2018 at “me + richard armitage”

For comparison purposes, 2017 is here.

Richard Armitage photographed in conjunction with Their Lost Daughters, May 2018. My favorite photo of 2018.

I will post again later today, or maybe tomorrow, with more contemplation (I hope), but this is my annual “stats”-related post.

The top ten posts published in 2018 by number of page views:

1. Berlin Station 3.2, first impressions [spoilers!] (published November 20, 2018). I’m not sure why, after two years, I’ve suddenly become the address for Berlin Station critique, but there it is. I’m guessing based on the number of views that I’m getting a lot of readers on this who are not Armitage fans.

2. Wow (published January 10, 2018). Armitage tweets that he will be silent for a while (we assumed at the time, in response to requests by fans for updates on his mother’s health status). I assume the dominant theme of Armitage’s life this year was his mother’s death, and posts relating to that were highly ranked, but this was the first of only two that made it into the top ten on this blog.

3. Can Berlin Station fix the Daniel and Esther thing? [part one] (published January 2, 2018). And I never wrote a part two, although there’s a draft outline there. This is a post on everything that was wrong in the first two seasons of writing of this pair. Interesting that it got so many views because it only attracted four comments at the time.

4. Has Richard Armitage reached peak sexy? (published July 28, 2018). The attraction of this topic is obvious, I suspect.

5. Collateral attractions: Lee Pace discusses coming out (published June 4, 2018). A passworded post makes the top ten again. What it says on the tin.

6. Top ten list of questions Richard Armitage will not answer for #AskArmitage (published February 21, 2018). The most highly ranked spoof — written after yet another one of these silly Audible Twitter promotions.

7. Richard Armitage fans finally get their rom-com? (published January 11, 2018). Announcement of the Wanderlust project, and the most highly ranked post relating to an audiobook project this year.

8. Really hoping there are no snipers in Budapest (published August 1, 2018). My snarky comment on Michelle Forbes’ declaration that she would take a bullet for Armitage and / or Henry. Most highly ranked photo post of the year.

9. #NHSCrisis continues for the Armitage family (published January 4, 2018). Armitage’s followup on his frustration that his mother’s surgery could not happen as scheduled. Screencap as this tweet was later deleted.

10. Berlin Station 3.1, first impressions [spoilers] (published November 28, 2018). See remarks on #1.

The priorities in this list are interesting in light of Richard Armitage’s projects that actually released this year besides the ones mentioned above:

• Ocean’s 8. I blogged a fair amount about this; the highest post on the film is ranked #43. It seems that 2017’s enthusiasm for news about the film in the fandom did not last once the film was out.
• Berlin Station was a relatively low interest topic on the blog in 2017, but a high interest topic this year, with the previous seasons’ recap posts also garnering high numbers of page views.
• Urban and the Shed Crew. It was hard to blog as much as I normally would have about this, because even the on-demand situation was difficult to navigate. My most-visited post on this did not make the top 100 and got only one seventh as many views as the most visited post publishe in 2018. Photos from the My Zoe and The Lodge sets got four times as much attention.
• Wolverine: The Long Night. I blogged about this weekly. At the time it was also hard for fans who didn’t subscribe to Stitcher Premium to follow along.
• The Bloody Chamber. I blogged about each chapter of this that Armitage narrated but it seemed that a lot of people were not listening.
• The Martian Invasion of Earth. I only blogged about this once.
• Castlevania 2, which I have not blogged about yet.
• And all the audiobooks that I did not blog about because I haven’t purchased them: Their Lost Daughters, The Christmas Hirelings, Heads You Win, The Man from St Petersburg, The Snowman, The Murderer’s Son, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Fourth Friend, and The Other Queen.

And the most-visited post in 2018 was actually something I wrote in 2017 — a long post on Sleepwalker. I assume this caught attention because the film was released in more markets and people were trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

So, what was going on this year?

• I published 839 posts in 2018, significantly down from 1,072 in 2017. Readership of individual posts remained roughly steady, i.e., I was publishing less but roughly same number of people were reading what I did publish. More about this tomorrow — for now, a brief “thanks for sticking with me.”
• Armitage’s efforts turned largely to audiobooks and voicework — one hypothesizes, at least partially in light of his mother’s final illness and death in the first half of the year. This may also have led to the failure of plans for a stage play in London toward the spring to materialize, which also significantly affected events on blog.
• Berlin Station was the project of most general interest (and probably attracted non-fans here as well). Also, it finally became available in the UK. At the same time, its delayed filming schedule (due to uncertainty at EPIX late in 2017?) meant that it missed many of the usual venues for generating publicity and photos.
• Several projects (not just Berlin Station) offered platform obstacles to significant pieces of the fandom.
• My low interest in audiobooks meant I offered little opportunity for readers to discuss them. At the same time, I did post the interviews relating to these projects, none of which generated much discussion. This may in part be happening because these interviews are starting to be very repetitive. Not much new gets said and the thing that I used to really appreciate about them — Armitage talking about his creative process — has largely been marginalized.
• Much less interest in Armitage’s tweets materialized here, probably because I’ve become so skeptical or even hostile about many of them, and also because diehard fans seems to have decided that that’s part of the Armitage package. (I’m not there yet.)
• My father’s stroke upended my life in mid-June and the rate of posting dropped dramatically. Many posts were primarily aggregation (“Richard Armitage tangentially related”) and did not generate much discussion. I was unable for much of the middle of the year to write my trademark style of analytical or reflective or even comic posts.

~ by Servetus on December 31, 2018.