have tentatively planned deeply excite me.

Let me start with the posts I referenced that were supposed to be in 2021 that got moved to this year instead. I mentioned a few of these in the 2021 preview, chief among them being an aspec analysis of the Borg from Star Trek, which I plan to do around Halloween. October 2021 was an extremely bad time for me, and as such I didn’t feel up to doing the post then. However, I am still very excited to bring my analysis of the Borg to you this year, so look for that when we get into spooky season.

Another post I had planned for the end of the year was going to be called “Redefining the Future,” a look at how portrayals of the future in media are often limited by our modern-day conventions about sexuality and romance. In fact, I had planned it to be the last official post of the year (not counting the 2021 recap) to mirror the fact that the first official post of 2021 (not counting the preview) was also a “Redefining” post known as “Redefining Love.” “Redefining the Future” was pushed off for a far better reason – the fact that I desperately wanted to discuss the experience of seeing BTS in person, and so, to keep with the “Redefining” theme, the aforementioned “Redefining Belonging” post was born.

Because there are a lot of different topics that can fit into this theme, I’ve decided to make it a little miniseries this year rather than focusing on a longer series of posts like 2020’s Tropes series or 2021’s How to Write Aspec Characters series. As of right now, in addition to the two posts from 2021 and “Redefining the Future,” I plan to start and end 2022 with “Redefining Adulthood” and “Redefining Happily Ever After” respectively, both of which I’m looking forward to tackling. The former is something especially important to me and something I have been thinking about a lot lately. That will be my next post, so please look for that soon.

Another post that was pushed off for a very practical reason was an aspec analysis of Will Byers, a character in the Netflix series Stranger Things, which was pushed off simply because I’m trying to time the post around the release of the show’s fourth season. Due to COVID delays, we didn’t get season four last year, but we should be getting it sometime this year; however, we’ve yet to have an exact date. As such, that post is a bit of a floater, and will make its appearance either sometime before the fourth season or after it, depending on how things go, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Speaking of streaming services, you may remember my post about how streaming is a challenge for someone like me and the struggles I face trying to navigate something as simple as the Netflix library. Not long after I did that post, I heard about a service known as VidAngel, which works to filter out things such as graphical sexual content from shows on streaming platforms. I’ve never tried this or any similar service, but I thought I might, if all goes well, try it this year and perhaps share my thoughts on it here. This type of technology is something I believe could be very important to people like me, so I hope I can give it a spin.

Beyond TV and movies, though, I hope to spend part of 2022 with my favorite type of media – books! In 2021, I only did one Ace Book Review post and, although I can’t promise I’ll have the time to do all the reviews I have planned, this year I’m planning to read and review three books with aspec characters. All three of them seem very different from one another, so I’m hoping to find a diverse array of aspec characters to analyze as well. In general, I expect this year’s analysis to be full of diverse topics, some covering characters, some covering themes, and some even focusing on more real-world issues, such as some of my personal opinions on how to improve fandom spaces for aspec people.

Coming up in February will also be the blog’s second anniversary, so I hope to do a special post for that! In addition to posts like the anniversary post, I will once again be doing my highly subjective “Ace Safe Space List” around my birthday and am very excited to share with you even more media that makes me feel safe, understood, or happy. Another sequel post I hope to do is a follow-up to 2021’s “How Aphobia Hurts Allosexual People Too,” with even more ways I (and the allosexual people around me) believe aphobic tendencies create problems for all people.

In my 2021 recap post, I mentioned the fact that a lot of what I covered on the blog over the course of the year became extremely personal. Much of that was due to the circumstances of the year, but I think in general that trend will continue somewhat. Two pretty personal posts I’m planning for the year include an analysis of things that personally scare me as an aspec person (which will also be posted around Halloween) and a post about the things I’ve learned from the characters I headcanon as aspec (scheduled for around Thanksgiving). In general, the blog has always been, to borrow the wording of the previous paragraph, highly subjective. But I think 2022 will continue with that even more. It’s impossible to truly define “the good, the bad, and the ugly” that I advertise in my blog’s description, and when I do it always comes with a disclaimer, so I expect to be issuing a lot of disclaimers this year as I give my opinion on everything from “best” platonic relationships and friendships in media, to my opinion on whether aspec villains are good or bad representation.

All that and more await us in 2022. If you made it to the end of this post, please allow me to once again tell you how much your support means to me as I continue to grow and experiment with this blog. It’s hard to believe that in just over a month, The Asexual Geek will be celebrating its second anniversary. I can honestly say this project has had a longevity that seemed like only a distant dream when I started it, and being able to use it as a place to analyze and speculate every other week has been amazing. I am very excited for these posts, and I’m even more excited to have all of you on the journey with me. I hope you enjoy where the analysis takes us!