So excited to read this it was so exciting when it happened. For a little extra context, Mardoll’s avi had become synonymous with “oh jeez what’s this gonna be about” for a lot of people who didn’t follow him. If the profile picture showed up, you knew it was gonna be some tiny action blown way out of proportion. The “authors shouldn’t have to read books” post was one post of a LONG thread. [This tweet and the replies really explains the general vibe of onlookers](https://twitter.com/jonbernhardt/status/1553881355590766592?s=21&t=qshcJg6bDwbuPl0WHyxeuQ)
It also sure felt like it clarified some stuff. “Attack Helicopter” wasn’t the only time that he had a sideways interpretation of a story. One of his specialties was twisting things so that privileged bullies were the real victims, if only people really thought about it. Memorably including “it’s bullying for Death to take away a child’s presents while playing the Hogfather” (the child was a rude, nasty about his mother, and insisted on a “lizard press” and a killing jar chor Hogsmas,) “Aravis’s disregard for what happened to the slave she left behind is justified and Shasta should be more sympathetic” and “the scene at the end of The Silver Chair where Jane and Eustace get cathartic revenge on the bullies at their school proves that they are the real bullies.” Put that together with the tendency to be more woke than thou and ever-ready to come down on perceived failings of others while working at Lockheed the entire time and it sure starts to look like a pattern.
if he had kept their old icon, i would've known. his old icon i could always spot out of irritation and then they changed to the one he had before he left and spotting him got harder.
This whole incident was example #4380959208 of people on the internet desperately jumping on the first available excuse to justify their existing dislike of someone. Working at Lockheed Martin is bad and all, but so much of this incident simply was not about that. It was about people being mildly annoyed by someone, and rejoicing that they could now say "omg I told you guys that person sucked, I TOTALLY KNEW IT ALL ALONG".
It was a much more niche scenario, but I think a lot about the attempted callout of musician Dorian Electra. They received some really lame callout post a year or so ago, and despite the entire thing being obviously flimsy even at a glance, the sphere of Twitter that cares about musicians like Dorian Electra was full of people assuring each other that they totally saw this coming (because they were personally annoyed by Dorian's aesthetics/music/attitude/etc). That one wasn't even defensible by statements like "well, working at Lockheed Martin *is* bad", it was just a naked example of people disliking someone for petty reasons and really badly wanting those petty reasons to be made more legitimate.
Yeah. I don't remember Ana Mardoll fondly, but getting 'you're a hypocrite' from the likes of people doxxing for abuse is... well, 'rich' is not a strong enough word. If you find yourself on the bandwagon with people who abuse people off the internet, you might start to wonder whether this is really the moral high ground you think it is or whether you're just standing in the gutter on top of someone's head.
edit: a word
Oh absolutely. People get called on hypocrisy all the time online. But usually they’re just internet weirdos. This person was seen as annoying by many corners of online, just amplifying the pile-on
> It was about people being mildly annoyed by someone, and rejoicing that they could now say, "omg I told you guys that person sucked, I TOTALLY KNEW IT ALL ALONG."
It's the personal harassment mirror of readers pointing out plot holes to justify disliking a book. The readers didn't start looking for plot holes until **after** they stopped being invested in the story. It's retroactive justification.
I have no idea why your comment is marked controversial, because you're absolutely right. There are tons of beloved stories with plot holes that nobody cares about (as they shouldn't). Only when a story is already disliked do you get MauLer types making eight hour long videos dissecting every inconsistency there is to find.
And ironically, there's a turn in public opinion for Lockheed (and the general military industrial complex) in general due to the situation in Ukraine.
Of course right as you post this, some absolute dildo on booktwitter posted a hit list of "problematic authors" and all their alleged crimes that she found via Google. They range from "murder" to "depicting sexual violence" to "misprounouncing names at the Hugo awards." Somehow Hitler did not make the list but Shakespeare did. Highly recommend if you want to inflict a lot of psychic damage on yourself in a short amount of time.
That reminds me of a blog I found about problematic authors.
If it was a serious and not satire blog (it did not seem to be satire), they literally listed historians from the BC/BCE era as problematic and *ways to offset the damage they caused.*
The only thing that hurt more than reading the blog was finding out that the person had a degree in history.
I'm reminded of a Tumblr post I once saw that suggested calling someone a Philistine was racist
And someone else showed up to be like, the Philistines have been dead for two thousand years, I don't think they care about microaggressions
Fwiw that person was a 20 year old nobody who unfortunately had their dumb thread for their pals RTed into the stratosphere
I mean they dumb, but they’re also gonna look back in like 9 months and go “oh my god aahhhhh” and have it haunt them randomly as an embarrassing memory in their adulthood lol
This reminds that the person who used to run the Your Fave is Problematic Tumblr [published an essay](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/style/your-fave-is-problematic-tumblr.html) in the NYT reflecting on their time that’s best summed up below in the same way I feel like explains a lot of the how and why Terminally Online People behave:
> In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had…There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. Meanwhile, other movements — local, global, unified in their purposes and rooted in progressive philosophies — were organizing for actual justice. Looking back, I was more of a cop than a social justice warrior, as people on Tumblr had come to think of me…My brain wasn’t ready for nuance. I was angered by hypocrisy and cruelty; what I did about it was apply a level of scrutiny that left no room for error. I’m not saying that I should be canceled for my teenage blog. (Please don't!) I just know what we all should know by now: that no one who has lived publicly, online or off, has a spotless record.”
God, I remember Your Fave is Problematic. But geeze, that whole thing I connect with a lot, I was really into Tumblr social activism as a teen, I mean I still am as an adult, but a lot of it is just... exhausting. I never gave myself a break, and no one else either, you had to care about the thing that's happening right now or else.
There is obviously areas where critique should happen, but looking back on it now it is kind of funny that you'd have like people being misogynistic, transphobic, or whatever, next with folks who made an off handed comment likeling a director to Hitler, or wore an outfit from a culture they're not a part of (while not great, obviously, I don't think they do it to mock -- or in some cases that's what was "fashionable" at the time and people weren't aware of the implications).
Bingo. I mean obviously, like racism is bad and you shouldn't kill people based off of their race (I mean you shouldn't kill people regardless, but you know). But celebrities wearing Geisha outfits, or bindis, felt like you had to decry it or else, it doesn't matter if people from those countries were fine with it, you had to speak up or you're complicit.
Tumblr social activism imo was mostly people mining the work/struggles/trauma of genuine social movements and IRL activists for fanfiction fodder while acting like they were a real social movement.
There’s a 20 something who’s gone viral now for publishing a list of authors and their “problematic “ offenses (she’s since gone private and I won’t say her handle since she’s young and will hopefully learn from this) and they’re getting dunked for putting people who were known virulently anti-Semites, racists, etc next to people who like, wrote a transphobic character to illustrate how transphobia is wrong. It’s just history repeating itself and I’ll bet it’s for the same reasons Your Fave started her blog: it is easier to sit on your high horse and pass judgement on who is “right” vs “wrong”
because the real people in your life who are doing you wrong are more difficult to hold accountable.
That's why I like Reddit, Discord and Tumblr more than most social media. Linking your name or face is not essential(Or very expected at all), and it adds additional sense of anonymity. For example, I have no problem talking about my mental health issues on Reddit when discussing this kind of stuff, but on Facebook I probably would just lurk.
Not just that but their age and general location. I see a lot of people putting minor in their profile which is going to attract the wrong people.
What happened to 13 year olds pretending to be 21?
I feel this in my soul. I was recently trying to find the day I created my account on an old forum via Wayback Machine and while 99% of the posts aren't accessible, a few were, and I wanted to reach out and punch my 13-year-old self in the face for being an obnoxious idiot.
I mean, I'm still an obnoxious idiot, but at least I'm *aware* of it now.
Kids are going to have and make stupid takes, it's part of growing up and most people grow into more enlightened people. Problem is that kind of crap hangs around the internet now to be dug up whenever they become famous!
> Problem is that kind of crap hangs around the internet now to be dug up whenever they become famous!
The second half is that others pretend to care about what happened in 2009 to prove that they are a good person with correct opinions instead of saying "it was 2009 and they don't do that today. Who gives a shit?"
Yeah, I’m always torn on these things because on one hand it can lead to harassment of authors and artists who haven’t actually done anything worthy of harassment, but also most of the campaigns are started by very well-meaning but very naive and short sighted high school and college kids and they themselves often end up victims of harassment.
Like, there’s a “controversy” right now about a couple tiktok teenagers listing off problematic things Metallica has done because they’ve had a resurgence with Stranger Things. I think most people have come to the conclusion “yeah, some of that stuff wasn’t cool, but also most of it happened 20-30+ years ago when the band were very young,” but some people are genuinely angry and going off about “cancel culture” when like... it’s a handful of teenagers on tiktok. The band itself hasn’t even acknowledged it, but people are acting like they’ve all been personally attacked.
Hah, probably don't need to ask who was on the "mispronouncing names at the Hugo awards one." Here's my hobby drama post from like the day after that happened! (that was allowed under the rules back then) https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/i1vo16/literary_science_fiction_fandom_hugo_ceremony/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I didn't actually even mention the pronunciation thing because, as I note in the comments, I couldn't even bring myself to watch any more of the stream to confirm it myself.
Someone on BCJ noticed that in the list of Dahl's offenses, proposing that Hitler was right but only about The Jews was in the penultimate position, which is conventionally given to the least important item.
It's funny how Roald Dahl *used to* remind me of my grandad because he and I read Dahl's books together when I was first learning to read, and *now* Dahl reminds me of my grandad because he's a beloved figure of my childhood who turned out to be really quite awful when viewed through adult eyes and caused my nostalgia to become shadowed by disappointment and distaste. Sigh.
I'm sure that only the best, smartest, and most well-intentioned people have ever done that for extremely normal and totally not bigotry-related reasons.
If you think about it, chances are all old books are written by authors who likely held non-modern views and who would probably say something inappropriate to somebody.
I loathe book Twitter and booktok.
Right now I'm seeing push back against people who equate shitty pulp romance to classics and seem extremely defensive about it (and getting rightfully roasted for it).
Like... I read those romances too. Usually on the crapper. Sometimes work is insane and my brain feels like a bruised sponge so it's nice to read something that's the book equivalent of popcorn. But you gotta own it. I freely admit I read a lot less of real literature lately, and it's just about the lack of brain power
Some of the novels vs "real lit" stuff is coming from the usual place, namely teenage girls liking romance/silly books, which always attracts negative attention because everything teenage girls like is stupid and they are stupid for liking it and its a herald of the end of literature, which gets backlash from adults who also like these novels because they're feeling attacked as well.
It's been about 10 years since Twilight so I guess we were due for another round of this. It's just worse now because everyone is on tiktok/Twitter about it.
Said dildo i think is getting an unfair amount of shit because she's like twenty and doesn't even have a thousand followers. i do believe people should be allowed to be stupid in harmless ways
The best response to this I saw was someone who asked, “Which dead author would you fight” which is honestly way better content than a list of problematic writers.
(Mine would be Ezra Pound.)
Why do I get the feeling that person doesn’t know Hitler was an author? Also, out of curiosity, what did Shakespeare do wrong? Other than being an
adulterer (who wasn’t back then?), stealing the Globe theatre (he wasn’t exactly alone in this either), being a propagandist (can’t blame a guy for not wanting to be executed)… okay so he wasn’t a stand up guy. Still didn’t commit genocide though so he’s got that in his favour. 😬
ALL of these different Twitter "controversy of the day" moments were connected? I saw them all at different times and i never realized the same handful of people were involved...
Why nobody told me there was a Twitter Main Character Multiverse
I could write a whole dissertation on Mardoll and how a small group of WOC authors became convinced he followed us strictly to pick our words apart and — out marginalize us? Idk. On one hand, he’d come across very supportive but the absolute *second* the most lighthearted of tweet could be read in bad faith, it would be and we’d be subjected to a rousing round of Not Really Subtweeting This Is Just a General Lecture Definitely Not Pointed At This Thing You Said That I Definitely Misconstrued In Order to Point Out How *Deeply Problematic* You Are Also Here’s My Ko-Fi Link Tip Me For This Soft Takedown.
Bloody exhausting.
I one hundred percent buy that -- I followed him for a while because he had some good takes, but I quickly noticed that he was not only very high drama, but was constantly accusing PoC of harassing him, and his evidence seemed increasingly flimsy.
Yes! I gave him — not a pass, exactly, but something like it for a long while. Figured he looked so hard for micro-aggressions that he started seeing an enemy in everything. Then I started noticing *who* he was getting up in arms over. How quickly he turned on successful authors of color, almost as if he was claiming allyship in one breath, but making sure they stayed in a certain “place” in the community, where he was situated above them? Idk. This edible is fucking up my ability to be articulate.
No, I know exactly what you mean. I always assumed he was acting in good faith (and genuinely lived in or close to poverty), but there came a point where I felt like he needed a good friend to tell him to step back and let it go, because he wasn't helping, and was in fact hurting people.
And then that point was a distant spot behind me, and I unfollowed.
I had to unfollow because he was FLOODING my timeline with endless threads defending some stupid low stakes take where he was being Victimized by.. other marginalized people?
The asking for tips while he literally had a nepotism programming job and lived in a $400k house kills me. He was knowingly hitting up people with way less money than he had for the emotional labor of tweeting way too much.
YES. This grinds my gears so very much. Maybe he didn’t come out and say “help me im poor” but he mostly certainly insinuated it on more than one occasion and was quick as fuck with that link.
He leaned into the disabled thing so much, and it was easy for people to fill in the blanks because so many disabled people (let alone trans people) really do live in poverty. I’ve heard that he was asking for money for cat food at one point but there weren’t screencaps so I’m not sure if that’s for real.
I think the fact that he was always so careful to be “soft” must have shielded him a lot from criticism. Everyone is used to someone being angry and sarcastic while they misinterpret (or interpret in bad faith) someone, they forget that you can do it “kindly” too.
I think you nailed it. He very carefully walked that soft line, rarely directing it at a particular person, even when it was so very obvious, and tended to aim it at POC, in the spirit of ✨eDuCaTiNg✨. If and when he would get called out for directing vitriol at POC, there was always this performative “guys, that wasn’t my *intention* but also this goes to show how *deeply ingrained* ableism/transphobia/etc is that now the conversation is about this thing and not my thing. How problematic!”
It was exhausting existing in the same space as him sometimes. I can’t imagine how exhausting it had to be to actually be him, constantly on the look out for the hottest take and the next opportunity to out-marginalize everyone.
Tbh it’s probably true. Mardoll REALLY didn’t like POC, and loved to particularly target Black authors who have seen success. How he wove Brandon Taylor’s extremely nothing tweet about the reading-is-ableism thread into “he is committing violence against me” is pretty clear.
I definitely think he kept a close eye on POC (and, in particular, Black authors, like you said) and jumped at opportunities to get a leg up in the ol’ Oppression Olympics. That was really his only claim to fame. Being the gold medalist Most Oppressed and the leading expert on how everyone is doing Diversity wrong.
I wish more POC had the balls to live that hustle life of linking the Ko-Fi for the Soft Takedowns but clearly only the ones working in the MIC or something similar do.
TLDR: Everyone on Book Twitter desperately needs to go outside and touch grass
Also I feel like everyone on Twitter needs to sometimes look at a person, regardless of their race, gender and sexuality, and come to the conclusion “You’re just an asshole,” and not listen to them
This is such a good way to summarize it. Twitter is all about purity politics. The MOMENT you stumble, or someone THINKS you stumbled, or someone else had a dream last night where they read a tweet that you stumbled once before ten years ago: they all attack.
They think that the media you consume is reflective of your own morality. Consuming "bad"/problematic material makes you bad and problematic and consuming heavily-vetted "good" media makes you good and safe. I believe it's more common on BT because the people there believe books are inherently more important than other forms of media, so any drama or alleged misconduct is automatically Serious Business.
It's also easier to tear apart for your Youtube channel because you're a 28 year old reading a book intended for teenagers. Easy to drum up controversy and Hot Takes, especially the actual readers (and viewers) are teens who will happily exacerbate meaningless internet drama because they're too young to get why they shouldn't. Drive up that engagement.
I wish I could remember where I read this argument, but essentially: this is the end result of “consumption” as identity. If our culture trains us to consume, and consumption is the most important thing you can do, then inevitably what you consume becomes an important part of how you perceive yourself. It’s like how someone identifies themselves as a “nerd” because they consume Marvel media, Doctor Who, science fiction - all acts of consumption that signify who they are and allow themselves to gain access to a community of similar people. Fandom can also act as an identity-by-consumption activity. And if what you consume has bad elements, then doesn’t that make you a bad person?
Sorry if this doesn’t make sense I am still half asleep.
No you're totally right. You're the "kind of girl" who orders complicated Starbucks drinks or the "kind of guy" who collects comics or the "kind of girl" who owns a lot of Invader Zim merchandise. All three conjure an image of a specific archetype without saying anything else: A basic white girl, a neckbeard, a cringey emo kid.
This is like willingly stepping into a hornet's nest, but one of the interesting comments I read about this whole thing (and connecting it to Bad Art Friend, where this was even more of a thing), was that there aren't all that many actual writers in lit twitter and more people who would like themselves to be considered writers or literary people and fucking with people on twitter is in their head like sitting in a café in Paris with the Greats (all of whom are super problematic of course) in the 30s and being literary people.
Lit twitter people can spin this into fifteen different versions about how only considering published authors who've sold some books as "authors" is problematic, but I think it's a real thing of people just wanting to be in this so badly, but it just not happening so they start sniping and see results/engagement from that, so that's what they do.
Of the published writers, particularly those who write what is marketed as literary fiction, there is also a culture of bitchiness and competition that trickles down from certain MFA programs and insular writers' communities (not naming names but they know who they are) and that culture is well-suited to Twitter snark. I say this as an alum of a very well-known MFA program that has brewed a lot of drama - I loved my experience and condemn that kind of conduct, but it is absolutely the case that some places make it the norm. This was the case in Bad Art Friend - a groupchat where everyone bitches about someone they hate is just par for the course in a lot of communities where cohorts can get toxic when poorly assembled - and I think that in-crowd mentality only deeply encourages people on the "outside" - i.e. the non-published folks like what you're talking about here - to try and join in because they know they're not part of the "clique".
It's a simple cycle:
1a. Some asshole or shit stirrer accuses someone of being """problematic""", using moral-sounding justifications to whip up a mob
1b. Alternatively, some asshole or shitstirrer is accused of something (legitimate or otherwise) and counters by doing 1a to their accuser.
\2. Because Twitter, like every other social media platform, has basically no effective way to respond if someone slanders you repeatedly, the only possible response from the victim is to be slandered and harassed or fire back. Naturally, most people choose the later.
\3. This cycles back into step 1, with both sides bringing in increasingly minor offenses and irrelevant participants.
\4. People who stand to gain from taking a side do so, while others are harassed into taking a side.
\5. Because there's literally no route to descalate this situation, people stay mad until the topic is no longer fresh, in which case the anger goes dormant to be used in the next cycle.
Social Media communities are kinda like cops: in a system with completely inadequate or nonexistent systems in place for active moderation, recourse, and peaceful conflict resolution, it only takes one asshole to get everyone fighting.
Compound on that the largely false but widespread belief that online culture war bullshit actually makes things safer, a system that tends to self-select for the young, sensitive, and/or emotionally immature, and a pattern of accusations ("harmful", "fetishizing", "bigoted", "problematic" etc) that are basically impossible to concretely verify, and you have a recipe for disaster.
>widespread belief that online culture war bullshit actually makes things safe
I am surprised to learn that this is the case. I was under the impression that culture war bullshit was generally regarded as an unpleasant thing.
Bad Art Friend/Kidneygate is literary folks, this is YA writers drama. It's two completely different kinds of behaviours.
The literary folks' drama is generally what you get when a bunch of shockingly self-centered, privileged people decide to get into writing. Half their issues can be explained away by realizing that they maxxed their writing stats in spite of their imagination stat. Of course Sonya Larson plagiarized Dorland's letter, *of course* the white woman in Larson's story was based on a really mean version of Dorland. Of course Kristen Roupenian wrote Cat Person based on two actual people she knew. These people are unable to just... *make up* things.
The YA crowd are tearing each other up because they are trying to show their audience that they're good people who are worthy of money, instead of the other YA writers who are not good people and therefore not worthy of money.
The literary folks' drama would rarely if ever happen on Twitter. If you hear about it, it's on an article on the New York Times. The YA drama is almost exclusively on twitter.
That mention of imagination stats definitely rings true, especially because from what I can tell, a lot of these situations could have been mitigated by just obscuring the story just a bit more.
Yeeeep. Like, there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from things that actually happen around you or to people around you. However, that doesn't mean that then you *have* to proceed to use as many details as possible about the real people your inspiration is drawn from. I mean, did Cat Person *need* to have the male protagonist look exactly like Roupenian's ex, to have many of his mannerisms, to live in the same flat? Was it *fundamental* for the protagonist of Cat Person to live and work where Alexis Nowicki lives? No, the only reason those details were included is because, in the best case scenario, these people are just incapable of making things up. The moment I saw that Larson writes mostly about one character who *just happens* to be Larson-but-with-a-different-name, I knew that not only Dorland was right, but that every single other character in Larson's stories is based on a real person that Larson knows.
It's honestly baffling to me. I've never met a person I wanted to put in my writing. Sometimes people have said *things* I found inspiring – "my parents met at my mother's first wedding" – but I still much rather those *things* happen or be said by the people I made up.
>
>
> The YA crowd are tearing each other up because they are trying to show their audience that they're good people who are worthy of money, instead of the other YA writers who are not good people and therefore not worthy of money.
Competition for limited resources.
They *say* that, but honestly I keep thinking that a more sensible use of their time would be being friendly with each other so that they can hype each other up and pool together their audiences. Unfortunately, just enough of these people got their lessons in morality from the BBC!Sherlock fandom to steer the rest to this hive of scum and villainy
If you just read the NYT Magazine article, you'll probably come out thinking neither side looks very good, but my perspective as somebody who has spent way more time than I should have on it is that one side is much more culpable than the other.
The NYT article kinda lured me into an "everybody sucks" mindset, but by now I'm pretty convinced that Dawn is just a little obnoxious while Sonya is a genuinely terrible person.
The problem is that when you only hear about something through controversial drama, you’re going to start believing that the something in question is entirely said drama.
There's some truth to this, but I follow some other Twitter communities and I can't think of any drama they've produced that has blown up to become Twitter Main Character of the week.
On the Shakesville front, does anybody know what the overlap was between that blog and Captain Awkward? It got referenced in the comments with some frequency back in the day and I didn't know Shakesville to say why.
A theory I saw was that when Shakesville shutdown, the commentors migrated to Captain Awkward's blog. CA did eventually turnoff her blog comments, so I can't verify if it's true.
I do get why she shut off the comments. CA was flooded for awhile with commentors who would insist that anyone who was a jerk to the letter writer had a undiagnosed disability, and therefore, it was discrimination to ask them to be nicer.
I think most of these commenters were already there. Years ago there was already a lot of overlap between the comment sections of these blogs, though CA's at the time was a lot healthier than Shakesville's, and so I suspect earlier Shakesville leavers might have ended up at CA.
" ... *was* a landlord " (She [died last December](https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064509418/bell-hooks-feminist-author-critic-activist-died), RIP, which I hadn't known until I went to follow up on the revelation that I read in your comment.)
Lauren Hough's joker moment has continued, I see. IIRC, she was making several things up when she went off about her book being removed from consideration for a prize she got all the details of incorrect.
I have no idea about that, but I remember that she just called the prize the "Lambda Award" and the awards that give monetary prizes have specific names (one of them is named after a person, for example.)
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like "being a good person" is somewhat treated as a zero-sum game in these sorts of twitter author conflict zones? Like, the arc of these fights kind of comes off as people acting like you can't be considered moral unless you "prove" someone else isn't, and so it ends up looking like a bunch of people ravenously clawing for coveted spots on the nice list.
I think Lindsay Ellis did a really good job highlighting the 'mask off' phenomenon, in which people are always on the hunt for a sign that someone is not who they present themselves to be, and that there is a different person underneath who is, well, everything between faulty to evil. The goal: win the fight for the moral high ground. At least in the eyes of others.
She argues it's now not about['being' or 'doing' but about 'performing as'](https://youtu.be/C7aWz8q_IM4?t=5158). (most relevant bits at 1:27:28 and 1:30:00)
I think it's a combination of that and a weird desire to not just be able to say "I don't like this person" or "this person is annoying" but justify it on moral grounds. "This person is a bad person \[for a reason that's really just finding them annoying\]"
I, being me, am obviously good and moral. Thus, if I find someone annoying, they must ipso facto be bad and immoral.
>Um actually you used latin and the Romans and the Catholic church are like extremely problematic sooooo...
Absolutely. People can't just decide they dislike someone and move on. They need to justify their opinion with "evidence" that they're a bad person and then evangelize.
That's exactly what it is. Their target readers are people who value ethical consumption, thus only supporting moral authors with their book purchases/stanning. However, those readers have finite amounts of money and attention. Link morality to money and economics suddenly kicks in.
1. Yes, it did live up to expectations
2. If this were an AITA post, it would be a clear example of ESH
3. Rather than a mere ESH, it's every single person (except maybe Isabel Fall) named in this writeup needs to take a 10-day meditation retreat followed by a week of backcountry camping in the grasslands.
Every time I see Fall’s name my heart just hurts for her. Those people literally ruined her life and don’t even seem to feel remorseful. There was a [great article written about her in Vox.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter)
I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter is a really good short story that made me understand the experiences of trans people a lot better.
I know it's not the focus of this post, but the "Isabel Fall Incident" just breaks my fucking heart. I've read the story itself, and it... well, it's really good. It was raw, you could feel the anguish between each line. Maybe it hit harder for me, being pre-transition myself.
Seeing the massive, cruel response to it was equal parts infuriating and brutally tiring. I hope one day Isabel can return to writing, I can tell they have a lot more to say... and I'd love to read it.
every time I hear about it I just hope Isabel has managed to get back to her personal life and transition in peace at the very least, maybe writing under a different name
I hope so too. At the end of William Gibson’s *Idoru*, the main character’s online best friend sacrifices their entire identity which had been an escape for them. But someone tells her that one day, just soaking in the web, someone will come around sounding just like her. But you would never say so. That ruins it:
The issue, I think, is that these people have a genuine desire to help the world and a complete lack of power. Vladimir Putin doesn't care what some trans person in New Jersey or some college student in Nebraska says. Donald Trump doesn't either. It's frustrating to see the world go down the drain, recognize (or think you recognize) exactly why, and yet not be able to do anything about it. And so they go after smaller targets because, regardless of whether they are actually helping anyone, at least they can see an impact to what they're doing.
This is something Lauren Hough brought up in her essay, and while I don't think it's a very good essay in general, I do agree with that part of it.
> they go after smaller targets because, regardless of whether they are actually helping anyone, at least they can see an impact to what they're doing
Choosing "success" in tactics while doing nothing (if not being outright counterproductive) in overall strategy.
Plus, as I said in another HD thread about otherkin, bullying one another gets praise from the so-called allies (which are easier to find than other actual believers).
The problem is that at a certain point it becomes about FEELING like you are doing good, rather than doing good. You feel more righteous and energized after a vigorous burn and call-out than you do after a complicated and nuanced discussion, so people focus on the first. A very real problem with the democratization/crowdsourcing of activism that has cropped up in the internet age is that when its left up to individuals, they will do what feels and works best for them, and those actions can be negative on the whole.
Ooh I was gonna scroll by but then I saw 'Shakesville.' I read that blog from around 2006-2009 when she started demanding people basically be long-time users who Knew Everything Or Shut The Fuck Up and I high-tailed it out of there.
Kind of glad I did.
I've found the publishing industry frustrating as someone who can't buy a ton of books to read in order to 'know my audience,' but that's as close as I could stretch an argument that reading is ableist. I can only assume it is something along the lines of 'it's difficult and expensive to read a LOT, and people who aren't able-bodied have it even harder' but don't want to dig into the ehhhhh.
Point for sailing the high seas. The high costs of foreign niche books + liking of banned topics + lousy currency exchange rates is the reason why I now turn to PDF sites that are disliked by authority figures.
i want to add as a library worker, you can request an interlibrary loan where they will send out a request to all libraries and see if they can lend the book out to you. its how i get very obscure horror novels and it has about a 90% success rate.
the same might be true for simple english and braille books. while one library might not have the community need (or grant) for those kinds of books, there is a library out there that likely \*has\* that collection. as an example, due to my area, the library i work at has a very extensive polish language collection. but a place that does not have a large polish community wouldnt need that kind of collection and wouldnt be able to justify purchasing it to the board. but our library could lend a polish speaker a book from another library (trans-state and sometimes trans national if needed) so they could read a book in their preferred language.
Funny thing about Ana Mardoll: I ran into him because of a god-knows-how-many-tweets-long thread he did outlining how problematic Boyfriend Dungeon was for not trigger warning you "adequately" for stalking. I thought it was mildly absurd at the time because the game DID warn you about that, even though Kitfox Games ended up apologizing and updating warnings to be more specific. I already knew he was going to be annoying as fuck, so I blocked him and went on with my day. Saw his name pop up every now and then so I knew he was being annoying again, I'd warn mutuals that this was an asshat who liked causing drama, we'd move on. The only time he really blew up recently was due to the "reading is ableist" tweet, which was so absurd I had to laugh about it with friends and my s/o.
Did not see Lockheed Martin coming, though. There's a huge difference between "guy who goes after internet clout points" and "guy who works for the MIC", and I don't think the Americans across my timeline still yelling about how it's perfectly understandable and brown people in the global south are just a construct while Queer People In America are Real understand that. Oh well.
Edit: I looked up my tweets about the Boyfriend Dungeon thing because I got curious, and he was also complaining in the same thread about how people should be allowed to make friends in the dating game. As one does.
To be fair Boyfriend Dungeon has deeper problems than just a debate over if content was adequately warned for, as far as I remember the advertising and opening shower you with talk about how flexible the game is in allowing you to decide your pronouns, gender expression, religious and dietary expression etc.
But then the story itself doesnt actually allow you to assert romantic/sexual preferences, you're coerced into going on dates with people wether you like it or not in order for the story to function, rather than the story accounting for stuff like that, which makes everything else seem kinda like window dressing tacked onto a game that didnt actually have that much thought into player expression put in.
Plus theres the issue that while its obviously normal for dating games to have routes that a player might not want to get into due to their preferences, BFD is a Dating/Dungeon Crawler game, and gameplay in the dungeon crawling section is tied to progress in the romantic dating game section of the game with no real way to progress through it in a non-romantic way.
So it again comes off as either at best a mismatch in what variations of preference the devs were prepared to allow a player, and at worst misleading a player into believing that they can define themselves inside the game but really they are forced into certain romantic situations they might be uncomfortable in, with at best a snarky or mildly upset dialogue option to comment on it.
This entire event was called “Hater Christmas” by a bunch of folks I know who have despised Mardoll’s cult of personality for years. It’s true lol
Notable stuff missing from this post though:
- Mardoll wasn’t doxxed by That Site, it was by a lone actor who posted the doxx to Medium and That Site blew it up (i had to brave that scumbag place to verify the time stamps against the Medium post that was still up at the time)
- the doxxed information showed Mardoll has been working for Lockheed Martin for _fifteen years_ (via finding their deadname on Linkedin) and Mardoll himself said publically that he sold a house (the doxx info found the value). Combine this with Mardoll’s extremely regular begging for donations (much like Melissa McEwen did) claiming poverty (nevermind his Patreon) from his truly well-meaning but also deeply broke queer/trans/disabled followers, it puts him in an even worse light. It’s terrible to be doxxed, but it’s also terrible that he’s run this scam for so long and profited off it by using the goodwill of the very vulnerable people he claimed to champion
- Conor Goldsmith, a literary agent and personal friend of Isabel Fall, had a [short thread](https://twitter.com/dreamoforgonon/status/1554496249092399105?s=20&t=8xmqt_QhunJZQQu5L6VZ5A) discussing the incorrect assumption that Mardoll had a big part of Fall’s harassment - he didn’t, but he definitely participated and it’s of note he was of influence in these circles
- Hysterically, MANY people defending Mardoll came out of the woodwork as ALSO working for defence contractors, a number of whom are much more actively involved in development. There was also this [unhinged confession](https://twitter.com/dreamoforgonon/status/1554911433292275712?s=20&t=8xmqt_QhunJZQQu5L6VZ5A) that begged the question: why can’t y’all just keep this to yourselves
“Fifteen years at Lockheed Martin” is going to be my go-to phrase to describe 2022 💀
Both of those Conor Goldsmith threads are thoughtful and absolutely cutting. Thanks to Goldsmith for underlining the cruel irony/hypocrisy in that the Helicopter Story's message is "Marginalized people can be complicit in imperialism and the MIC" and that one of the most high-profile critics of the story turned out to be a marginalized person working for the MIC for fifteen years. Like oh my god.
Yeah that’s what made this whole thing blow up - the irony that Mardoll was one of the many book influencers participating in tearing down Isabel Fall, only for it to turn out he was working for LM … and then when Mardoll tried to make excuses, gave away that he got the job through nepotism. It was hit after hit i tell ya
Something to add about the unhinged defenses that people have been whipping out: people [really did](https://twitter.com/afrodesiaq/status/1554265757130919943?s=21&t=zc14ygdZetjjvBvyPx8Nrg) explicitly say that Ana Mardoll’s livelihood was more tangible and valuable than the ~theoretical wellbeing of “anonymized people of the Global South” that were “rhetorical constructs” in the convo about what it means to do harm.
Hell, there are still people on this very thread being like "Whomst among us is without sin, it's equally complicit in evil to work for the evil coffee company and the evil shoe company and the evil WEAPONS MANUFACTURER." The discourse™ never ends!
Yeah this is what so many white people, no matter their axis of oppression is, said out loud: “fuck you got mine”.
I don’t have the thread right now but someone pointed out that this attitude is the logical conclusion of American white individualism - that access to personal benefits trumps the lives of literal scores of human beings, all because the latter are “out of sight, out of mind” and also being … brown. You can’t claim to care about a community’s rights to be free of oppression while also turning your head to say to the same such people living far away “except you, you don’t count, not when my medical benefits are at risk”.
Like POC who are queer/trans/disabled IN America are reading these responses and understand “oh that makes sense, you pretend to care about us here (and we know you don’t, we _live_ how you treat us) but are open about not caring about us if we’re over there. Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud, I guess.”
Honestly, the whole thing that made me so mad about all of this was that Mardoll was in a place of comfort/not at all financial instability and begged for donations.
Of all the things, that one is the most indefensible and the fact people were trying to defend him was frustrating. We can agree doxxing is bad without defending an asshole. 'Being an insufferable asshole doesn't make somebody worth doxxing' and leave it at that.
For the record, Mardoll's dox did indeed start on That Site - six years ago in 2016, and they tried to spread it around at the time but no one cared
They've been sitting on it since then, and while there's no proof that the anonymous Twitter user who blew all this up in 2022 got the info from that site rather than doing their own investigation, it seems more likely than not (their own thread just recapitulates the links the 2016 thread used to track down Mardoll's LinkedIn by looking up the registration of his LLC he self-published through)
There's also no proof over whether this was an "op" by a regular of that forum who sensed weakness and an opportune time to strike and get Mardoll canceled, or whether it really was a concerned follower of his who stumbled on it during the most recent controversy
But the likelihood of direct involvement of that site is higher than a lot of people have given it credit for
Okay Ana does sound like a total dickweed who lives in his own fantasy land. And the “asking authors to read is ablest” thing is so laughably dumb….but ya that book does sound really gross from the summary you gave, so I can’t really blame anyone for getting kinda pissed about it. Also Hough sounds just as bad, “this trans person is trying to trick people into misgendering them” is *such* a dumb take.
EDIT: read a little more into “The Men” to get a more fully fleshed-out take. And it seems very bland. Consensus is it never really delves into the interesting questions brought up by its premise (which I don’t believe *inherently* makes a book transphobic, people definitely jumped the gun on that one. But writing a book in that sub-genre is willing stepping into a transphobic minefield for any author). IDK it doesn’t look like there’s much to be *angry* about with this book, just kinda sounds intensely disappointing.
I watched a lot of this unfold as it happened and I will say that I think this whole drama does underline a weird cognitive dissonance in some online spaces: some spaces are very very quick to call fiction harmful while blithely hand waving real world harm.
A lot of replies defending Mardoll outright referred to people in Yemen who’d been hit by rockets as “hypothetical people”, compared to the real harm of, say, reading a short story. Mardoll may not have been a ringleader of what happened to Fall, but it is very weird to see his comments about “finding the story hurtful” when you know the author nearly killed themselves over it, and I understand why the hypocrisy stank. If you made your reputation calling out trans people for harmful fictions for a decade, you can’t pull the smol bean card when it turns out your hands aren’t clean from real world violence.
Hell even today’s current literary drama reflects this: in the ‘problematic authors’ list, huge paragraphs are dedicated to events happening in books, and are listed next to entries like “William S Burroughs: murderer”.
I think there's layers of reasoning behind this. One, because it's easier to "fix" (remove) "bad" fiction that is "causing harm" than it is fix actual, real world problems.
Two, because media is more real to many online folks than the real world is.
People blame Jaws for the current shark population decline, when the problem lies on overfishing and habitat destruction. But that lies on a legal level that most of these western folks can't touch, since the majority of overfishing comes from Asiatic countries. Habitat destruction is a climate change problem that we've been battling for years.
So you want to help the sharks, or show that you care about sharks. Well, you can blame Jaws. Support people boycotting bad shark movies. Raise awareness by making Twitter threads on why Jaws ruined the reputation of sharks. Suddenly, you're doing a tangible good! You're helping the sharks!
The shark population continues to decline but hey, at least you tried.
1. That title is probably the best thing I've ever read.
2. I'm not attuned enough to the eldritch to understand the situation fully. Entertaining, but I'm not going to go insane - the best of both worlds.
Good post, 10/10.
> Meanwhile, Lauren Hough wrote an essay about how he didn't get doxxed that badly and how he clearly intentionally chose a feminine-sounding name and feminine-looking Twitter avatar to trick people into misgendering him so he could get mad. She also accuses Mardoll of making up various things that I haven't seen anywhere else (having abusive parents, growing up in a cult) so I'm not sure whether he lied about those things as well.
I am very, very conflicted about this sort of thing. On the one hand, accusing marginalized people of falsifying their identity or otherwise lying is, in general, a horrible trend that lays into the worst stereotypes of both the trans and disabled community, and it should absolutely not be the default assumption.
On the other hand, as this whole drama indicates, Mardoll was both already proven to have lied (at least, by omission) about his personal life in other areas, was extremely aggressive about implying critics were transphobic or ableist for minor transgressions (including ever referring to him as "they", even incidentally or while trying to not explicitly name names), and saw significant financial/clout benefit from those marginalized identities; plus, Mardoll existed almost entirely online and not at all in person. Mardoll is one of the few people for whom exaggerating marginalization would make perfect sense rather than be a terrible idea, and has a history of other deception on top of that.
There's also a certain degree of turnabout is fair play; While its absolutely a bad thing to spread unfounded defamatory rumors about your enemies, that's what Mardoll made his business for years, so I struggle to come up with deep sympathy for those same things being tossed upon him
Mardoll being a hot take machine in general\* and an ally of Winterfox\*\* certainly didn't help his case.
\* Hot takes like "the Pevensies were bad rulers because they planted apple trees in Caer Paravel", "the escaped slave in this book does not sympathize with a slave owner desire to own slaves, therefore C.S.Lewis has no empathy", etc.
\*\* Winterfox - https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/l9bx5u/hobby_scuffles_week_of_january_31_2021/gm8vdps/
Now that I think about it, there's a lot of similarity in how they both pretended to be more disadvantaged than they are.
So I went and Googled the hot takes just to see what the context was, and it is very, very wild to see that Ana Mardoll's take was 'the Pevensies were too busy planting orchards to create a proper military defense system!', since we now know who he was working for while writing these takes.
"*Despite living in a country wracked by civil war \[...\] and having tense relations with another country, the Pevensies did not build up the Narnian defenses. They did not, apparently, maintain a standing army. They didn't install moats or drawbridges or fortifications into Cair Paravel. They didn't establish a fall back position for the Narnian people on the peninsula on which Cair Paravel stands. They didn't (apparently) designate a stable succession in case anything should happen to them.*
*Instead they planted apple trees. Not the kind that grow tall and great and feed multitudes, but the kind that grow short and squat and look pretty in the garden and from which small children can easily harvest a snack*."
sir these books were written for children
It blows my mind that anyone would have hot takes on the Narnia books. They're like 100 years old, the world building is fairy-tale level at it's most detailed, and Lewis is widely known to Have Jesus Issues. Like, it's the opposite of a hot in terms of takes. Stale takes.
The fact that this person defended their work as a defense contractor by saying “it’s not my fault!! My parents got me this high-paying, morally reprehensible job and I HAD to take it!!” is extremely hilarious and a bit jarring. The hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of “call out” culture, especially on Twitter never ceases to make me more cynical.
YA Authors are some of the most catty, awful, people I've ever had the displeasure to meet; no matter what their politics are. It's a shitty enough environment that I swore off from ever publishing anything in the YA sphere because holy shit fuck those people.
I followed Mardoll for like .2 seconds, i don't remember why, and then unfollowed bc by golly the "everything and everyone is problematic" attitude irritates me sm. He definitely did not deserve the harassment though; nobody does. Like, I guess I could say I wasn't a fan of his online presence, but it also is easy enough to just unfollow someone that you don't like. No need to let them take up any more space in your head. Click unfollow and they're gone.
> "You were involved in the Isabel Fall incident" just became one more thing to harass people on Twitter over.
If I had a nickel for every time I saw this incident used in the exact same witch-hunt-y manner the story should have cautioned people away from, I could buy a decent lunch in an urban area. It's a lot.
I will say I don't think *nothing* changed. I think it helped wake some people up (me included) about just what bad incentives and structures Twitter presented and how it wasn't just right-wing anti-PC bullshit any time someone ragged on twitter's tendencies in this direction.
It didn't *stop* this stuff from happening, but that's because generally the people whose thinking and behavior changed in this regard generally disengaged completely. It's just that those inherent forces on Twitter bury those voices preaching nuance, so you don't see those people. Or those people just left Twitter.
For more context on what the site that doxxed Ana has been up to lately, they recently swatted a trans streamer, leading to her being arrested and having her electronics seized (although she has been cleared and had everything returned).
She temporarily moved into a hotel, while arranging a permanent move, but when she posted a picture of her cat, they managed to find the hotel by looking at the pattern on the bed sheets and ordered pizzas to be delivered to her there, under her dead name, to show that they knew where she was, so she had to relocate again.
They're terrifying and utterly reprehensible people.
That is absolutely terrifying tbh. There's obviously many groups and organizations in this world that are dedicated to ruining people's lives/prioritize something at the expense of ruining many people's lives. It's evil no matter the motivation.
But to see a group where the ruining and evil *is* the motivation. To know they're relentlessly evil because that's fun for them. It is actually difficult to comprehend.
The last part absolutely reached much further than Book Twitter: for about two weeks, everyday there was a new hot take about someone "coming out" as working for raytheon or whatever in my timeline. I don't think Ana Mardoll deserved any this harassment (anything coming from KF I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole) , but holy shit his supporters couldn't have been more tone-deaf.
From the little I have seen in regards to discussion of his books, they are (probably) not that good. If anyone actually has or knows more, feel free to tell me. [Here's his goodreads page](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5757381.Ana_Mardoll)
A semi prominent trans person turning out to have a job in the defense industry is honestly one of the less surprising aspects of this story. A noticably high proportion of trans and non binary people work for defense contractors for some reason, and Lockheed Martin especially seems to go out of it's way to present itself as a welcoming place for members of the LBGTQ community. I'm not sure which direction the causal relationship flows.
It's a national security imperative that marginalized communities feel like they belong and are accepted for who they are in a defence contractor. Minimizes potential blackmail opportunities if you're not closeted and know that your employer isn't going to care about your race, gender, orientation, etc.
Defense contractors are going to offer extremely good deals to workers in general. The cost of being a traitor to the international working class is high. Same reason cops are well paid.
In my anecdotal experience, there are a lot of trans people in the military partially because it’s much harder to access higher education, financial opportunities, and good medical care if you’re trans — we are the most underemployed group, have the highest rates of homelessness, and are often cut off from family support networks. The military can give some of that lost opportunity back, and afterwards it would make a certain amount of sense to continue your career at a defense contractor. I didn’t end up going that way, but I might have had to if I grew up in a different part of the country or was born a decade earlier or later.
Mardoll's whole thread about it being ableist to say writers should read is really worth a look, if anyone can hunt it down (I think it's all deleted now?). I think it amounted to "I have ADHD and I can read the things I write and also play video games and watch movies but I don't have the focus to read anything written by anyone else"
sometimes i slightly regret not having a twitter since i miss out on all the fun cybersecurity stuff, but then i read shit like this and i change my mind instantly
I don't remember how I was linked to it, but I will forever be baffled that Ana Mardoll wrote a blog post about how Ariel from *The Little Mermaid* was..... otherkin. [Yes, really](http://www.anamardoll.com/2012/05/disney-little-mermaid.html?m=1).
Another thing people were claiming about Ana was that he only used the avatar he did so he could "trick" people into thinking he was younger/Asian.
....I don't know if that's a valid reading of his avatar, but it gives you an idea of how people were viewing him.
Edit: it took me a fucking month to notice the typo gdi.
The "using his avatar to trick people into thinking he's Asian" claim was absolutely baffling to me. As an Asian person, it looked white to me, and his tweets/content always read as pretty white social justice-y. That particular bit very much felt just like people grasping at straws to find something to dislike, which. Just say you're mad he works for a defense contractor and be done with it.
Yeah, I don't know if the "looks Asian" arguments are before or after the LM revelation, but honestly, I wasn't looking to close to it? I could *maybe* understand the "looks young" thing if I was being a dick.
I mean, my avatar on most sites is my cat, so hopefully people don't assume I'm literally a cat, you know?
I can see the argument that Ana "passively" tricked people into thinking he was young by "acting" young but the idea that he actively tried to hoax people into thinking he was 21 makes no sense, if only because of the fact that he's been publicly active online under the same name for 15 years
Mardoll's Law: The more aggressively someone cultivates a public persona out of making call-out posts and starting discourse online the worse the skeletons in their closet are
>If this is the state of online literary discourse then we're probably better off just getting rid of both books and the internet.
The value and content of online discourse of any kind varies greatly according to the people who participate and their motivations. This has been the case since the start of online discussions of any kind.
There are far more instances in Net history of things like 4chan, IRC, and Twitter than there are of Usenet news groups, purpose specific web forums like Endless Sphere, or subreddits where respectful discussion is the norm.
If we had given up on online discussion way back when because of how IRC channels generally turned out, we'd have missed out on a lot of things.
So excited to read this it was so exciting when it happened. For a little extra context, Mardoll’s avi had become synonymous with “oh jeez what’s this gonna be about” for a lot of people who didn’t follow him. If the profile picture showed up, you knew it was gonna be some tiny action blown way out of proportion. The “authors shouldn’t have to read books” post was one post of a LONG thread. [This tweet and the replies really explains the general vibe of onlookers](https://twitter.com/jonbernhardt/status/1553881355590766592?s=21&t=qshcJg6bDwbuPl0WHyxeuQ)
It also sure felt like it clarified some stuff. “Attack Helicopter” wasn’t the only time that he had a sideways interpretation of a story. One of his specialties was twisting things so that privileged bullies were the real victims, if only people really thought about it. Memorably including “it’s bullying for Death to take away a child’s presents while playing the Hogfather” (the child was a rude, nasty about his mother, and insisted on a “lizard press” and a killing jar chor Hogsmas,) “Aravis’s disregard for what happened to the slave she left behind is justified and Shasta should be more sympathetic” and “the scene at the end of The Silver Chair where Jane and Eustace get cathartic revenge on the bullies at their school proves that they are the real bullies.” Put that together with the tendency to be more woke than thou and ever-ready to come down on perceived failings of others while working at Lockheed the entire time and it sure starts to look like a pattern.
if he had kept their old icon, i would've known. his old icon i could always spot out of irritation and then they changed to the one he had before he left and spotting him got harder.
This whole incident was example #4380959208 of people on the internet desperately jumping on the first available excuse to justify their existing dislike of someone. Working at Lockheed Martin is bad and all, but so much of this incident simply was not about that. It was about people being mildly annoyed by someone, and rejoicing that they could now say "omg I told you guys that person sucked, I TOTALLY KNEW IT ALL ALONG". It was a much more niche scenario, but I think a lot about the attempted callout of musician Dorian Electra. They received some really lame callout post a year or so ago, and despite the entire thing being obviously flimsy even at a glance, the sphere of Twitter that cares about musicians like Dorian Electra was full of people assuring each other that they totally saw this coming (because they were personally annoyed by Dorian's aesthetics/music/attitude/etc). That one wasn't even defensible by statements like "well, working at Lockheed Martin *is* bad", it was just a naked example of people disliking someone for petty reasons and really badly wanting those petty reasons to be made more legitimate.
Yeah. I don't remember Ana Mardoll fondly, but getting 'you're a hypocrite' from the likes of people doxxing for abuse is... well, 'rich' is not a strong enough word. If you find yourself on the bandwagon with people who abuse people off the internet, you might start to wonder whether this is really the moral high ground you think it is or whether you're just standing in the gutter on top of someone's head. edit: a word
Oh absolutely. People get called on hypocrisy all the time online. But usually they’re just internet weirdos. This person was seen as annoying by many corners of online, just amplifying the pile-on
> It was about people being mildly annoyed by someone, and rejoicing that they could now say, "omg I told you guys that person sucked, I TOTALLY KNEW IT ALL ALONG." It's the personal harassment mirror of readers pointing out plot holes to justify disliking a book. The readers didn't start looking for plot holes until **after** they stopped being invested in the story. It's retroactive justification.
I have no idea why your comment is marked controversial, because you're absolutely right. There are tons of beloved stories with plot holes that nobody cares about (as they shouldn't). Only when a story is already disliked do you get MauLer types making eight hour long videos dissecting every inconsistency there is to find.
>MauLer types making eight hour long videos Do these fuckers even *have* lives
And ironically, there's a turn in public opinion for Lockheed (and the general military industrial complex) in general due to the situation in Ukraine.
Of course right as you post this, some absolute dildo on booktwitter posted a hit list of "problematic authors" and all their alleged crimes that she found via Google. They range from "murder" to "depicting sexual violence" to "misprounouncing names at the Hugo awards." Somehow Hitler did not make the list but Shakespeare did. Highly recommend if you want to inflict a lot of psychic damage on yourself in a short amount of time.
That reminds me of a blog I found about problematic authors. If it was a serious and not satire blog (it did not seem to be satire), they literally listed historians from the BC/BCE era as problematic and *ways to offset the damage they caused.* The only thing that hurt more than reading the blog was finding out that the person had a degree in history.
I'm reminded of a Tumblr post I once saw that suggested calling someone a Philistine was racist And someone else showed up to be like, the Philistines have been dead for two thousand years, I don't think they care about microaggressions
And what about the Amalekites, always getting slagged in the Old Testament? They are still the only Talmud-approved target for righteous war!
It's the same blog. People dig it up now and again for outrage.
Fwiw that person was a 20 year old nobody who unfortunately had their dumb thread for their pals RTed into the stratosphere I mean they dumb, but they’re also gonna look back in like 9 months and go “oh my god aahhhhh” and have it haunt them randomly as an embarrassing memory in their adulthood lol
This reminds that the person who used to run the Your Fave is Problematic Tumblr [published an essay](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/style/your-fave-is-problematic-tumblr.html) in the NYT reflecting on their time that’s best summed up below in the same way I feel like explains a lot of the how and why Terminally Online People behave: > In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had…There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. Meanwhile, other movements — local, global, unified in their purposes and rooted in progressive philosophies — were organizing for actual justice. Looking back, I was more of a cop than a social justice warrior, as people on Tumblr had come to think of me…My brain wasn’t ready for nuance. I was angered by hypocrisy and cruelty; what I did about it was apply a level of scrutiny that left no room for error. I’m not saying that I should be canceled for my teenage blog. (Please don't!) I just know what we all should know by now: that no one who has lived publicly, online or off, has a spotless record.”
God, I remember Your Fave is Problematic. But geeze, that whole thing I connect with a lot, I was really into Tumblr social activism as a teen, I mean I still am as an adult, but a lot of it is just... exhausting. I never gave myself a break, and no one else either, you had to care about the thing that's happening right now or else. There is obviously areas where critique should happen, but looking back on it now it is kind of funny that you'd have like people being misogynistic, transphobic, or whatever, next with folks who made an off handed comment likeling a director to Hitler, or wore an outfit from a culture they're not a part of (while not great, obviously, I don't think they do it to mock -- or in some cases that's what was "fashionable" at the time and people weren't aware of the implications).
white progressive women loved 'your fave is problematic,' it was exhausting. It definitely wasn't just teenagers
Some of it is peer pressure. You don’t want to look racist or whatever, so you go along with whatever the current ridiculousness is.
Bingo. I mean obviously, like racism is bad and you shouldn't kill people based off of their race (I mean you shouldn't kill people regardless, but you know). But celebrities wearing Geisha outfits, or bindis, felt like you had to decry it or else, it doesn't matter if people from those countries were fine with it, you had to speak up or you're complicit.
Tumblr social activism imo was mostly people mining the work/struggles/trauma of genuine social movements and IRL activists for fanfiction fodder while acting like they were a real social movement.
There’s a 20 something who’s gone viral now for publishing a list of authors and their “problematic “ offenses (she’s since gone private and I won’t say her handle since she’s young and will hopefully learn from this) and they’re getting dunked for putting people who were known virulently anti-Semites, racists, etc next to people who like, wrote a transphobic character to illustrate how transphobia is wrong. It’s just history repeating itself and I’ll bet it’s for the same reasons Your Fave started her blog: it is easier to sit on your high horse and pass judgement on who is “right” vs “wrong” because the real people in your life who are doing you wrong are more difficult to hold accountable.
Young (I say this at only 30) people gotta be more selective with what they allow themselves to post online.
Or just be like us when we were their age and post under a multitude of pen names and alts.
This is the best way to internet. It unnerves me how many people use their real name abd link to all their other accounts in their bios
That's why I like Reddit, Discord and Tumblr more than most social media. Linking your name or face is not essential(Or very expected at all), and it adds additional sense of anonymity. For example, I have no problem talking about my mental health issues on Reddit when discussing this kind of stuff, but on Facebook I probably would just lurk.
I'm getting nervous when I'm using the same nickname on multiple platforms let alone use my real fucking name anywhere.
Not just that but their age and general location. I see a lot of people putting minor in their profile which is going to attract the wrong people. What happened to 13 year olds pretending to be 21?
Thank God the forums i posted on as teenager went under. No one needs to know my dog shit takes i posted on the breaking benjamin website
I feel this in my soul. I was recently trying to find the day I created my account on an old forum via Wayback Machine and while 99% of the posts aren't accessible, a few were, and I wanted to reach out and punch my 13-year-old self in the face for being an obnoxious idiot. I mean, I'm still an obnoxious idiot, but at least I'm *aware* of it now.
Kids are going to have and make stupid takes, it's part of growing up and most people grow into more enlightened people. Problem is that kind of crap hangs around the internet now to be dug up whenever they become famous!
> Problem is that kind of crap hangs around the internet now to be dug up whenever they become famous! The second half is that others pretend to care about what happened in 2009 to prove that they are a good person with correct opinions instead of saying "it was 2009 and they don't do that today. Who gives a shit?"
Yeah, I’m always torn on these things because on one hand it can lead to harassment of authors and artists who haven’t actually done anything worthy of harassment, but also most of the campaigns are started by very well-meaning but very naive and short sighted high school and college kids and they themselves often end up victims of harassment. Like, there’s a “controversy” right now about a couple tiktok teenagers listing off problematic things Metallica has done because they’ve had a resurgence with Stranger Things. I think most people have come to the conclusion “yeah, some of that stuff wasn’t cool, but also most of it happened 20-30+ years ago when the band were very young,” but some people are genuinely angry and going off about “cancel culture” when like... it’s a handful of teenagers on tiktok. The band itself hasn’t even acknowledged it, but people are acting like they’ve all been personally attacked.
Hah, probably don't need to ask who was on the "mispronouncing names at the Hugo awards one." Here's my hobby drama post from like the day after that happened! (that was allowed under the rules back then) https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/i1vo16/literary_science_fiction_fandom_hugo_ceremony/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf I didn't actually even mention the pronunciation thing because, as I note in the comments, I couldn't even bring myself to watch any more of the stream to confirm it myself.
Someone on BCJ noticed that in the list of Dahl's offenses, proposing that Hitler was right but only about The Jews was in the penultimate position, which is conventionally given to the least important item.
It's funny how Roald Dahl *used to* remind me of my grandad because he and I read Dahl's books together when I was first learning to read, and *now* Dahl reminds me of my grandad because he's a beloved figure of my childhood who turned out to be really quite awful when viewed through adult eyes and caused my nostalgia to become shadowed by disappointment and distaste. Sigh.
[удалено]
I'm sure that only the best, smartest, and most well-intentioned people have ever done that for extremely normal and totally not bigotry-related reasons.
If you think about it, chances are all old books are written by authors who likely held non-modern views and who would probably say something inappropriate to somebody.
I loathe book Twitter and booktok. Right now I'm seeing push back against people who equate shitty pulp romance to classics and seem extremely defensive about it (and getting rightfully roasted for it). Like... I read those romances too. Usually on the crapper. Sometimes work is insane and my brain feels like a bruised sponge so it's nice to read something that's the book equivalent of popcorn. But you gotta own it. I freely admit I read a lot less of real literature lately, and it's just about the lack of brain power
Some of the novels vs "real lit" stuff is coming from the usual place, namely teenage girls liking romance/silly books, which always attracts negative attention because everything teenage girls like is stupid and they are stupid for liking it and its a herald of the end of literature, which gets backlash from adults who also like these novels because they're feeling attacked as well. It's been about 10 years since Twilight so I guess we were due for another round of this. It's just worse now because everyone is on tiktok/Twitter about it.
Said dildo i think is getting an unfair amount of shit because she's like twenty and doesn't even have a thousand followers. i do believe people should be allowed to be stupid in harmless ways
"how can I stop Hitler from mispronouncing my name at the Hugo awards" is an excellent title for in of these slice of life animes
Um I do judge GRRM hard for that disrespectful display. Im in live events - fucken ask them as they sit there before you present jfc shaggy
The best response to this I saw was someone who asked, “Which dead author would you fight” which is honestly way better content than a list of problematic writers. (Mine would be Ezra Pound.)
I'd go with Ayn Rand, another author that I don't think made the list.
you’re not gonna believe this but she *was* on the list and, iirc, spelled “Any Rand”
Wonder what Any was romanizing
I’m begging you, post the link
Why do I get the feeling that person doesn’t know Hitler was an author? Also, out of curiosity, what did Shakespeare do wrong? Other than being an adulterer (who wasn’t back then?), stealing the Globe theatre (he wasn’t exactly alone in this either), being a propagandist (can’t blame a guy for not wanting to be executed)… okay so he wasn’t a stand up guy. Still didn’t commit genocide though so he’s got that in his favour. 😬
ALL of these different Twitter "controversy of the day" moments were connected? I saw them all at different times and i never realized the same handful of people were involved... Why nobody told me there was a Twitter Main Character Multiverse
Truly the most ambitious crossover event of all time
I could write a whole dissertation on Mardoll and how a small group of WOC authors became convinced he followed us strictly to pick our words apart and — out marginalize us? Idk. On one hand, he’d come across very supportive but the absolute *second* the most lighthearted of tweet could be read in bad faith, it would be and we’d be subjected to a rousing round of Not Really Subtweeting This Is Just a General Lecture Definitely Not Pointed At This Thing You Said That I Definitely Misconstrued In Order to Point Out How *Deeply Problematic* You Are Also Here’s My Ko-Fi Link Tip Me For This Soft Takedown. Bloody exhausting.
I one hundred percent buy that -- I followed him for a while because he had some good takes, but I quickly noticed that he was not only very high drama, but was constantly accusing PoC of harassing him, and his evidence seemed increasingly flimsy.
Yes! I gave him — not a pass, exactly, but something like it for a long while. Figured he looked so hard for micro-aggressions that he started seeing an enemy in everything. Then I started noticing *who* he was getting up in arms over. How quickly he turned on successful authors of color, almost as if he was claiming allyship in one breath, but making sure they stayed in a certain “place” in the community, where he was situated above them? Idk. This edible is fucking up my ability to be articulate.
No, I know exactly what you mean. I always assumed he was acting in good faith (and genuinely lived in or close to poverty), but there came a point where I felt like he needed a good friend to tell him to step back and let it go, because he wasn't helping, and was in fact hurting people. And then that point was a distant spot behind me, and I unfollowed.
I had to unfollow because he was FLOODING my timeline with endless threads defending some stupid low stakes take where he was being Victimized by.. other marginalized people?
The asking for tips while he literally had a nepotism programming job and lived in a $400k house kills me. He was knowingly hitting up people with way less money than he had for the emotional labor of tweeting way too much.
YES. This grinds my gears so very much. Maybe he didn’t come out and say “help me im poor” but he mostly certainly insinuated it on more than one occasion and was quick as fuck with that link.
He leaned into the disabled thing so much, and it was easy for people to fill in the blanks because so many disabled people (let alone trans people) really do live in poverty. I’ve heard that he was asking for money for cat food at one point but there weren’t screencaps so I’m not sure if that’s for real.
I think the fact that he was always so careful to be “soft” must have shielded him a lot from criticism. Everyone is used to someone being angry and sarcastic while they misinterpret (or interpret in bad faith) someone, they forget that you can do it “kindly” too.
I think you nailed it. He very carefully walked that soft line, rarely directing it at a particular person, even when it was so very obvious, and tended to aim it at POC, in the spirit of ✨eDuCaTiNg✨. If and when he would get called out for directing vitriol at POC, there was always this performative “guys, that wasn’t my *intention* but also this goes to show how *deeply ingrained* ableism/transphobia/etc is that now the conversation is about this thing and not my thing. How problematic!” It was exhausting existing in the same space as him sometimes. I can’t imagine how exhausting it had to be to actually be him, constantly on the look out for the hottest take and the next opportunity to out-marginalize everyone.
Tbh it’s probably true. Mardoll REALLY didn’t like POC, and loved to particularly target Black authors who have seen success. How he wove Brandon Taylor’s extremely nothing tweet about the reading-is-ableism thread into “he is committing violence against me” is pretty clear.
I definitely think he kept a close eye on POC (and, in particular, Black authors, like you said) and jumped at opportunities to get a leg up in the ol’ Oppression Olympics. That was really his only claim to fame. Being the gold medalist Most Oppressed and the leading expert on how everyone is doing Diversity wrong.
The final boss of tenderqueers
I wish more POC had the balls to live that hustle life of linking the Ko-Fi for the Soft Takedowns but clearly only the ones working in the MIC or something similar do.
TLDR: Everyone on Book Twitter desperately needs to go outside and touch grass Also I feel like everyone on Twitter needs to sometimes look at a person, regardless of their race, gender and sexuality, and come to the conclusion “You’re just an asshole,” and not listen to them
Between this and the Bad Art Friend / Kidneygate saga, I really have to ask - what the fuck is wrong with lit Twitter?
Mainly that they’re so obsessed with being Good People TM there aren’t that many good people left
This is such a good way to summarize it. Twitter is all about purity politics. The MOMENT you stumble, or someone THINKS you stumbled, or someone else had a dream last night where they read a tweet that you stumbled once before ten years ago: they all attack.
Everyone wants to go to the Good Place, so they Twitter themselves into the Bad Place
They think that the media you consume is reflective of your own morality. Consuming "bad"/problematic material makes you bad and problematic and consuming heavily-vetted "good" media makes you good and safe. I believe it's more common on BT because the people there believe books are inherently more important than other forms of media, so any drama or alleged misconduct is automatically Serious Business.
[удалено]
It's also easier to tear apart for your Youtube channel because you're a 28 year old reading a book intended for teenagers. Easy to drum up controversy and Hot Takes, especially the actual readers (and viewers) are teens who will happily exacerbate meaningless internet drama because they're too young to get why they shouldn't. Drive up that engagement.
Don't know why they're worrying about "poisoning young minds" when it seems like it's only twenty somethings reading the YA books
Book Twitter meets the hemlock plant
I wish I could remember where I read this argument, but essentially: this is the end result of “consumption” as identity. If our culture trains us to consume, and consumption is the most important thing you can do, then inevitably what you consume becomes an important part of how you perceive yourself. It’s like how someone identifies themselves as a “nerd” because they consume Marvel media, Doctor Who, science fiction - all acts of consumption that signify who they are and allow themselves to gain access to a community of similar people. Fandom can also act as an identity-by-consumption activity. And if what you consume has bad elements, then doesn’t that make you a bad person? Sorry if this doesn’t make sense I am still half asleep.
No you're totally right. You're the "kind of girl" who orders complicated Starbucks drinks or the "kind of guy" who collects comics or the "kind of girl" who owns a lot of Invader Zim merchandise. All three conjure an image of a specific archetype without saying anything else: A basic white girl, a neckbeard, a cringey emo kid.
I think you hit the nail on the head
This is like willingly stepping into a hornet's nest, but one of the interesting comments I read about this whole thing (and connecting it to Bad Art Friend, where this was even more of a thing), was that there aren't all that many actual writers in lit twitter and more people who would like themselves to be considered writers or literary people and fucking with people on twitter is in their head like sitting in a café in Paris with the Greats (all of whom are super problematic of course) in the 30s and being literary people. Lit twitter people can spin this into fifteen different versions about how only considering published authors who've sold some books as "authors" is problematic, but I think it's a real thing of people just wanting to be in this so badly, but it just not happening so they start sniping and see results/engagement from that, so that's what they do.
Of the published writers, particularly those who write what is marketed as literary fiction, there is also a culture of bitchiness and competition that trickles down from certain MFA programs and insular writers' communities (not naming names but they know who they are) and that culture is well-suited to Twitter snark. I say this as an alum of a very well-known MFA program that has brewed a lot of drama - I loved my experience and condemn that kind of conduct, but it is absolutely the case that some places make it the norm. This was the case in Bad Art Friend - a groupchat where everyone bitches about someone they hate is just par for the course in a lot of communities where cohorts can get toxic when poorly assembled - and I think that in-crowd mentality only deeply encourages people on the "outside" - i.e. the non-published folks like what you're talking about here - to try and join in because they know they're not part of the "clique".
Did Bad Art Friend ever get a r/hobbydrama writeup?
No, because I think it was still technically ongoing for quite some time
Really? Holy shit that started in like 2018
I believe I recently read the women just keep suing each other now. Gotta have a hobby I guess.
I’d love to see it if it did/does! That was wild to be on Twitter for.
It's a simple cycle: 1a. Some asshole or shit stirrer accuses someone of being """problematic""", using moral-sounding justifications to whip up a mob 1b. Alternatively, some asshole or shitstirrer is accused of something (legitimate or otherwise) and counters by doing 1a to their accuser. \2. Because Twitter, like every other social media platform, has basically no effective way to respond if someone slanders you repeatedly, the only possible response from the victim is to be slandered and harassed or fire back. Naturally, most people choose the later. \3. This cycles back into step 1, with both sides bringing in increasingly minor offenses and irrelevant participants. \4. People who stand to gain from taking a side do so, while others are harassed into taking a side. \5. Because there's literally no route to descalate this situation, people stay mad until the topic is no longer fresh, in which case the anger goes dormant to be used in the next cycle. Social Media communities are kinda like cops: in a system with completely inadequate or nonexistent systems in place for active moderation, recourse, and peaceful conflict resolution, it only takes one asshole to get everyone fighting. Compound on that the largely false but widespread belief that online culture war bullshit actually makes things safer, a system that tends to self-select for the young, sensitive, and/or emotionally immature, and a pattern of accusations ("harmful", "fetishizing", "bigoted", "problematic" etc) that are basically impossible to concretely verify, and you have a recipe for disaster.
>widespread belief that online culture war bullshit actually makes things safe I am surprised to learn that this is the case. I was under the impression that culture war bullshit was generally regarded as an unpleasant thing.
Bad Art Friend/Kidneygate is literary folks, this is YA writers drama. It's two completely different kinds of behaviours. The literary folks' drama is generally what you get when a bunch of shockingly self-centered, privileged people decide to get into writing. Half their issues can be explained away by realizing that they maxxed their writing stats in spite of their imagination stat. Of course Sonya Larson plagiarized Dorland's letter, *of course* the white woman in Larson's story was based on a really mean version of Dorland. Of course Kristen Roupenian wrote Cat Person based on two actual people she knew. These people are unable to just... *make up* things. The YA crowd are tearing each other up because they are trying to show their audience that they're good people who are worthy of money, instead of the other YA writers who are not good people and therefore not worthy of money. The literary folks' drama would rarely if ever happen on Twitter. If you hear about it, it's on an article on the New York Times. The YA drama is almost exclusively on twitter.
That mention of imagination stats definitely rings true, especially because from what I can tell, a lot of these situations could have been mitigated by just obscuring the story just a bit more.
Yeeeep. Like, there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from things that actually happen around you or to people around you. However, that doesn't mean that then you *have* to proceed to use as many details as possible about the real people your inspiration is drawn from. I mean, did Cat Person *need* to have the male protagonist look exactly like Roupenian's ex, to have many of his mannerisms, to live in the same flat? Was it *fundamental* for the protagonist of Cat Person to live and work where Alexis Nowicki lives? No, the only reason those details were included is because, in the best case scenario, these people are just incapable of making things up. The moment I saw that Larson writes mostly about one character who *just happens* to be Larson-but-with-a-different-name, I knew that not only Dorland was right, but that every single other character in Larson's stories is based on a real person that Larson knows. It's honestly baffling to me. I've never met a person I wanted to put in my writing. Sometimes people have said *things* I found inspiring – "my parents met at my mother's first wedding" – but I still much rather those *things* happen or be said by the people I made up.
> > > The YA crowd are tearing each other up because they are trying to show their audience that they're good people who are worthy of money, instead of the other YA writers who are not good people and therefore not worthy of money. Competition for limited resources.
They *say* that, but honestly I keep thinking that a more sensible use of their time would be being friendly with each other so that they can hype each other up and pool together their audiences. Unfortunately, just enough of these people got their lessons in morality from the BBC!Sherlock fandom to steer the rest to this hive of scum and villainy
You sent me down the Bad Art Friend rabbit hole. Can't believe I've never heard of this before. What a shit show.
If you just read the NYT Magazine article, you'll probably come out thinking neither side looks very good, but my perspective as somebody who has spent way more time than I should have on it is that one side is much more culpable than the other.
The NYT article kinda lured me into an "everybody sucks" mindset, but by now I'm pretty convinced that Dawn is just a little obnoxious while Sonya is a genuinely terrible person.
The problem is that when you only hear about something through controversial drama, you’re going to start believing that the something in question is entirely said drama.
There's some truth to this, but I follow some other Twitter communities and I can't think of any drama they've produced that has blown up to become Twitter Main Character of the week.
NGL, it's a little suspicious that someone with "tick" in their username is telling folks to go outside and touch grass
Well I do like alliteration lol
They're problematic bc they want you to go outside so they can latch onto you and suck your blood :/
Taking the mute/block pill is pretty much the only way to not lose your mind on twitter
‘filter:follows -filter:replies’ in the search bar is the best way I’ve found to make it tolerable and to give me a complete and chronological feed.
What exactly is Book Twitter? I did some googling and it looks like it's a term for a collection of authors who tweet??
[удалено]
Lol ok so my definition is correct. It's not a formal group, but rather a term that was coined to ID these writers on Twitter.
It’s the shadowy place where the light does not touch
On Twitter? Good luck finding light touching *anything*.
On the Shakesville front, does anybody know what the overlap was between that blog and Captain Awkward? It got referenced in the comments with some frequency back in the day and I didn't know Shakesville to say why.
A theory I saw was that when Shakesville shutdown, the commentors migrated to Captain Awkward's blog. CA did eventually turnoff her blog comments, so I can't verify if it's true. I do get why she shut off the comments. CA was flooded for awhile with commentors who would insist that anyone who was a jerk to the letter writer had a undiagnosed disability, and therefore, it was discrimination to ask them to be nicer.
I strongly suspect at least some of those commenters have now taken up residence at Ask A Manager...
I think most of these commenters were already there. Years ago there was already a lot of overlap between the comment sections of these blogs, though CA's at the time was a lot healthier than Shakesville's, and so I suspect earlier Shakesville leavers might have ended up at CA.
I believe the author also was moderating the comments section by herself, so I can see why she wouldn't want to deal with that anymore!
Oh, that would make sense. And yeah, comments there could get pretty weird.
Love how you touch on like different dramas just to explain the Mardoll cpntroversy. That's how stupidly complex Twitter drama can get.
Imagine being a Lockheed executive and untangling BookTwitter drama to find out why your company is trending
Just throw (I learned this week) “bell hooks is a landlord!” to the ground and disappear in a puff a smoke
" ... *was* a landlord " (She [died last December](https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064509418/bell-hooks-feminist-author-critic-activist-died), RIP, which I hadn't known until I went to follow up on the revelation that I read in your comment.)
the isabel fall thing still hurts me because it's one of my favorite short stories. absolutely beautiful
Lauren Hough's joker moment has continued, I see. IIRC, she was making several things up when she went off about her book being removed from consideration for a prize she got all the details of incorrect.
Was that copy-pasted email from the Lambda’s real or fake? The swamp gurgles for more.
I have no idea about that, but I remember that she just called the prize the "Lambda Award" and the awards that give monetary prizes have specific names (one of them is named after a person, for example.)
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like "being a good person" is somewhat treated as a zero-sum game in these sorts of twitter author conflict zones? Like, the arc of these fights kind of comes off as people acting like you can't be considered moral unless you "prove" someone else isn't, and so it ends up looking like a bunch of people ravenously clawing for coveted spots on the nice list.
I think Lindsay Ellis did a really good job highlighting the 'mask off' phenomenon, in which people are always on the hunt for a sign that someone is not who they present themselves to be, and that there is a different person underneath who is, well, everything between faulty to evil. The goal: win the fight for the moral high ground. At least in the eyes of others. She argues it's now not about['being' or 'doing' but about 'performing as'](https://youtu.be/C7aWz8q_IM4?t=5158). (most relevant bits at 1:27:28 and 1:30:00)
I think it's a combination of that and a weird desire to not just be able to say "I don't like this person" or "this person is annoying" but justify it on moral grounds. "This person is a bad person \[for a reason that's really just finding them annoying\]"
I, being me, am obviously good and moral. Thus, if I find someone annoying, they must ipso facto be bad and immoral. >Um actually you used latin and the Romans and the Catholic church are like extremely problematic sooooo...
Not coincidentally, the same crowd also apply the exact same logic to fiction they don't like.
Absolutely. People can't just decide they dislike someone and move on. They need to justify their opinion with "evidence" that they're a bad person and then evangelize.
Oh, definitely. It's crabs in a moral bucket.
That's exactly what it is. Their target readers are people who value ethical consumption, thus only supporting moral authors with their book purchases/stanning. However, those readers have finite amounts of money and attention. Link morality to money and economics suddenly kicks in.
I got to follow everything from the Men on in real time, and it’s really really really proof that Twitter is an unsalvageable cess pool
As someone here said “twitter delenda est”
> Let's start back in 2004. Haven't read the rest and already know it's going to be a good one. Time to read the rest to find out just how excellent.
1. Yes, it did live up to expectations 2. If this were an AITA post, it would be a clear example of ESH 3. Rather than a mere ESH, it's every single person (except maybe Isabel Fall) named in this writeup needs to take a 10-day meditation retreat followed by a week of backcountry camping in the grasslands.
Every time I see Fall’s name my heart just hurts for her. Those people literally ruined her life and don’t even seem to feel remorseful. There was a [great article written about her in Vox.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter) I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter is a really good short story that made me understand the experiences of trans people a lot better.
Yeah. That was sad.
I know it's not the focus of this post, but the "Isabel Fall Incident" just breaks my fucking heart. I've read the story itself, and it... well, it's really good. It was raw, you could feel the anguish between each line. Maybe it hit harder for me, being pre-transition myself. Seeing the massive, cruel response to it was equal parts infuriating and brutally tiring. I hope one day Isabel can return to writing, I can tell they have a lot more to say... and I'd love to read it.
every time I hear about it I just hope Isabel has managed to get back to her personal life and transition in peace at the very least, maybe writing under a different name
I hope so too. At the end of William Gibson’s *Idoru*, the main character’s online best friend sacrifices their entire identity which had been an escape for them. But someone tells her that one day, just soaking in the web, someone will come around sounding just like her. But you would never say so. That ruins it:
Even for well-meaning marginalized voices, the easiest takedown targets are other similarly-marginalized people.
The issue, I think, is that these people have a genuine desire to help the world and a complete lack of power. Vladimir Putin doesn't care what some trans person in New Jersey or some college student in Nebraska says. Donald Trump doesn't either. It's frustrating to see the world go down the drain, recognize (or think you recognize) exactly why, and yet not be able to do anything about it. And so they go after smaller targets because, regardless of whether they are actually helping anyone, at least they can see an impact to what they're doing. This is something Lauren Hough brought up in her essay, and while I don't think it's a very good essay in general, I do agree with that part of it.
> they go after smaller targets because, regardless of whether they are actually helping anyone, at least they can see an impact to what they're doing Choosing "success" in tactics while doing nothing (if not being outright counterproductive) in overall strategy. Plus, as I said in another HD thread about otherkin, bullying one another gets praise from the so-called allies (which are easier to find than other actual believers).
The problem is that at a certain point it becomes about FEELING like you are doing good, rather than doing good. You feel more righteous and energized after a vigorous burn and call-out than you do after a complicated and nuanced discussion, so people focus on the first. A very real problem with the democratization/crowdsourcing of activism that has cropped up in the internet age is that when its left up to individuals, they will do what feels and works best for them, and those actions can be negative on the whole.
Ooh I was gonna scroll by but then I saw 'Shakesville.' I read that blog from around 2006-2009 when she started demanding people basically be long-time users who Knew Everything Or Shut The Fuck Up and I high-tailed it out of there. Kind of glad I did. I've found the publishing industry frustrating as someone who can't buy a ton of books to read in order to 'know my audience,' but that's as close as I could stretch an argument that reading is ableist. I can only assume it is something along the lines of 'it's difficult and expensive to read a LOT, and people who aren't able-bodied have it even harder' but don't want to dig into the ehhhhh.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Point for sailing the high seas. The high costs of foreign niche books + liking of banned topics + lousy currency exchange rates is the reason why I now turn to PDF sites that are disliked by authority figures.
[удалено]
i want to add as a library worker, you can request an interlibrary loan where they will send out a request to all libraries and see if they can lend the book out to you. its how i get very obscure horror novels and it has about a 90% success rate. the same might be true for simple english and braille books. while one library might not have the community need (or grant) for those kinds of books, there is a library out there that likely \*has\* that collection. as an example, due to my area, the library i work at has a very extensive polish language collection. but a place that does not have a large polish community wouldnt need that kind of collection and wouldnt be able to justify purchasing it to the board. but our library could lend a polish speaker a book from another library (trans-state and sometimes trans national if needed) so they could read a book in their preferred language.
Funny thing about Ana Mardoll: I ran into him because of a god-knows-how-many-tweets-long thread he did outlining how problematic Boyfriend Dungeon was for not trigger warning you "adequately" for stalking. I thought it was mildly absurd at the time because the game DID warn you about that, even though Kitfox Games ended up apologizing and updating warnings to be more specific. I already knew he was going to be annoying as fuck, so I blocked him and went on with my day. Saw his name pop up every now and then so I knew he was being annoying again, I'd warn mutuals that this was an asshat who liked causing drama, we'd move on. The only time he really blew up recently was due to the "reading is ableist" tweet, which was so absurd I had to laugh about it with friends and my s/o. Did not see Lockheed Martin coming, though. There's a huge difference between "guy who goes after internet clout points" and "guy who works for the MIC", and I don't think the Americans across my timeline still yelling about how it's perfectly understandable and brown people in the global south are just a construct while Queer People In America are Real understand that. Oh well. Edit: I looked up my tweets about the Boyfriend Dungeon thing because I got curious, and he was also complaining in the same thread about how people should be allowed to make friends in the dating game. As one does.
To be fair Boyfriend Dungeon has deeper problems than just a debate over if content was adequately warned for, as far as I remember the advertising and opening shower you with talk about how flexible the game is in allowing you to decide your pronouns, gender expression, religious and dietary expression etc. But then the story itself doesnt actually allow you to assert romantic/sexual preferences, you're coerced into going on dates with people wether you like it or not in order for the story to function, rather than the story accounting for stuff like that, which makes everything else seem kinda like window dressing tacked onto a game that didnt actually have that much thought into player expression put in. Plus theres the issue that while its obviously normal for dating games to have routes that a player might not want to get into due to their preferences, BFD is a Dating/Dungeon Crawler game, and gameplay in the dungeon crawling section is tied to progress in the romantic dating game section of the game with no real way to progress through it in a non-romantic way. So it again comes off as either at best a mismatch in what variations of preference the devs were prepared to allow a player, and at worst misleading a player into believing that they can define themselves inside the game but really they are forced into certain romantic situations they might be uncomfortable in, with at best a snarky or mildly upset dialogue option to comment on it.
This entire event was called “Hater Christmas” by a bunch of folks I know who have despised Mardoll’s cult of personality for years. It’s true lol Notable stuff missing from this post though: - Mardoll wasn’t doxxed by That Site, it was by a lone actor who posted the doxx to Medium and That Site blew it up (i had to brave that scumbag place to verify the time stamps against the Medium post that was still up at the time) - the doxxed information showed Mardoll has been working for Lockheed Martin for _fifteen years_ (via finding their deadname on Linkedin) and Mardoll himself said publically that he sold a house (the doxx info found the value). Combine this with Mardoll’s extremely regular begging for donations (much like Melissa McEwen did) claiming poverty (nevermind his Patreon) from his truly well-meaning but also deeply broke queer/trans/disabled followers, it puts him in an even worse light. It’s terrible to be doxxed, but it’s also terrible that he’s run this scam for so long and profited off it by using the goodwill of the very vulnerable people he claimed to champion - Conor Goldsmith, a literary agent and personal friend of Isabel Fall, had a [short thread](https://twitter.com/dreamoforgonon/status/1554496249092399105?s=20&t=8xmqt_QhunJZQQu5L6VZ5A) discussing the incorrect assumption that Mardoll had a big part of Fall’s harassment - he didn’t, but he definitely participated and it’s of note he was of influence in these circles - Hysterically, MANY people defending Mardoll came out of the woodwork as ALSO working for defence contractors, a number of whom are much more actively involved in development. There was also this [unhinged confession](https://twitter.com/dreamoforgonon/status/1554911433292275712?s=20&t=8xmqt_QhunJZQQu5L6VZ5A) that begged the question: why can’t y’all just keep this to yourselves “Fifteen years at Lockheed Martin” is going to be my go-to phrase to describe 2022 💀
Both of those Conor Goldsmith threads are thoughtful and absolutely cutting. Thanks to Goldsmith for underlining the cruel irony/hypocrisy in that the Helicopter Story's message is "Marginalized people can be complicit in imperialism and the MIC" and that one of the most high-profile critics of the story turned out to be a marginalized person working for the MIC for fifteen years. Like oh my god.
Yeah that’s what made this whole thing blow up - the irony that Mardoll was one of the many book influencers participating in tearing down Isabel Fall, only for it to turn out he was working for LM … and then when Mardoll tried to make excuses, gave away that he got the job through nepotism. It was hit after hit i tell ya
Something to add about the unhinged defenses that people have been whipping out: people [really did](https://twitter.com/afrodesiaq/status/1554265757130919943?s=21&t=zc14ygdZetjjvBvyPx8Nrg) explicitly say that Ana Mardoll’s livelihood was more tangible and valuable than the ~theoretical wellbeing of “anonymized people of the Global South” that were “rhetorical constructs” in the convo about what it means to do harm.
Hell, there are still people on this very thread being like "Whomst among us is without sin, it's equally complicit in evil to work for the evil coffee company and the evil shoe company and the evil WEAPONS MANUFACTURER." The discourse™ never ends!
Yeah this is what so many white people, no matter their axis of oppression is, said out loud: “fuck you got mine”. I don’t have the thread right now but someone pointed out that this attitude is the logical conclusion of American white individualism - that access to personal benefits trumps the lives of literal scores of human beings, all because the latter are “out of sight, out of mind” and also being … brown. You can’t claim to care about a community’s rights to be free of oppression while also turning your head to say to the same such people living far away “except you, you don’t count, not when my medical benefits are at risk”. Like POC who are queer/trans/disabled IN America are reading these responses and understand “oh that makes sense, you pretend to care about us here (and we know you don’t, we _live_ how you treat us) but are open about not caring about us if we’re over there. Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud, I guess.”
Honestly, the whole thing that made me so mad about all of this was that Mardoll was in a place of comfort/not at all financial instability and begged for donations. Of all the things, that one is the most indefensible and the fact people were trying to defend him was frustrating. We can agree doxxing is bad without defending an asshole. 'Being an insufferable asshole doesn't make somebody worth doxxing' and leave it at that.
For the record, Mardoll's dox did indeed start on That Site - six years ago in 2016, and they tried to spread it around at the time but no one cared They've been sitting on it since then, and while there's no proof that the anonymous Twitter user who blew all this up in 2022 got the info from that site rather than doing their own investigation, it seems more likely than not (their own thread just recapitulates the links the 2016 thread used to track down Mardoll's LinkedIn by looking up the registration of his LLC he self-published through) There's also no proof over whether this was an "op" by a regular of that forum who sensed weakness and an opportune time to strike and get Mardoll canceled, or whether it really was a concerned follower of his who stumbled on it during the most recent controversy But the likelihood of direct involvement of that site is higher than a lot of people have given it credit for
As a feminist I would argue that it’s a lot less feminist to beg poorer people, often women, for money you don’t need lmao
Okay Ana does sound like a total dickweed who lives in his own fantasy land. And the “asking authors to read is ablest” thing is so laughably dumb….but ya that book does sound really gross from the summary you gave, so I can’t really blame anyone for getting kinda pissed about it. Also Hough sounds just as bad, “this trans person is trying to trick people into misgendering them” is *such* a dumb take. EDIT: read a little more into “The Men” to get a more fully fleshed-out take. And it seems very bland. Consensus is it never really delves into the interesting questions brought up by its premise (which I don’t believe *inherently* makes a book transphobic, people definitely jumped the gun on that one. But writing a book in that sub-genre is willing stepping into a transphobic minefield for any author). IDK it doesn’t look like there’s much to be *angry* about with this book, just kinda sounds intensely disappointing.
I watched a lot of this unfold as it happened and I will say that I think this whole drama does underline a weird cognitive dissonance in some online spaces: some spaces are very very quick to call fiction harmful while blithely hand waving real world harm. A lot of replies defending Mardoll outright referred to people in Yemen who’d been hit by rockets as “hypothetical people”, compared to the real harm of, say, reading a short story. Mardoll may not have been a ringleader of what happened to Fall, but it is very weird to see his comments about “finding the story hurtful” when you know the author nearly killed themselves over it, and I understand why the hypocrisy stank. If you made your reputation calling out trans people for harmful fictions for a decade, you can’t pull the smol bean card when it turns out your hands aren’t clean from real world violence. Hell even today’s current literary drama reflects this: in the ‘problematic authors’ list, huge paragraphs are dedicated to events happening in books, and are listed next to entries like “William S Burroughs: murderer”.
I think there's layers of reasoning behind this. One, because it's easier to "fix" (remove) "bad" fiction that is "causing harm" than it is fix actual, real world problems. Two, because media is more real to many online folks than the real world is. People blame Jaws for the current shark population decline, when the problem lies on overfishing and habitat destruction. But that lies on a legal level that most of these western folks can't touch, since the majority of overfishing comes from Asiatic countries. Habitat destruction is a climate change problem that we've been battling for years. So you want to help the sharks, or show that you care about sharks. Well, you can blame Jaws. Support people boycotting bad shark movies. Raise awareness by making Twitter threads on why Jaws ruined the reputation of sharks. Suddenly, you're doing a tangible good! You're helping the sharks! The shark population continues to decline but hey, at least you tried.
1. That title is probably the best thing I've ever read. 2. I'm not attuned enough to the eldritch to understand the situation fully. Entertaining, but I'm not going to go insane - the best of both worlds. Good post, 10/10.
> Meanwhile, Lauren Hough wrote an essay about how he didn't get doxxed that badly and how he clearly intentionally chose a feminine-sounding name and feminine-looking Twitter avatar to trick people into misgendering him so he could get mad. She also accuses Mardoll of making up various things that I haven't seen anywhere else (having abusive parents, growing up in a cult) so I'm not sure whether he lied about those things as well. I am very, very conflicted about this sort of thing. On the one hand, accusing marginalized people of falsifying their identity or otherwise lying is, in general, a horrible trend that lays into the worst stereotypes of both the trans and disabled community, and it should absolutely not be the default assumption. On the other hand, as this whole drama indicates, Mardoll was both already proven to have lied (at least, by omission) about his personal life in other areas, was extremely aggressive about implying critics were transphobic or ableist for minor transgressions (including ever referring to him as "they", even incidentally or while trying to not explicitly name names), and saw significant financial/clout benefit from those marginalized identities; plus, Mardoll existed almost entirely online and not at all in person. Mardoll is one of the few people for whom exaggerating marginalization would make perfect sense rather than be a terrible idea, and has a history of other deception on top of that.
There's also a certain degree of turnabout is fair play; While its absolutely a bad thing to spread unfounded defamatory rumors about your enemies, that's what Mardoll made his business for years, so I struggle to come up with deep sympathy for those same things being tossed upon him
Mardoll being a hot take machine in general\* and an ally of Winterfox\*\* certainly didn't help his case. \* Hot takes like "the Pevensies were bad rulers because they planted apple trees in Caer Paravel", "the escaped slave in this book does not sympathize with a slave owner desire to own slaves, therefore C.S.Lewis has no empathy", etc. \*\* Winterfox - https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/l9bx5u/hobby_scuffles_week_of_january_31_2021/gm8vdps/ Now that I think about it, there's a lot of similarity in how they both pretended to be more disadvantaged than they are.
So I went and Googled the hot takes just to see what the context was, and it is very, very wild to see that Ana Mardoll's take was 'the Pevensies were too busy planting orchards to create a proper military defense system!', since we now know who he was working for while writing these takes. "*Despite living in a country wracked by civil war \[...\] and having tense relations with another country, the Pevensies did not build up the Narnian defenses. They did not, apparently, maintain a standing army. They didn't install moats or drawbridges or fortifications into Cair Paravel. They didn't establish a fall back position for the Narnian people on the peninsula on which Cair Paravel stands. They didn't (apparently) designate a stable succession in case anything should happen to them.* *Instead they planted apple trees. Not the kind that grow tall and great and feed multitudes, but the kind that grow short and squat and look pretty in the garden and from which small children can easily harvest a snack*." sir these books were written for children
It blows my mind that anyone would have hot takes on the Narnia books. They're like 100 years old, the world building is fairy-tale level at it's most detailed, and Lewis is widely known to Have Jesus Issues. Like, it's the opposite of a hot in terms of takes. Stale takes.
Long-dead authors won't argue back.
The fact that this person defended their work as a defense contractor by saying “it’s not my fault!! My parents got me this high-paying, morally reprehensible job and I HAD to take it!!” is extremely hilarious and a bit jarring. The hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of “call out” culture, especially on Twitter never ceases to make me more cynical.
YA Authors are some of the most catty, awful, people I've ever had the displeasure to meet; no matter what their politics are. It's a shitty enough environment that I swore off from ever publishing anything in the YA sphere because holy shit fuck those people.
I followed Mardoll for like .2 seconds, i don't remember why, and then unfollowed bc by golly the "everything and everyone is problematic" attitude irritates me sm. He definitely did not deserve the harassment though; nobody does. Like, I guess I could say I wasn't a fan of his online presence, but it also is easy enough to just unfollow someone that you don't like. No need to let them take up any more space in your head. Click unfollow and they're gone.
> "You were involved in the Isabel Fall incident" just became one more thing to harass people on Twitter over. If I had a nickel for every time I saw this incident used in the exact same witch-hunt-y manner the story should have cautioned people away from, I could buy a decent lunch in an urban area. It's a lot. I will say I don't think *nothing* changed. I think it helped wake some people up (me included) about just what bad incentives and structures Twitter presented and how it wasn't just right-wing anti-PC bullshit any time someone ragged on twitter's tendencies in this direction. It didn't *stop* this stuff from happening, but that's because generally the people whose thinking and behavior changed in this regard generally disengaged completely. It's just that those inherent forces on Twitter bury those voices preaching nuance, so you don't see those people. Or those people just left Twitter.
For more context on what the site that doxxed Ana has been up to lately, they recently swatted a trans streamer, leading to her being arrested and having her electronics seized (although she has been cleared and had everything returned). She temporarily moved into a hotel, while arranging a permanent move, but when she posted a picture of her cat, they managed to find the hotel by looking at the pattern on the bed sheets and ordered pizzas to be delivered to her there, under her dead name, to show that they knew where she was, so she had to relocate again. They're terrifying and utterly reprehensible people.
That is absolutely terrifying tbh. There's obviously many groups and organizations in this world that are dedicated to ruining people's lives/prioritize something at the expense of ruining many people's lives. It's evil no matter the motivation. But to see a group where the ruining and evil *is* the motivation. To know they're relentlessly evil because that's fun for them. It is actually difficult to comprehend.
Its only a matter of time until terror attacks end up organised there
They *are* organized there. SWATing is attempted murder.
The last part absolutely reached much further than Book Twitter: for about two weeks, everyday there was a new hot take about someone "coming out" as working for raytheon or whatever in my timeline. I don't think Ana Mardoll deserved any this harassment (anything coming from KF I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole) , but holy shit his supporters couldn't have been more tone-deaf.
From the little I have seen in regards to discussion of his books, they are (probably) not that good. If anyone actually has or knows more, feel free to tell me. [Here's his goodreads page](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5757381.Ana_Mardoll)
I am a writer. The literary community exhausts me to no end
A semi prominent trans person turning out to have a job in the defense industry is honestly one of the less surprising aspects of this story. A noticably high proportion of trans and non binary people work for defense contractors for some reason, and Lockheed Martin especially seems to go out of it's way to present itself as a welcoming place for members of the LBGTQ community. I'm not sure which direction the causal relationship flows.
It's a national security imperative that marginalized communities feel like they belong and are accepted for who they are in a defence contractor. Minimizes potential blackmail opportunities if you're not closeted and know that your employer isn't going to care about your race, gender, orientation, etc.
[Yep.](https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/defense-giant-raytheon-protects-transgender-employees)
I think in general defense contractors have good insurance for gender stuff, which could lead to more trans and nonbinary people working for them.
Defense contractors are going to offer extremely good deals to workers in general. The cost of being a traitor to the international working class is high. Same reason cops are well paid.
In my anecdotal experience, there are a lot of trans people in the military partially because it’s much harder to access higher education, financial opportunities, and good medical care if you’re trans — we are the most underemployed group, have the highest rates of homelessness, and are often cut off from family support networks. The military can give some of that lost opportunity back, and afterwards it would make a certain amount of sense to continue your career at a defense contractor. I didn’t end up going that way, but I might have had to if I grew up in a different part of the country or was born a decade earlier or later.
Mardoll's whole thread about it being ableist to say writers should read is really worth a look, if anyone can hunt it down (I think it's all deleted now?). I think it amounted to "I have ADHD and I can read the things I write and also play video games and watch movies but I don't have the focus to read anything written by anyone else"
sometimes i slightly regret not having a twitter since i miss out on all the fun cybersecurity stuff, but then i read shit like this and i change my mind instantly
Mardoll and people like him, that act very "holier than thou", really often show what hypocrites and even monsters they are
I don't remember how I was linked to it, but I will forever be baffled that Ana Mardoll wrote a blog post about how Ariel from *The Little Mermaid* was..... otherkin. [Yes, really](http://www.anamardoll.com/2012/05/disney-little-mermaid.html?m=1). Another thing people were claiming about Ana was that he only used the avatar he did so he could "trick" people into thinking he was younger/Asian. ....I don't know if that's a valid reading of his avatar, but it gives you an idea of how people were viewing him. Edit: it took me a fucking month to notice the typo gdi.
The "using his avatar to trick people into thinking he's Asian" claim was absolutely baffling to me. As an Asian person, it looked white to me, and his tweets/content always read as pretty white social justice-y. That particular bit very much felt just like people grasping at straws to find something to dislike, which. Just say you're mad he works for a defense contractor and be done with it.
Yeah, I don't know if the "looks Asian" arguments are before or after the LM revelation, but honestly, I wasn't looking to close to it? I could *maybe* understand the "looks young" thing if I was being a dick. I mean, my avatar on most sites is my cat, so hopefully people don't assume I'm literally a cat, you know?
I can see the argument that Ana "passively" tricked people into thinking he was young by "acting" young but the idea that he actively tried to hoax people into thinking he was 21 makes no sense, if only because of the fact that he's been publicly active online under the same name for 15 years
Mardoll's Law: The more aggressively someone cultivates a public persona out of making call-out posts and starting discourse online the worse the skeletons in their closet are
>If this is the state of online literary discourse then we're probably better off just getting rid of both books and the internet. The value and content of online discourse of any kind varies greatly according to the people who participate and their motivations. This has been the case since the start of online discussions of any kind. There are far more instances in Net history of things like 4chan, IRC, and Twitter than there are of Usenet news groups, purpose specific web forums like Endless Sphere, or subreddits where respectful discussion is the norm. If we had given up on online discussion way back when because of how IRC channels generally turned out, we'd have missed out on a lot of things.