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Follow-up to this post, where I try to explain what happened, how I got involved, and why it upset me so much.
Back when The Fault in Our Stars was a thing, I read it because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I didn't like it. I thought it was a load of pretentious nonsense. Soon after rating the book on Goodreads, I found myself participating in a discussion with other TFiOS-haters, one of whom linked to the Whittler's recaps on the Das Sporking LiveJournal community. I clicked the link and was hooked. The recaps were funny, informative, and articulated my feelings about the book better than I ever could. I wanted more and immediately set out to explore the entire community. Somewhere along the line, I read Eragon, didn't like it, and wound up joining the Antishurtugal LJ-comm as well. I eventually discovered Twitter and followed who I thought was worth following. But I didn't just want entertainment; I wanted attention. I had no friends, online or in real life, and saw this as an opportunity to finally make some. I wanted to fit in and be liked. I wanted to be one of the cool people. I desperately wanted them to approve of and include me.
That's how this whole thing started. I was happy for a long time, or so I thought. And I did meet some genuinely amazing and wonderful people. But my new world had a dark side, even though I didn't realize it at the time.
Because so many of the people I met were writers, I felt pressured to write stories as well, despite intensely disliking writing and struggling with it my whole life. If you weren't a writer, you weren't cool. At the same time, I was afraid to write anything at all, because I didn't want to risk failure and mockery. It wasn't enough to just take apart a bad book or bad fanfiction and explain why it didn't work. There had to be a bad guy, and that bad guy was the author. I don't even want to repeat some of the stuff that was said, which ranged from uncomfortable to downright nasty. I was scared that if I tried writing, someone would say things like that about me. I still am.
I thought seeing bad writing ripped apart was just a bit of harmless fun. I never questioned anything the sporkers said, because I automatically assumed they knew better than I did about what was good and what was bad. Even when books I didn't think were that bad (Divergent, The Jewel) and books I genuinely loved (City of Bones, The Great Gatsby, Throne of Glass) started showing up on Das Sporking, I didn't question it. I convinced myself not to trust my own judgement and that I didn't know anything. My opinions were insignificant and wrong.
Things weren't any better over on Twitter. If you said or did something that could be construed as problematic in any way, you were a horrible person. If you were anxious or unhappy, you were just whining. If you were happy or excited, you were willfully blinding yourself to all the suffering in the world. There was no way to win. I absorbed all this and internalized it. If I didn't think the right thoughts, feel the right emotions, hold the right opinions, or admire the right people, I would be a bad person. Feeling upset and helpless after seeing depressing news items obviously meant I was too weak to survive in the real world.
Around the same time, something happened in real life that I don't feel comfortable talking about. It wasn't a bad thing and I wasn't responsible, but I felt ashamed and horrified afterwards. I was sure that if anyone on Twitter learned what had happened, they'd hate me.
Then came the Lindsay Ellis incident.
Lindsay argued in her video Dear Stephenie Meyer that while it's okay to hate a book, it's not okay to vilify the author. I have disagreed with things she's said from time to time, but this was not one of those times. I thought she made an excellent point and linked the video on Antishurtugal, hoping to start a discussion.
The results were disastrous. Everyone refused to even consider that Lindsay might have a point and that bashing the author along with the book (which they all loved to do) might not be a good idea. For the first time, I saw what I had gotten into, and it wasn't pretty.
(Antishurtugal is also the place where someone told me that I couldn't really say I was obsessed with old movies because I hadn't seen Gone with the Wind. I'm sorry to say I believed them. I haven't wanted to admit I like old movies since. And I still haven't seen Gone with the Wind.)
I left Antishurtugal and Das Sporking and unfollowed a bunch of people on Twitter, but the damage had been done. I can't think about the things I like without feeling a stab of guilt over liking anything at all. When I feel unhappy or uncomfortable, I don't say so because I don't want to cause trouble. I don't share my opinions because I'm afraid someone will think poorly of me. I feel like I can't trust my own judgement. I frequently worry about doing something wrong. I feel like my life isn't worth anything. And I haven't told anyone any of this, because I'm ashamed. I feel like I brought it on myself because I was too stupid to see what was right there in front of me. That what happened to me was my fault.
I feel awful.
Back when The Fault in Our Stars was a thing, I read it because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I didn't like it. I thought it was a load of pretentious nonsense. Soon after rating the book on Goodreads, I found myself participating in a discussion with other TFiOS-haters, one of whom linked to the Whittler's recaps on the Das Sporking LiveJournal community. I clicked the link and was hooked. The recaps were funny, informative, and articulated my feelings about the book better than I ever could. I wanted more and immediately set out to explore the entire community. Somewhere along the line, I read Eragon, didn't like it, and wound up joining the Antishurtugal LJ-comm as well. I eventually discovered Twitter and followed who I thought was worth following. But I didn't just want entertainment; I wanted attention. I had no friends, online or in real life, and saw this as an opportunity to finally make some. I wanted to fit in and be liked. I wanted to be one of the cool people. I desperately wanted them to approve of and include me.
That's how this whole thing started. I was happy for a long time, or so I thought. And I did meet some genuinely amazing and wonderful people. But my new world had a dark side, even though I didn't realize it at the time.
Because so many of the people I met were writers, I felt pressured to write stories as well, despite intensely disliking writing and struggling with it my whole life. If you weren't a writer, you weren't cool. At the same time, I was afraid to write anything at all, because I didn't want to risk failure and mockery. It wasn't enough to just take apart a bad book or bad fanfiction and explain why it didn't work. There had to be a bad guy, and that bad guy was the author. I don't even want to repeat some of the stuff that was said, which ranged from uncomfortable to downright nasty. I was scared that if I tried writing, someone would say things like that about me. I still am.
I thought seeing bad writing ripped apart was just a bit of harmless fun. I never questioned anything the sporkers said, because I automatically assumed they knew better than I did about what was good and what was bad. Even when books I didn't think were that bad (Divergent, The Jewel) and books I genuinely loved (City of Bones, The Great Gatsby, Throne of Glass) started showing up on Das Sporking, I didn't question it. I convinced myself not to trust my own judgement and that I didn't know anything. My opinions were insignificant and wrong.
Things weren't any better over on Twitter. If you said or did something that could be construed as problematic in any way, you were a horrible person. If you were anxious or unhappy, you were just whining. If you were happy or excited, you were willfully blinding yourself to all the suffering in the world. There was no way to win. I absorbed all this and internalized it. If I didn't think the right thoughts, feel the right emotions, hold the right opinions, or admire the right people, I would be a bad person. Feeling upset and helpless after seeing depressing news items obviously meant I was too weak to survive in the real world.
Around the same time, something happened in real life that I don't feel comfortable talking about. It wasn't a bad thing and I wasn't responsible, but I felt ashamed and horrified afterwards. I was sure that if anyone on Twitter learned what had happened, they'd hate me.
Then came the Lindsay Ellis incident.
Lindsay argued in her video Dear Stephenie Meyer that while it's okay to hate a book, it's not okay to vilify the author. I have disagreed with things she's said from time to time, but this was not one of those times. I thought she made an excellent point and linked the video on Antishurtugal, hoping to start a discussion.
The results were disastrous. Everyone refused to even consider that Lindsay might have a point and that bashing the author along with the book (which they all loved to do) might not be a good idea. For the first time, I saw what I had gotten into, and it wasn't pretty.
(Antishurtugal is also the place where someone told me that I couldn't really say I was obsessed with old movies because I hadn't seen Gone with the Wind. I'm sorry to say I believed them. I haven't wanted to admit I like old movies since. And I still haven't seen Gone with the Wind.)
I left Antishurtugal and Das Sporking and unfollowed a bunch of people on Twitter, but the damage had been done. I can't think about the things I like without feeling a stab of guilt over liking anything at all. When I feel unhappy or uncomfortable, I don't say so because I don't want to cause trouble. I don't share my opinions because I'm afraid someone will think poorly of me. I feel like I can't trust my own judgement. I frequently worry about doing something wrong. I feel like my life isn't worth anything. And I haven't told anyone any of this, because I'm ashamed. I feel like I brought it on myself because I was too stupid to see what was right there in front of me. That what happened to me was my fault.
I feel awful.
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From:
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You have every right to like the books you do, you have every right to agree with Lindsey Ellis if you want to, and you can say you like old movies whether or not you've seen "Gone with the Wind" (and in my own opinion, you didn't miss very much by skipping it, anyway). Nobody has the right to dogpile you for having a different opinion. You didn't bring anything on yourself and there's no "fault" in having your own opinion.
I hope you get a good rest and feel better soon!
From:
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Yes, when you dislike something it's natural to seek out validation in the form of people who have articulated (and analysed) a similar reaction better than you could -- and the same when you fall in love with something. And it's human nature to ignore anything that questions your own opinions and eagerly endorse anything that agrees with them.
And wanting to be included is also a very basic human reaction: that same self-amplifying mechanism is what drives almost all mass movements, as well as gangs and cliques. (It's also why mob rule is so scary, and why perfectly ordinary people will commit atrocities when they egg each other on.)
For what it's worth, I ended up making a conscious decision when I was about your age that I simply couldn't believe all the things that 'right-thinking society' told me I had to believe; that was in the days before Twitter and so on, but it involved a lot of highly idealistic political editorials and campaigning. During my teens I had tried very hard and without question to believe in all the causes that I was told were right, and to discard all the prejudices that I was told were wrong (and held only by those on 'the other side'); eventually it got to the stage where I found the only solution was to sit down and say 'this is what I actually believe, and if it makes me a bad person then it's easier to accept that I'm an inherently bad person than to try to make black white' -- which I suspect is what you call 'internalizing it'.
My compromise was to say that I believe in treating people decently whether I consider them my equals or not -- particularly if I don't consider them my equals. But it doesn't mean I have to like all their habits or endorse liberations I disapprove of or believe that everything is culturally relative (with my own culture being automatically discounted as tainted by association).
It's simply not possible to be the ideal person that others demand that you be (and if they're pretending that they themselves are, odds are that they're probably covering up). You can never please all of the people all of the time... and what most of these 'problematic, toxic' people don't realise is that they are almost certain to end up on the wrong side of history themselves some day (the way that people like Germaine Greer are now being attacked for being 'not real feminists' after having been attacked in their youth for being hairy-legged ballbreaking man-haters).
Yes, when you admire people who are more experienced and knowledgeable than you on a subject you enjoy, you naturally assume their opinions and beliefs are the one revealed truth and that you ought to think as they do. And yes, it's fun to all pile in on a mutually loathed object (like The Fop...) and compete to see who can denigrate it the most and in so doing gain plaudits from the rest, even if left to yourself you wouldn't actually dislike it.
And yes, when you threaten people's sense of identity by exposing them to a possibility that their beliefs might be wrong and that their behaviour might have been less than ideal, they are not going to react by saying 'well, maybe you might have a point there' -- they're going to react by attacking you in order to efface any possibility of doubt, because that's human nature.
I'm tempted to say 'welcome to the adult world', but maybe that's just the world I inhabit...
You claim that you intensely dislike writing and have always struggled with it -- and yet you've written a good deal here, eloquently expressed. Why not try writing for yourself rather than trying to 'be a writer' in others' opinion? Why not write in private, the way we all did before the Internet (when we were learning our craft in decent privacy!) -- why not write for fun, in utter self-indulgence and without any intention of publication?
Write a gratuitous self-insert story where you save the world. Write a story where you are an outrageously over-the-top villain (the villains get all the best lines), laughing sardonically at the heroes and plotting cataclysmic evil, only to repent in the last reel and die heroically saving the world (again). Write a story where you make mad, passionate love with a dark and seductive stranger (or whatever you enjoy). Don't do any of the hard work bits at all -- don't worry about choosing words or accurate punctuation or meeting a prescribed level of output. Don't even bother writing anything down. Just tell stories and have fun where no-one will ever see.
Then and only then -- if you still want to and you happen accidentally to have come up with a really effective idea -- try writing it down to share with other people.
(The bit about being afraid what people will say, I'm afraid, doesn't go away; I still get that when reading book reviews in the national press, never mind sporkings...)