Dear Traumateers,
Lorraine: I don’t really consider myself a sentimental person. LOL. JAYKAY. I have lot of emotions. Sometimes Sweeney and I send e-mails back and forth about all the nonsensical emotions we feel and then we take heart because at least the other one of us is feeling them too/understands/will humor us. It’s a beautiful thing.
Sweeney: Being struck by ALL THE FEELINGS is terrifying. These emails are essential to coping with that.
Lor: Those emails, and posts like this, in which we get to wax a little nostalgic, dip into our Fictional Booze Fund, and hold each other as we let the feels wash over us.
Um. Something like that. Point is: Happy New Year! We wanted to take this moment to reflect on all the awesome things that happened in 2012.
The beginning of that would be admitting that the year started out roughly. Snark Squad, while being one of my favorite things of life, is also an intense investment of time. When the year started, it seemed that all our lives were in one state of transition or another. The blog went silent, and eventually, some of the Snark Ladies graciously laid down their titles.
I’m pretty sure there was an email that went to Sweeney that said, “welp. Can a squad be two people?”
We still aren’t sure about the technical definition, but we made it work. We hope more than that.
Sweeney: We do what we want. Like, using words maybe probably not correctly.
Lor: In 2012, we posted 128 times. We aren’t going to recap all of that, but! Here’s a word cloud:
Sweeney: I want a poster of this.
Lor: Not a bad idea, but only if I can also get one of Stalker Boyfriend printed out for you. We love our graphics and gifs ’round here, and 2012 gave us some gems:
The old Squad facing off with the characters of SVH.
Introducing E.L. James to a dictionary.
Illustrating the Fifty Shades equation: “The more you submit, the greater my joy.”
Jessica deserved it.
Analyzing B’s wardrobe.
The Snark Squad mascot got festive.
And of course the birth of Stalker Boyfriend.
In 2012, we took a huge leap forward and combined our two blogs, Childhood Trauma and Snark Squad Culture to create SnarkSquad.com
Sweeney: A huge change for our little blog! Our readership has exploded in that time too; as always, we are so thankful for all the lovely comments.
Other big things: we made our first forays into Snark Squad vlogs, mostly because doing Fifty Shades alone was giving Lor epic feels that needed another outlet.
Lor: That is a lot of my face. I apologize and also promise that Sweeney is in some of these.
Sweeney: In 2012, we featured a few guest posts; and, perhaps second only to the blog merge, we started both of the two series that have come to be the mainstays of the blog.
Lor: Yeaaah, so somewhere along the line it became the Buffy and Fifty show. On the one hand, we finished the first book of the Fifty Shades Trilogy and it really was the fist thing we ever finished, and even though the subject sucks, that felt amazing.
Sweeney: With that in mind, know that we do have big plans to start branching out more, though we’re still figuring out how to do that without abandoning the fun projects we’ve already started. (All right, so, one is maybe a lot less fun at times. Ahem.)
And, as always, this is supposed to be our monthly wrap-up space, so we’d hate to see December getting mistreated. Here’s what happened in the final month of our already big year:
Season two of Buffy wrapped up with comically bad David Boreanaz flashback accent, and Joyce kicking Buffy out because she’s the worst. We did a little Season Two wrap up to cope with all our feels. She started season three working the diner of lost dreams before returning to Sunnydale to find her friends being a little shitty and evil cats and the arrival of a new slayer.
In the shitshow known as Fifty Shades, we introduced the AND THEN SHE DIES game, Ana attended a party wearing the cooter balls, and we got a really disturbing visual involving feces. In the interest of coping with our suffering, we celebrated the apocalypse with Stalker Boyfriend memes from readers, and you helped us choose a winner.
We only had one book report this month, but it was a big deal because it was an ARC that was actually enjoyable; Lor gave The Twelve-Fingered Boy a B.
We also had a few fun guest posts this month, because sometimes we have friends. The Democracy Diva helped me rank the stylishness of Disney villains, Ginny introduced us to the Nickeloedon gem Roundhouse, and Gina took us along for a very Saved By The Bell Christmas adventure. Because we love holiday specials too, we also got our religious education on in the Rugrats Hanukkah special and education in fictional holidays with the first O.C. Chrismukkah episode.
Lor: While we usually take this moment to welcome questionable new friends, I think it is more fitting to once again say cheers to all of our friends, old and new. Thank you for 2012, and know that we are extremely excited for all the crazy, maybe not possible, but we’re going to try them anyways things we want to do 2013.
We love your readership.
We love your support.
We love your promises for fictional booze.
We love your emails, FB posts and Tweets.
We love your comments.
We love your faces.
♥
The Snark Squad