Although The Protester is Time magazine's official Person of the Year, if you dig a little deeper, you can find that they, too, have a special place in their hearts for Ryan Gosling.

Dig deeper than those profiles of actual protestors, "People Who Mattered" (Adele and Abbas! Casey Anthony and Anonymous! Former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and Kim Kardashian!), and world-shaking events like the Egyptian uprising, and you'll see that Gosling has been voted Coolest Person of the Year. Because, well, duh.

2011 saw the explosion of the young Canuck's career and a growing online fascination with him, like the ever-present Tumblrs devoted to him. (Our new fave is Film Studies Ryan Gosling, but we'd like to believe that Feminist Ryan Gosling is closer to his sensitive heart!)

Yup, our little "Believer" is all grown up and smashing heads, metaphorically and literally, in Oscar-baity flicks like "Ides of March" and arty actioners like "Drive." There's even an incredibly dumb lawsuit against his movie "Drive," which is how you know it's big time.

Even though the secret crush of many otherwise sensible, intelligent people has gone worldwide with his abs, he'll always be Noah in "The Notebook" to us. If he's a bird, we're a bird!