"Based on purely anecdotal evidence-I am doing "reverse eugenics" or whatever-I have found that wealthy whites get first dibs on writing about important things. And because this year was the one where a critical mass of people started saying stupid shit like "DEI must DIE" (they thought they were clever for that one), well, a lot of my queer and BIPOC (am I still allowed to say "queer" and "BIPOC"?) peers were pushed out of any job where they could authoritatively comment on anything."
"Despite my propensity for doing things like "reading The New Yorker " and "watching HBO dramas," I am neither of those things, and this, thank Christ, is not a fancy magazine. Here, you get to hear from the riff-raff (me) who, for once, will get to declare What The Year Meant for everyone else, on a video game website where they can safely ignore it."
"Not to get controversial, but I would call 2025 a bad year. Showing my work a little: I find 2025 bad because it 1.) was worse than the year before it, 2.) was just straight-up miserable to live through, and 3.) did very little to set up 2026 to be much better. In fact, it did the opposite. I know it's kind of verboten these days for a critic to be so openly hostile and negative"
Wealthy white reviewers disproportionately cover major subjects, crowding out queer and BIPOC voices after a DEI backlash pushed marginalized people from commentary roles. Media opinion regressed toward a small, lily-white, affluent median across politics, entertainment, culture, and economics. A non-elite perspective appears on a video-game website, funded by paid freelance work and presented as a deliberately unpolished voice. The year 2025 is characterized as worse than 2024, broadly miserable to live through, and insufficiently preparatory for a better 2026, with many trends actively making the near future feel worse.
Read at Kotaku
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