The Asexual Geek's 2025 Recap
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| Image description: Just a pretty photo of the Aurora Borealis I found on Canva and edited to show off some AroAce friendly colors, perfect for my year-end recap |
As of writing this post, it’s only twelve days until Christmas – which is absolutely shocking, and I guess it means that, if I had a true love, I’d be getting a partridge in a pear tree. Well, I don’t have a true love, so I guess I won’t be sorting out days of birds and random people showing up at my door (which, as an introvert, is a relief). And, since I don’t have those things to give you in these last several days before Christmas, I’ll instead offer up a final post to end 2025 on, and one final chance to reflect on this weird and wonderful year.
Every year, popular apps and websites always seem to recap the year its users have had. One of the most noteworthy comes from the music streaming site Spotify, but all of them seem to have one nowadays. For instance, the graphic design website Canva recently revealed to me that my most frequent activity on the site involves photo editing, as the cover of this post so amply proves. The end-of-year wrap-up for Discord, the site I use to talk to many an internet friend, informed me that my most used emoji is the “rofl” emoji (which depicts a laughing smiley face tipped to its side), followed shortly thereafter by the purple heart, used frequently when discussing BTS related matters. YouTube, meanwhile, was quick to show me that I am in the top 0.1 percent of viewers for… my own YouTube channel. And when it’s revealed in January, I’m interested to see how much Audible calls me out for relistening to my favorite books over and over again, such as previous Ace Book Review subject, Firebreak.
All that to say, recapping the milestones of the year has become something of a time-honored tradition and, because 2025 has meant a lot of things to me, I feel like it’s a very good year to recap in a similar manner. I wish I had a memory as good as those apps and websites so I could tell you the best parts of every month and every moment, but alas, especially as we get to this time of year, the more my brain starts to resemble that of a goldfish. But that doesn’t change the fact that on a personal level, a project-focused mindset, a fangirl perspective, and more, there’s been a lot going on this year.
Here in blog land, I spent a lot of the year revisiting common topics – second parts to previous posts, usual franchises being analyzed in depth, new Ace Book Review posts, and of course my fifth anniversary post. Among these familiar posts were also a few unexpected subjects, some of which were very exciting for me to discuss and some of which were less so. Among these more expected subjects, however, were some new ones, and throughout the year I found myself going to new places or being inspired into new topics I never would have guessed I’d be covering, some of which I believe turned out quite well. When it comes to the post on the blog with the most hits, that honor goes to a post from May, in which I asked the question of why it seems so hard for media to respect aspec identities (spoiler alert – many of the predictions I made about the character of Sasappis in Ghosts in that post turned out to be completely accurate).
But the real core of the year was undoubtedly the summer, both here on the blog and on a personal level. In June, for instance, was the long-awaited return of the Korean band BTS following the completion of their military service, something which felt like it would never happen back when I was crying over it in 2022 and 2023. Then, in July, I had the amazing opportunity to see the band’s oldest member – Kim Seokjin – in concert, which was easily the highlight of my year. Getting to see someone who means so much to me with one of the most important people in my life (my mom) was something I will cherish forever; the fun and freedom of those two concert days, and the joy they brought to my life will never fade. Later in that same month, I also had a far less fun concert experience closer to home when I went to see Coldplay, and while the concert itself was amazing, getting heat exhaustion and almost blacking out was far less fun. But hey, at least it gives me an interesting story to tell.
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| Image description: Me with Jin at the concert... or, at least, me with a photo op prop of Jin. Is he actually that tall? Signs point to yes. |
However, the summer also contained some of those very interesting blog posts I alluded to earlier, as well as the continuation of some of those themes. In June – after BTS’s return but before concerts – I took on something of a unique challenge in which I attempted to talk about two characters whose identities are not my own but who I believe offer us important lessons about representation regardless of what our identities may be. One of those characters was Hyun-ju from the second season of the Korean survival thriller Squid Game.
Hyun-ju is a transgender character, and I believe she offered some of the best examples of representation I’ve ever seen, both for trans characters and in general, and I did an entire post exploring the ups and downs of her character throughout the second season. At the time I did that post, the third season had not yet aired, and so I knew there was a component of the unknown in her character arc and how her story would end in the final six episodes of the third season. Seeing how that story ended turned out to be a big part of my summer, and something I’m still thinking about here at the end of the year for so many reasons. [spoiler warning for season three to follow!]
The second episode of season three introduces us to a brutal game of hide and seek in which some players are designated to hide and some players are designated to find and kill the hiders. The taggers are given knives to complete this brutal task; the hiders are giving nothing to defend themselves, but instead are given keys. These keys unlock doors that allow them to traverse parts of the maze they find themselves in, with each hider having a different shape of key – circle, triangle, or square – meaning that a single player can only unlock certain doors. They are also told that there is an exit, and that if they find the exit or survive the round within the time limit, they’ll make it through.
Hyun-ju is one of the designated hiders, and early in the game she finds her friend Geum-ja, as well as the pregnant Jun-hee – both of whom are also hiders – and brings them along with her to protect them. When some of the taggers attempt to attack Geum-ja and Jun-hee, sensing them as easy targets, Hyun-ju is there to defend and protect them, taking down their would-be killers with her bare hands. As it turns out, each of them has one of the necessary keys, and in an act of ultimate trust, the other two women give Hyun-ju their keys for safekeeping. This becomes even more profound when Hyun-ju eventually finds the exit and realizes the door requires all three keys… which she has.
It's at this point that Hyun-ju could have been selfish and gone through the door, but in a beautiful moment of true character growth, she turns away and returns for Geum-ja and Jun-hee – as well as Jun-hee’s newborn, whom she gave birth to as they hid in one of the rooms. As I mentioned in my post all about Hyun-ju, we see in season two that she occasionally makes selfish decisions, such as voting to continue the dangerous games because she knows how much she needs the money in order to start a new life for herself. But following the death of her friend Young-mi, Hyun-ju is committed to getting out of the games no matter what and making sure her friends can do the same, so it makes sense that she returns for them. It is here, however, that she killed, so close to being able to escape.
In a season full of huge and very affecting deaths, I admit Hyun-ju’s was one of the ones that hit me the hardest for so many reasons. I already loved her character, but I came to love her even more while writing my post about her, and so to lose her a few days after I finished that post was terrible. However, something I found very encouraging was seeing how many people looked on Hyun-ju’s death as a heroic sacrifice and considered her a brave hero because of it. In my posts about her, I mentioned how deeply I wanted aspec representation to follow the model of trans representation we saw in the second and third seasons, and although her death was tragic, her life and the heroism she showed is something I want for aspec characters in future. And, more than just wanting it for aspec characters, her example of bravery, loyalty, and devotion to her friends is something I want to model in my own life. [End of spoilers]
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| Image description: A poster for Squid Game season 3, featuring Hyun-ju, a character I will never forget. |
I believe nothing really changes on a birthday, and that even milestone years like thirty don’t feel much different than twenty-nine did or than thirty-one likely will; but I have noticed one strange attribute of being thirty, and that’s the feeling of wanting to value my own self more strongly than ever before. Whether or not this is some strange magic of hitting this age milestone, I couldn’t possibly tell you, but in my own life, I know there’s a lot more behind it than merely the inscrutable. I know how much I am shaped by my experiences – by being aspec, by consuming the media I often discuss here, by taking away lessons from said media, by interacting with people and learning from them, etc. And I’d like to believe that I’m growing immensely thanks to all of these things and thanks to my own desire to do so.
I think that notion sharpened to an even finer point a bit later in the year when I got to see my childhood friends again for a long girls’ vacation. I think it’s only natural when childhood friends get together to spend a great deal of time reminiscing and discussing things from the past, which of course we did in abundance, and which definitely made me feel like an adult. But the thing that truly made me feel like an adult when I was with my friends was realizing just how much I’ve grown. I got to see my besties last year for a wedding (again, talking about feeling adult), but since it was a busy weekend, we didn’t get to spend a lot of time just existing in one another’s company. And, although I have seen one of my besties more recently, the whole group technically hasn’t been back together to hang out since before the events of 2020.
Finally seeing them again after so long made me realize how much I’ve grown over the past five years. That’s not to say I’m done growing – there’s still a lot I want to accomplish and grow into – but I’ve definitely matured, especially in ways that are not often societally prized but are nevertheless very highly prized to me. Additionally, since 2020 is when I started this blog, I know running the blog over the years since I’ve seen them has contributed to that growth, which is something I will never take for granted. This all brings me to something I want to discuss to wrap up this otherwise packed and impactful year.
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| Image description: My blog's icon, made back in 2020 when this whole blog was still just an idea. |
As you know if you’re a regular reader of the blog, I’m often very open about my process. I have no problem admitting when certain post subjects take a lot out of me to write or when certain topics demand a lot of my time or when a year of blogging – or even just a year of existing as an aspec person – has been tough. In that same spirit of honesty, I will admit that I thought about throwing in the towel on this blog numerous times throughout the year. I even admitted to people close to me that, at times, I’d come to hate working on it.
Throughout a lot of 2025, I found myself getting frustrated by the topics I was working on, resenting the amount of time they were taking to research and write, or hating the slow, painstaking work of proofreading, adding links, and putting in pictures for posts I knew wouldn’t get much traction anyway. This blog is easily one of the most personal projects I’ve ever worked on, and so hating it felt like an exercise in self-hatred, perhaps reflective of my own mental and emotional states more than anything that was wrong with the blog itself. But it definitely hasn’t always been easy to want to sit down and write a post when it feels like I have countless other things I can and should be doing.
For that reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want the blog to work in the future. I have been running this blog for almost six years at this point, and I have explored so many diverse topics that I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time. In fact, so many of the topics that I deeply wanted to discuss when I started the blog have yielded so many more posts than I even imagined, allowing me to keep diving deeper into the important messages I want to express. But at the same time, as proud as I am of what I’ve managed to accomplish here, I also feel very limited by my own ability.
From my earliest years of identifying as AroAce, I’ve wanted to talk about what it’s like, and to share my thoughts and experiences, especially as an aspec girl seeing the issues common in popular media. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, a lot of the original basis of the blog and the bones of many early posts actually came from essays I wrote as a high school senior over a decade ago. So, needless to say, it’s been a dream of mine to talk about these topics, and so this blog feels like a product of a huge part of my life and my goals. While of course my goals for the blog and for myself have changed over the years, the blog has consistently been here through my highs and lows.
However, something I’ve come to realize throughout this part of my life is how difficult it is to say things that have an impact or to even feel that impact at all. I think I’m coming to realize that the goals and dreams I had as a younger aspec person were maybe a little off base. As a teen just coming into my identity, I think I was encouraged by seeing how people around me eventually came to accept me and thought that maybe if I just lifted my voice up, built a platform to speak, or tried very hard to get people to see my point of view, I could help to make things that much better for all aspec people. While that dream might feel a little childish in hindsight, I wonder if many young queer people feel this way at some point or another – dreaming that they can help change the world like a character in a book or movie, dreaming of a day where things can be better.
In my own life, I’ve always felt that dream is a little bit harder to believe in, since finding the peace of a typical “happy ending” is obviously not in the cards for me, and so I have to think of other ways to find happiness and fulfillment. For a long time, writing this blog was a form of peace, as it gave me catharsis to talk about topics that I otherwise couldn’t express. But as I’ve gotten older and some of these feelings haven’t gone away or have in fact gotten worse, it’s easy to ask myself the age-old question: “what’s the point?” And, as I’ve considered that very thing, I think maybe I’ve been missing the point and that it’s time to correct that a bit.
In a way, I think I previously focused a bit too much on how other people would perceive the blog or how they’d perceive asexuality if they read it. But as I reflect on the year and myself, I want to return to the basics; my original mission statement was that I wanted the blog to be a comfort to myself and a place where other aspec people could come to feel less alone, to realize that other people felt the same way, and to perhaps see things they’d felt and thought put into words. In short, my hope moving forward into another year of blogging is that the blog becomes less about trying to convince the world of my validity and more using my experiences and thoughts to give comfort to other people if I can.
I’ve realized that there’s no need to be overly ambitious about that goal, nor is there any reason to turn the blog into something I’m not willing or capable of doing. To that end, the blog isn’t going away, but it’s going to be changing a bit in a way that I think will allow me to get back to what I really want to be doing. I’ll share more details on that in my 2026 preview post in January; I’m really excited about the changes I have planned and am excited to see how these changes hopefully allow blog and blogger alike to get to a place that works.
In the meantime, to anyone reading this post or who is still on this journey with me, thank you. And to anyone who finds this post in a week, a month, a year, or longer, I hope it finds you well. As always, I wish everyone who stumbles upon my messy musings a happy and prosperous end of 2025 and a 2026 that is full of possibilities and self-love. I will see you again soon.
With platonic love,
The Asexual Geek
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