This year, I wrote a lot about television. About movies, and moments, and characters who never quite said what we needed them to say. But really, I wrote about recognition. About the strange relief of seeing a feeling named. About the quiet ache of realising you weren’t imagining it after all.

Some pieces travelled further than others. Not because they were louder, or cleverer, or more topical, but because they landed on something shared. A memory. A pattern. A soft spot most of us learned to protect very early.

So, to close out the year, here are the essays that resonated most. Not just in numbers, but in replies, forwards, screenshots, and “I’ve never seen anyone put it like this before” messages. These weren’t just the most read pieces. They were the ones where recognition moved fastest.

This one felt like striking a tuning fork.

The gay panic episode was everywhere once you started looking for it. Played for laughs. Framed as misunderstanding. Resolved neatly before the credits rolled. Writing this was about naming how much damage that lightness carried, and how many of us learnt early that queerness could exist only as a joke, a rumour, or a moment to be corrected.

This essay worked because it trusted readers to already know the feeling. It just finally gave it a name.

This was one of the hardest pieces to write, and one of the most necessary.

Queer tragedy has been dressed up as seriousness for decades. Loss framed as meaning. Death as depth. This essay wasn’t about tallying bodies. It was about asking why queer survival was so often treated as optional, and why we were taught to accept that as realism.

Even now, this one continues to surface in conversations because it isn’t tied to a single show. It’s tied to a pattern many of us grew up internalising.

This essay arrived quietly, and stayed.

There was something radical about writing about tenderness without irony. About letting joy be the point, not the exception. This piece mattered because it resisted the urge to frame queer happiness as surprising, or earned, or fragile.

Sometimes the most powerful thing television can do is simply allow people to live, gently, on screen. Readers responded to that permission.

This was the essay where a lot of frustration snapped into focus.

Queerbaiting isn’t about accidents or missed opportunities. It’s about incentives. About learning that suggestion keeps audiences engaged longer than honesty. Writing this felt like pulling a thread that many people had been tugging at privately for years.

The response made it clear that people weren’t looking for another rant. They were looking for structure. For language that made sense of why disappointment felt so personal, and yet so predictable.

This one was playful on the surface, and quietly serious underneath.

It worked because it treated queerness as obvious rather than exceptional. Because it trusted readers to see intimacy where the text refused to name it. And because sometimes the most radical thing you can do is point at a dynamic and say: yes, that. That’s what you’re responding to.

It’s one of those essays that invites people in, rather than asking them to keep up.

This piece sits at the intersection of feminism, family history, and genre TV. It continues to be one of the essays people reference back to, not because it’s neat, but because it connects so many threads at once.

If there’s an emotional spine to everything else I write, it’s here. This essay explains the conditions under which a lot of us learnt to watch. Why we looked sideways. Why we read between lines. Why we trusted feelings before confirmation.

If this year clarified anything, it’s that people aren’t tired of pop culture analysis. They’re tired of analysis that pretends feelings are incidental. What keeps resonating are pieces that take emotional memory seriously, and treat audience interpretation as something earned, not accidental.

Next year, I want to keep building on that. Fewer hot takes. More pattern recognition. More writing that assumes readers are perceptive, historically aware, and capable of holding complexity without being talked down to.

Thank you for reading. For subscribing. For replying. For trusting me with your memories and your time.

We’ll do it all again next year.