As a friend and I sat together watching Stephen Colbert on YouTube, I couldn’t resist sulking over what seemed like a gaping hole in our film and television landscape that holds authority to account. “We can’t do this in Tamil, no channel will buy it, no writer will be spared,” my friend said by way of consolation, which rang true. We do live in a world where artists and filmmakers screen their content to various fringe groups for approval before release. We live in the era of controversy, where everything from a woman being a queen to a woman swearing on screen causes an outcry among upholders of culture.

In this essay, I write about how web content creators went the extra mile in 2017.