Ashley Bardhan
Hi! :~) I write about video games, women, and art, usually. I value fun and accessible writing and have worked with publications like Pitchfork, Vulture, and Gawker to put more of it into the world. Previously, I wrote newsletters at Inverse, and, most recently, I quoted Spinoza as a Kotaku staff writer. I also write the experimental video game blog Plant or Beast. Otherwise, I like jokes about butts, gonzo journalism, and clip art of little mice wearing hats.
Elden Ring’s Malenia Tells The Fairytale I Always Wanted To Hear, kotaku.com
August, 2022
Appearing to you naked and maimed, deceptively tender and feminine, she’s reduced to her true, brutal nature. “But she whose hours of tenderness were gone / had neither hope nor fear,” William Butler Yeats writes.
TikTok's Final Girl,
vulture.com
December, 2023
Why Is Media so Obsessed with the Drunken Canal?: A Hater Reports, studyhall.xyz
February, 2022
When I was a kid dreaming of being a writer in New York City, the place I grew up, I pictured a tall, effortlessly thin woman. She had an office in Manhattan. She wrote things particular to her and her life. She was nothing like me, and I would never grow up to be her.
Princess Peach: Showtime! review,
eurogamer.net
March, 2024
Outside of the castle, there's more space to be gentle. "There was / a peach in a wicker basket / There was a bowl of fruit," writes Louise Glück in the 2001 poem "Ripe Peach." "Fifty years. Such a long walk / from the door to the table." Finally, Peach gets to rule.
"You're a Christian, right?", justpreachy.com
March, 2021
I recognize her trepidation, the way she hunches over her steel-pipe weapon. It’s how I instinctively shrivel when men stare at me on the train. I’m moving against the unfair world, reminding myself to sit up straight.
Contact
ashleybardhan(at)gmail(dot)com