Looking Ahead to 2024 - A Preview of This Year's Posts

Image description: Another self-designed-on-Canva design made specifically for this post, this one once again featuring the asexual and aromantic flags together, styled a little like cards.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the blog! As stated in my 2023 wrap up post, I took a slightly longer holiday break than usual to really get my head in the game for a new year of posts, but I’m finally back to kick off 2024’s blogging. As always, I’m starting the year off with a preview of what you can expect from my posts this year. Each year always provides me with exciting opportunities for blogging, but I admit I’m looking forward to this year’s roster of posts even more than usual, because I think I’m going to be diving into some topics I’ve never had the chance to cover before. There are a lot of new things I want to discuss and a lot of new opportunities to expand upon previous topics in new ways that I think will be fresh, unique, and (hopefully) enjoyable.

As always, there’s a very strong possibility that not all of these topics will show up this year. As I move throughout the year of blogging, new topics of conversation tend to present themselves, and as such I often move my scheduled posts around, sometimes even bouncing a topic to another year. This year, there are at least three posts on my list that were supposed to be in 2023 but got moved to this year to make room for other analysis, so I don’t doubt the same will happen with at least a few of the posts mentioned here. I even have a few back-up posts at the ready, so I certainly haven’t run out of topics! If you see a topic here in this post that I don’t cover this year, worry not – it will definitely be covered eventually or even in an alternate form at some point.

To start off the planned year of posts, I’m actually getting back to basics – that is to say, I want to discuss some basic concepts that I feel I maybe haven’t done enough deep diving on. For instance, as a blog about asexual and aromantic representation in media, I am almost always talking about, well, representation. But what exactly is representation? What do I mean when I discuss “the good, the bad, and the ugly” in that topic? I realized that, for as much as I discuss this topic, I’ve perhaps not drilled down to the base of this subject as much as I could, so I’ll hopefully be correcting that oversight right out of the gate.

From there, I’m excited to go into another post in my ongoing “Redefining” series, this one called “Redefining Romance,” which I hope serves as an opportunity to unpack certain conventions in the romance genre. This post will appropriately be situated around Valentine’s Day, which some of you may know also marks my blog’s fourth anniversary, so naturally I will be doing an anniversary post of my choosing to celebrate another milestone I never thought I’d reach. Of course, I always enjoy the opportunity to explore love of all kinds around Valentine’s Day, so in addition to the romance post, I’ll also once again be exploring more of my favorite friendships.

As always, this will be a diverse bunch, but even more than that, it will also include some characters I’ve never discussed before on the blog, which has me very excited. The reason for that is simple – you all know I love talking about the many Star Trek series in existence, but near the end of 2023, I finally sat down and watched both seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. This is probably one of the best pieces of Star Trek media I’ve seen in a long time, and I absolutely fell in love with its characters and their dynamics in a way that I’m really excited to talk about. However, just like some of my other favorite Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds wasn’t always perfect, and there are other characters/relationships I feel they could have done better with – or which I at least think beg to be explored and analyzed in more depth.

Of course, because I’m me, Strange New Worlds won’t be the only Star Trek I’m discussing this year, and in fact I have a few Star Trek centric posts planned (try saying that three times fast). You may recall that in 2023, I tackled a request from one of my readers that I talk about Odo the Changeling from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. While writing that post, however, I realized that there was so much to discuss about the Changelings as a species in general – not just Odo, but other Changeling characters throughout the series – and how they’re portrayed. I decided this begged to be a separate post, and I am really looking forward to bringing you my more complete analysis this year. In a similar vein, I also plan on looking at another noteworthy Star Trek species and how sex/romance are portrayed for them – the famous Vulcans… and their slightly more infamous pon farr. That should certainly be an interesting post and one that may even require a second post to cover everything. We’ll see!

Many of these Star Trek posts or character deep dives excite me because they allow me to explore newer elements of an old fave of mine. Also in the spirit of exploring old faves, I’ve made it something of a personal mission to re-explore a piece of media I loved as a teenager – the BBC’s modern-day adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock. It’s been many years since I’ve watched the series, but Sherlock was very important to me back in the day, not just as a show and a fandom, but because it was one of my first introductions to asexuality as a concept, due to fans pointing out the character’s asexual and/or aromantic vibes. I’ve mentioned the show once or twice on the blog, mostly to point out these vibes and how the creators of the show fell down in understanding these things; however, this year I’d like to actually revisit the whole series as a fully-realized aspec adult, rather than a teenager just coming to understand my aspec identity, and see if it holds up. I’m both deeply excited and a little nervous, but definitely looking forward to this one.

However, not every post topic can be pleasant and, just as in previous years, there will be a few topics I cover that are somewhat intense or difficult. The first among these will be a discussion I’ve wanted to have for a while, detailing how I feel the aphobia in our culture and media has the potential to be deeply harmful to young aspec people, using my own experiences from my teenage years as a template. I also want to discuss how certain media portrayals of aspec identities, as well as fandom and societal reactions them, feel like a form of gaslighting, looking at how/why these things happen. By contrast, these are not posts I’m looking forward to, but I think they are necessary, so I hope they will help give context to certain issues that I feel are rarely addressed.

Of course, on a lighter note, I also hope to continue my tradition of reviewing at least a few aspec books this year. Book review posts are ones that always tend to be cut first – often due to the time commitment they require. However, last year I was proud to be able to do four review posts, including one for a trilogy of books. This year, I may tackle my biggest challenge yet and review an entire series of books that feature aspec character(s), time allowing. If I find that reviewing an entire series is too much of a time commitment, I hope to at least do two or three regular stand-alone books during the year. But again, time will tell.

Honestly, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my planned posts this year. But, to avoid this post getting as wordy as my other posts (and to allow there to still be some element of surprise this year), I’ll stop there. As always, thank you so much for your constant support and encouragement. Whether you’ve read or shared these posts, used my analysis in your own analysis, or like the links when I post them on Facebook, I am so grateful to everyone involved in the life of this blog. I look forward to bringing you new analysis in future and hope that even one of these topics excites you as much as they excite me. See you in the next post!