Dear Traumateers,
Lorraine: Our final The More You Know post for 2012 was titled, “So, we had a year.” That seems fitting. In 2012 we fell into a hiatus, lost a few Snark Ladies, but then decided to reinvent the website. We did a lot of great things, but it was a celebration in and of itself that we’d even had a year. Sweeney and I pulled it together and soldiered on, despite all the craziness and a multitude of changes.
Sweeney: It’s weird to think about that time, then. That brief period when we wondered how/if this blog would continue to exist. By “weird” I mean “impossible” because this thing has come to be so damn important to us both.
Lorraine: If 2012 was about laying the foundation of what Snark Squad is today, 2013 was about growing the blog. In 2012 we posted 128 times. In 2013? 350. THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POSTS, comprised of nearly 1,200,000 words.
To be honest, I expected “creepy,” to be our most used word, but alas.
Sweeney: To be fair, “creepy” is vastly underrepresented because of our creepcabulary. I’m sure it would be much more prominent if we could count all the other words we mash it up with.
Beginnings:
Lorraine: At the start of 2013, we were essentially a Buffy/Fifty Shades blog. Our two main goals for the year were to (a) – grow away from being just that and (b) – recap something current. We pretty much covered both those goals when we picked up Game of Thrones– blogging our way through 2 seasons in time to start recapping season 3 real time. We’re pretty sure that TV show ruined our lives, and personally, I think the Red Wedding was one of the hardest things I’ve recapped, to date. Still, real-time-recapping is thrilling and #GameofSnark was an amazing amount of fun.
Next, we decided to add Angel to the line-up AND NO ONE WARNED US. I mean, it was okay for a while there but recently, I’ve been hoarding brain bleach. As if we weren’t getting enough of a Whedon dosage, we decided to cover the sadly short Firefly series as well.
Founding Snark Lady Sara joined us once again and brought with her Pretty Little Liars recaps. Sara and Kirsti teamed up to cover Supernatural and we added Democracy Diva to the line-up to help us cover a long time, oft-mentioned favorite, Veronica Mars.
We also started a number of series. Although we’re still working out how often we want to work with these, it’s nice to know they are there. First, Segue Magic, in which the Snark Ladies vlog about a number of related to-but outside of Traumaland topics. Secondly, SnarkTube, a link round-up of all the things claiming our almost non-existent time on YouTube.
Endings:
As if we’d pass up a chance to once again celebrate the fact that we FINISHED THE FIFTY SHADES TRILOGY. We started the year at the beginning of the second book, and somehow, we made it through that and Fifty Shades Freed alive. It was touch and go there for a while. Also, EL James followed me on Twitter for 10 seconds.
Magic.
Sweeney: I’ve been doing a lot of big end-of-the-year evaluating/planning worksheets and I feel like I need to change all of my answers because that 10 seconds might be my actual favorite memory of 2013. AMAZING.
Last Month:
Lorraine: We basically took these last two weeks off. Trust us, we had big plans for posting all of the things, but the holidays demanded more attention than we anticipated. If you’ve been around for a while, you know that this is just so us. Maybe in 2014 we’ll finally learn that we are limited by like, time and stuff. Maybe. (S: Profoundly unlikely, as we’ll see in a later section on 2014 plans…)
We started the month with season 7 premier of Buffy and found ourselves infinitely glad to be back at Sunnydale High (and out of season ew6.) Of course, everyone said we would love Beneath You, but we found it hard to believe Spike’s story line. Or, really, to care about it. Willow came back to Sunnydale, and was so worried, she made herself invisible to her friends and also got all the feelings we didn’t give to Spike. So it goes. Buffy tries to help a student who has predicted her own death, and though she does help, she can’t prevent the death. Anya’s past is revisited through flashbacks, and she’s relieved of her vengeance demon self at the cost of Hallie’s life. Dawn falls hard for the quarterback, but as it turns out, so does every other female in Sunnydale. Finally, The Big Bad makes its grand debut and everyone chats with a dead person.
Angel kicked off season 4 with a bunch of crazy behavior, including but not limited to Wesley keeping a woman in his closet. Next, we met a one-time villain we liked pretty well, even if she did wear an all red leather outfit. The Fang Gang head to Vegas to save Lorne. Cordelia comes back with no memory of who she is and decides she feels safer hanging out with Connor. Fred finds out her old professor sent her to Pylea and she wants to murder his face off. Gunn does it first, though, to protect her innocence or something. The Fang Gang all get reverted to their teen selves and Cordy tells Angel she isn’t in love with him anymore. So, naturally, Cordy has sex with Connor ’cause she thinks the world is ending. (S: And we all came down solidly on the side of, “NOT AN ACCEPTABLE EXCUSE, CORDELIA.)
The pilot episode of Supernatural introduced us to the Winchester brothers through a bunch of terrible exposition, but they are so pretty we almost didn’t care. The brothers next find themselves against a Wendigo and a number of plot holes. The pissed off spirit of a murdered little boy takes to drowning all the members of his murders’ families and Amy Acker (!) shows up for a guest starring role.
In Neptune, California, we met Veronica Mars, awesome girl detective whose best friend was murdered, her father fired, mother ran away and was raped all in the last year. Veronica helps clear Weevil of some credit card fraud charges, and for some reason this all involves Paris Hilton. Her next case finds her helping a classmate trying to locate his father, but mostly he’s just trying to hang out with Veronica. Fair.
Our space cowboys find themselves stranded and as Mal tries to save the day, he has a few origin story flashbacks.
As we near the end of season 2 on Pretty Little Liars, we get a little up in the almost non-existent ante as Jenna gets saved from a burning house by Hanna. The Liars are attacked in a creepy doll store and Blind Jenna isn’t blind anymore, but we never believed she was anyways.
From the lovely minds of the Traumateers came #Snarkathon and we watched Cabin in the Woods alone-together and on Twitter. We hope you’ll join us for the next round on January 4th when we watch “I Know Who Killed Me.”
Sweeney: Because everything is my favorite, #Snarkathon was also one of my favorite things in 2013. Make sure you’re following us on Twitter because that’s where we will post the link to the Google Hangout if you’d like the full, magical experience of watching a bunch of strangers watch a movie with you. If not, Twitter is also where the rest of the party will be (but, of course, we’ll post a roundup with a synopsis and the best tweets.)
Coming Up:
Lorraine: Again, if you know us, you know a couple of things: (1) – We have all the hopes and dreams. We have all the hopes and dreams and we love this website, which usually means we come up with all these grandiose plans we sometimes aren’t equipped to realize. But like, it never stops us from hoping and dreaming and (2) – we do what we want.
Sweeney: With that in mind, we have a short list of overarching goals for the year – the stuff we’ll have to take stock of this time next year. It’s vague stuff on purpose, because our plans change so the particulars might not be everything that we’re anticipating right now:
(1) We have plans to bring more people into the Squad. We tried to do a sort of free-for-all approach to this forever ago, but quickly realized that this was just too overwhelming. Little by little works best. It’s our way of trying to acknowledge our minor time/space limitations in our quest to BLOG ALL THE THINGS. (2) Stuff that’s relevant but also not recaps. That’s weird and the vaguest thing on this list, but I’m not sure how else to phrase this long-standing goal of ours. Maybe it’ll make sense a year from now. Or maybe we’ll look back and say, “Nope, we didn’t do that weird, ambiguous thing.” (3) Vlogs. We probably won’t get Segue Magic back on track right away, but trust that we will and, more importantly, that we’re going to try to expand the scope of our YouTube channel. (4) More ways to build the community. Our Twitter parties and that one Google Hangout have been a blast; expect to see more variants on this real-time (or semi-real time, if you were a late #gameofsnark joiner like me) snark party theme.
Lorraine: In addition to those slightly vague-ish goals, here are a few things we more solidly know will happen: Early next year, we will finish Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s kind of hard to wrap my head around, but it’s been a long, long journey, and it’ll be nice to put that show to rest. We don’t know what will take up that twice a week recap slot yet, but we aren’t at an idea shortage by any means. Later next year will also see the end of Angel and Firefly both, as well.
Game of Thrones will be back for season 4, which we will continue recapping real time.
Additionally, we’re going to cover all 10 episodes of season 1 of Orphan Black prior to season 2 premiering in April.
Plus, you guys, I’m pretty sure we have a Fifty Shades movie to hate watch. Start preparing your livers.
Thank You, Faithful Friends:
As always, we’d like to take a moment to thank you all for sticking with us through 2013. It was a bumpy ride, sometimes, but we truly can boast that Traumateers always know how to keep it classy. I’m astounded by the community we’ve built here, and at how many friendships have grown out of comments and Twitter conversations and emails and etc.
We love you all and know that everything we do wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without you all there to laugh with us, rage with us, CAPSLOCK WITH US, drink with us, argue with us, and generally live in the best made-up Internet headquarters the world has ever not-really-seen.
Happy 2014, Traumateers.
Here’s to another spectacular year.
Here’s to a wealth of snark.
♥
The Snark Squad
