Hey you guys,

I didn’t expect to be writing the most anticipated pop culture post of the year here on Mamamia, but welcome to the final episode of The Bachelor season 4.

I’m not here to tell you the winner. You can find out about that later on our site. And I’m certainly not here to write a Bachie finale recap. That was meant to be Rosie’s job tonight but she’s unwell and, just like Hillary Clinton (they’re very similar), she’s had to take some sick leave from work to recover.

We’ve spent all day today thinking long and hard about how to cover the final Bach episode in Rosie’s absence and we decided to do that elsewhere on Mamamia.

But I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge what an extraordinary phenomenon Rosie has birthed here at Mamamia in recapping the Bachelor.

In all my years in the media, I’ve never seen anything even remotely like it.

A photo posted by Rosie Waterland (@rosiewaterland) on Dec 3, 2015 at 10:44pm PST

Let me tell you how it started. Back in 2012, cramped in our first Mamamia office around our shared desk, it went something like this:

Rosie:I want to write recaps of The Bachelor.

Me:The TV show? Is that on? No Rosie, you can’t recap The Bachelor. That show is so sexist. Shut up.

Rosie:But I love it.

Me:No.

Rosie:But it’s amazing.

Me:No.

Rosie:But I’ve already written it, on my own time.

Me:\_(ツ)_/¯ OK whatevs.

And so it went. Encouraged by Mamamia’s then editor, Jamila Rizvi, Rosie wrote and wrote and wrote and developed her recap style along with all the other writing she did for the site. It was a slow build. She kept at it.

During that first season, her recaps built a cult following but they didn’t blow up until season two when Blake was the bachelor and Rosie’s posts went Next Level.

Click through for some of our favourite Rosie moments. (Post continues after gallery.)

Some of our favourite Rosie moments

"We open with our Bachelor, Tim, doing some contemplative staring out at the horizon. This proves he’s good looking AND deep. Turns out he’s a 30-year-old chiropractor with a broken heart. That’s why he carries a briefcase and looks sad."

"Um, you told her to get really dressed up, said you were taking her to a fancy restaurant, and now you’re annoyed that she’s embarrassed and feels over-dressed for bowling and a food truck? You sir, are a Dirty Street Pie."

"Oh, this is too good. Bachie is standing between two glorious, colourful peens. This must be his way of making it clear: The girl he chooses must be willing to graduate from Forehead Sex to Peen Sex IMMEDIATELY. No more of this forehead jizz bullshit."

"Today’s COLCHA involves Bachie Wood taking his shirt off while the girls paint and sculpt him. It is very COLCHA, you guys. I mean, look at all that COLCHA."

“So heartbreak. Much hurt. Very turtleneck.”

"Girl is going to SLAY PEEN left, right and centre."

"WHERE IS THE BACHELORETTE’S TOKEN BLACK GUY? OR ASIAN GUY? OR EVEN SLIGHTLY BROWNISH ETHNICALLY AMBIGUOUS GUY? Someone must have forgotten to read the ‘please cast one token non-white person’ memo, but I don’t want anyone to get in trouble here, so I’ve come up with a solution that involves Token, the token black kid from South Park."

"Kissing a woman without her consent isn’t cute. No jokes here. That was gross, and a violation of her personal space. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Bachie Queen was well within her rights to throw him overboard minus his childish testicles, and you can tell by the look on her face that she wants to."

"She takes them to some Bath House, where she manages to get to the boys to agree to this situation, and considering I can’t even get my male cat to stop shitting in the bath, I’m pretty damn impressed at her sway with peen owners."

"Oshie, who's clearly been attached to the hairspray machine in his dungeon for at least 24 hours, introduces us to the "spectacular Tuscan Villa", which we all know is just code for 'Lady Prison with lots of candles'."

"What an epic fucking post-dumping bounce-back. Like I’ve been saying this whole time, what I wouldn’t give for that level of self-confidence, combined with that complete lack of self-awareness. I want to travel the world with her and push in line at theme parks."

Gold.

"Um... Pls stahp. I SAID STAAAAAHP. OH GOD NO PLEASE NO. IT'S... IT'S A... IT'S A CHOCOLATE DIARRHOEA SEX BATH *cries in terror*"

Like many, I didn’t watch the show, I just read the recaps which somehow didn’t require show-watching as a prerequisite. In time, I started watching the Bachelor to enhance my enjoyment of reading Rosie’s recaps. This – according to many sources at Channel 10 – provided an unexpected ratings benefit to the show which increased as a direct result of the buzz generated by Rosie’s Bachie magic on Mamamia.

People would stop me in the street and ask me about Rosie and tell me how much they loved her. How obsessed they were with her recaps. Her fan-base was diverse and spanned generations, something I noticed even in my own life. My mother’s work colleagues. My teenage son’s girlfriends. Teachers at my daughter’s primary school. Sales assistants in every shop I walk into. This one time, I had a doctor rave to me about how much she loved Rosie’s recaps during my pap smear.

Watching Rosie’s star ascend was a gift. It filled the hearts of her friends, her family and her co-workers at Mamamia, all of whom had supported her and loved her through her struggles. This is a woman who, if you’ve read her book or her writing, grew up with incredible challenges. She had a traumatic childhood and she has fought battles with her body, mental health, PTSD and a host of other issues that would have felled most people.

She got a book deal. She got (for a while) a car. She was offered TV shows and sponsorships and all manner of things as a result of her Bachelor posts and she deserved every single one of them.

In the 25 years I’ve worked in the media, her rise has been unprecedented. I’ve seen people become famous quickly but they’re always the ones who work in front of the camera. Reality show stars, models, actors… not writers.

Never have I seen a writer become a star. Not like this. Not at this level.

Rosie and I have talked in depth many times over the years about why her recaps – which were not the first reality show recaps to be published in the media by any means – exploded in the way they did.

This is the concl