enneamage

[enneamage]

random question do u have any book recommendations or are there any that u’ve been enjoyed reading :D

The last fiction book I read was Idol Burning, a really good exploration of empathy in a jpop fandom context (from what I can tell? I fall short of firsthand experience but it feels true to what I've seen.) It’s also short so I downed it pretty quickly.

[enneamage]

Unsure if there’s an answer to this outside of random fandom trend. I’ve noticed that crimeboys fans (both the fans who are writing “platonic” crimeboys and the other ones) have a habit of having Wilbur call Tommy “sunshine” in fics, edits, etc… does this come from anywhere?? I’ve tried to find the answer myself but haven’t been successful, and thought as a fandom veteran you or one of your followers may know

Honestly, it took off so much and in such an active environment that even if it did have one specific point of origin, it was almost less important than the fact that it resonated with everyone. It says a lot about fanon C!tommy (and fanon regular tommy) and the way people related to him at the time.

[enneamage]

idk if you’ll ever read this but I’m glad I’m out of reading Critblr all the time

everyone is very mean nowadays in regards to CCS :(

It comes and goes, as long as people are being fair somewhere online hopefully it evens out.

[enneamage]

Hi I messaged you in 2023 about how your post about sexual repression in MCYT fandom made me re-evaluate my own sexual repression and denial of pre-sexual behaviors as pre-sexual and how that in part led to me getting together with my best friend... Today is our two year anniversary <3 ty

Easily one of the best things to come out of this blog, contratulations ;-; 🎉

[enneamage]

idk if you care about this kinda thing but tommy talked about wilbur hurting him in the paintball vlog on the most recent patreon SUIT episode.

he said: ‘I started crying, because one of our old friends—and I won’t name which but we’re not friends anymore—kept shooting me til I cried, and it made me so angry’

*then they talk about Tommy’s low pain tolerance*

then he said: ‘and it wasn’t tubbo or phil, tubbo and Phil understood when to stop! but oh no and let me tell you Jack I was not over the moon, I was crying in pain. but don’t worry about me Jack, it’s all for the content’

I’m really glad that we’re past the time that you would have to fight upstream to have that be seen as weird. Reading this popped me back to when it would have had defenders, and man. What a time.

[enneamage]

miwb… wow I haven’t heard that name in a long time. i miss the old critblr blogs, it’s sad how many in this space would so often delete upon retiring. Leave it up for future internet historians !!

Ever since curiouscat went down a tragic amount of lore was lost. I wonder how this whole scene will be remembered years down the line, I feel like it has/had enough grit to be remembered as a distinct and kinda edgy thing.

[enneamage]

hi enneamage,

i was enneawondering what got you into the critblr space. what drove you to come to tumblr? what drove you specifically to This space? also what got you into enneagram? you seem to have an interest in sociology and psychology (understatement?), is there any books you would recommend to begin? through what path did you take to learn all that you did? should i be asking questions about the admin of critblr blog to the critblr blog admin? is this grilling? is this an interrogation? lord knows.

thanks and kind regards,

enneanonymous

Anon you are being so cute right now jeez 

Looking back five years ago on this particular topic is kind of crazy for me now even though I’m still riding the wave of it because of how massively consequential lockdown was for the world and how explosive MCYT was within/because of lockdown. Since the story is book-ended by ‘normalcy’ on both sides it’s like a nesting-doll memory going that far deep into how I got here. 

The story is fairly short in terms of how I caught wind of the DSMP online moment: I was referred by a friend, who was referred by the tiktok algorithm. They sold me on it as a cultural moment and I came in to sightsee and also have something to keep up with in the face of long painful days of nothing. I saw some animatics, the potato war, some big lore clips, and I was in the door pretty easy from there. 

Fandom habits don’t tend to change that quickly, but people were using new words (duo names) and balancing C! fandom with CC! Fandom in new tense and interesting ways (<- more new language, useful language as well) so I committed to people-watching on top of content skimming. I was sniffing around the sub-pockets of the fandom and checking out the little offshots, especially the ones that people kept warning each other about. I never engaged with the transformative fandom stuff as much as I could have– I would look at art and check out what was going on in Ao3 tags broadly but I actually didn’t dig too far into the writing itself as much as what people were writing and how they were writing it. (I picked up the freak habit of opening ao3 work to the comments to see what people were saying about a fic rather than reading the thing itself around this time.) 

Main was pretty much inhospitable to people with open doubts, and I did lead with my doubt because of the sweetness/faith/fandom-forward approach that the space had was pretty obviously an optimistic revision of the people they were processing. (Which was necessary at the time in terms of supply and demand! It was civilizing even, because it did have an effect on how CCs acted. DSMP got popular on the back of people wanting something to believe in / invest in.) I knew too much about what to expect from different kinds of people for the frame that Main was applying/building to seem right, so I kept it all to myself until later/now. I remember while it was happening that I thought of lurking main and enjoying going along for the ride as one of the more fucked-up fandom experiences I’ve ever had internally, because it was about being willing to go along / letting myself temporarily ‘believe’ in a situation that I more or less knew would end in disaster for real people. I had never seen a situation comparable to it that played out well, so I had a lot of degrees of removal from mainstream fandom happenings emotionally. I remember thinking around this time that it was deeply ironic that one of the main fandom anthems was about the bittersweetness of an imminent breakup. I also thought I might control it by watching someone who seemed relatively normal and boy oh boy am I glad I never spoke my “this time I’m going to be as chill as possible” intention out loud to anyone because that did not hold. 

I stand hands to the sky and confess the blatantly obvious: I was a Wilbur main (in a casual way) for like… a few months before I caught wind that something was genuinely off, after which a bloodhound nose and increasing ties to the gossip scene focused my attention to near these parts. (Shoutout Charlie, I know we didn’t agree on the details but I would not be here if not for him because his anons brought up crit a few times in curious cat.) I started out as an anon on another blog (MIWB) and made a blog to post about a few things that I was pleasantly surprised other anons wanted me to elaborate on, so I mooched off the pre-existing crit audience #nepoblog. It actually took me a little bit before I figured out that crit was associated with active leaking and not just talking about leaks but by that time people liked me and the fear was dulled. I love my objectively dangerous friends (◕‿◕✿).

[enneamage]

How do you analyze people so well?

I feel like most of things flew above my head, until someone else points them out 🙂‍↕️. I just really want to get better at noticing things and analyzing others.

One of the problem i run into when i try to do that (mostly i try to analyze ccs), is that a lot of things could mean different things and how i, as a simple viewer, can know exactly what it is. Is it just a bit, a character that they’re playing or a glimpse of truth?

Love your blog ❤️

I feel like in the very beginning when I was watching CCs as a sprout I wasn’t that good at reading them and had to come into it over time, so for starters don’t worry if things don’t come to you super fast. A lot of people skills build up over time to give you more flexibility, and reading people is definitely one of them. I think that sooner or later most bloggers are cursed with intuitive knowledge about at least one CC, and you don’t always get to choose which one. Some people also just ‘give themselves away’ less so your scepticism against your own guesses are healthy on a one-off basis, you can always look for patterns over time. 

Over the course of this blog, my overall long-term focus was on a small number of CCs since those were the ones I could weigh in on. I could loosely grasp a few others based on what I knew about type, but the people that I think I was making unique observations for were kind of luck of the draw. I also constantly hedge my statements which can make it look like I’m more right than I am, I promise I ate dirt pretty often looking back. 

My bag of tricks is pretty open, my knowledge of how people act is supplemented a lot by being an enneagram gremlin and a pseudo-psych enthusiast as well, so that helped trickle down into translating a gut feeling into active analysis and vice-versa. I also endorse The Gut Feeling, but that one can’t be taught, although it can be refined over time. Maybe I can say to not be afraid to search up exactly what you’re wondering about instead of putting pressure on yourself to re-invent the wheel, in a general personality and behavior sense? It might not always be that easy to find but half of my insights are me going “oh, x reminds me of y” on some level. Maybe it’s the art of stockpiling info for when the time is right and intuition meets up with catching a glimpse of something.

[enneamage]

hey i hope your doing okay <3

All good in Mage territory, life tumbles me forward and I move with it. I'm chewing on a few non-internet people for my personal enrichment now that I'm holding on more loosely to the space. I got good news recently so I am riding that high for as long as I can 🎉!

[enneamage]

Do you think it’s good and possible for teenagers and adults to have a genuine and healthy friendships?

I was reminiscing those type of friendships between ccs. Some of them turned out fine (from outside perspective) and some aged horribly.

Idk it’s seems like a complicated thing, can’t quite decide what side am I on

This one is a hard one because the internet can be such a corrupting force on even the most benign interactions. Monetised internet / showbusiness internet even more so, when we’re talking CCs. I touched a bit on the conditions where adults can wander/slide/drop straight down on purpose into damaging places with younger people before, but this topic kind of expands out endlessly as you said. 

I think that having role models and older people in one’s life as a young person feels so good that it becomes something you’ve gotta be careful about, but those feelings don’t come from an inherently bad place. You want to know what being a person can be and now you’ve got someone to tell you, fuckin’ sweet. People are probably hard-wired to relate in this way. I also think that friend-mentoring also feels really good if you’re the right person for the job, but you’ve got to bring a functional sense of ethics to the table, in the way that you would ideally do anyway as a half-rolemodel. 

The dark secret is that young people who are full of energy/kindness/eagerness/vulnerability can be very gratifying to be around, and one needs to be disciplined enough to pass up on ‘an opportunity’ to engage with those traits in a way that only benefits the adult. The issue is partly that the people who want to be friends with minors the most are the ones that should be least trusted with that guideline, because it’s easy to make someone like that a dumping ground for psychic baggage and god knows what else. Emotionally isolated adults, which can easily be internet as well as IRL adults, may see minors as a very rare chance to experience things that they think they can’t with people their age. This goes downhill fast. 

‘Real’ friendships are broadly characterised by being mutual, but what people give and take from them are rarely perfect 50-50 mirrors, so you’ve just got to be aware of the connection being more 70-30 with guardrails in place. Trying to go 50-50 when the playing field and the players aren’t 50-50 doesn’t work– it especially doesn’t work when it’s 30-70 tipped in the adults ‘favor’ in terms of benefit, as the younger person becomes the vent sponge and the place that the adult leaches their emotional gratification from. 

I’m not a huge face person, I don’t think of myself as someone who 100% needs to know how someone sounds and acts to make ongoing judgement calls about what they’ve got going on, but this trait is not universal. Some people really need to look into someone’s face and get that hard, material bio-feedback about the person in front of them to remember the situation that they’re in, otherwise they’ll under-attend to cognitive empathy and fill in the blanks badly. I think online text friendships can move sideways when the adult isn’t constantly being given visual cues as to how not-adult their adult-typing friend is (in some cases.) 

Voice and video calls are in a grey area for different reasons, because of the isolation of the situation warping the context. If you’re at work with adults and minors, which is the classic mixed age environment, I think you can get something very friendly going, but the context civilises that a lot. I also think third-person accountability can be part of what keeps these friendships decent, keeping people from doing things that third parties wouldn’t find weird through the power of shame. Ideally people have functional senses of ethics that don’t need all that, as you would want from and for any human you can be friends with, but in breaking things down into their moving parts this makes a difference.

[enneamage]

i was wondering if you could expand on the 5w4 not rare in lurking spaces but is irl? it’s facinating to me. i also wonder if types are just unlabeled in spaces, or if ppl mistype themselves and that’s why some are popping up more often than others?

I guess I can’t come with hard data on this, but a big thing for Fives is the urge to hang back and study a situation before jumping into it. Niche lurking is kind of like a sifter, people all around the world can filter through to a certain 'space' if they have the taste for it, which will give you pretty different numbers over a location-based sample. Being Online can also be a way to be around people while staying within conditions that won't exaust the industrial-strength introversion-- unless they’re scrolling in public they may be reclusive in physical life to hang out in digital learning-space. It’s not hard to wrangle Fives in the wild if you have a keen eye, but big concentrations of Fives out for long periods of time are kind of rare in social gatherings (Except science-heavy nerd spaces? Maybe? But those might be hostile for different reasons, hard sciences aren’t actually the silver bullet people might think when looking for Fives.)

Fives do get some false positives because some of the worse literature/tests just makes them sound like “The Smart Ones” so anyone who has an introverted learning streak gets thrown in the basket if people don't double-check. I toot this horn when I can but basically every type has smart people who notice important things about the world, but unfortunately enneagram writing can lean fairly critical of people in general so you hear much less about the positives unless they’re stereotypical.

[enneamage]

Read Character and Neurosis. I think you would like it.

Purchased o7

[enneamage]

enneamage can you tell us your enneatype. enneathanks <3

5w4! Not rare in lurking spaces but harder to find IRL.

[enneamage]

ur awesome and well spoken mage. Thanks for the great analysis over the years xoxo

Thank you anon ;-; <3

[enneamage]

Okay so the sound of silence radiating from my own black-hole askbox output became too much for even me to handle. I must come clean, I never got into the habit of watching SUIT. I am now among the population of people who see the thumbnail in their for-you page and never click because I am busy as hell and also not feeling it. Is this a good change? Is it a sign of the times? I just don’t have the hour to burn anymore, and I wave the right to interpret or reinterpret what the brighton-based CCs have been up to now that my foothold is gone. I would have liked to be more intentional with the advancing stages of my soft-retirement, but distraction and inertia hit me with the one-two punch and I’m now probably less informed than the average lurker. 

I had a thing midway through this blog that was mostly in my head, and it was the idea that while most CCs probably couldn’t be ‘saved’ from their context, interested lurkers could probably benefit from some analysis inspired by when things go wrong for their own lives. People have been very nice to me when they’ve said that my posts are interesting and useful, and since things are getting more sparse I want to put out a non-final but still deeply sincere “thank you for reading my stuff,” as I found meaning at a very weird time in my life by being on here. People wanting to talk to me and hear from me meant and still means a lot, which is why my tiny little heart has been acting up as I realised that I won’t be able to keep my end of the conversation up anymore. I always surprise myself with how hard I take goodbyes, and this isn’t even a full one as I’m still floating around the door, but I know I want to make a closurepost while I have the time. 

Turning the spotlight on the people who followed me back then and now, keep your head above water and know that the line between an idol and a lurker can be arbitrary bits of luck and circumstance. There is no more or less substance to a ‘big personality’ than an audience member, and if you ever feel like you’re floating to the bottom of anonymity and can’t feel your hands and feet and reflection in a way that matters anymore, they will be waiting for you when you return.

[enneamage]

If enneagram is changeable over time what is Clingy's current type? Tubbo I think definitely hits the 8w9 mark now. I am currently loving Tom's silent power, the more this guy stays in touch with reality and outside his Brighton clique the more he will improve. He does not seem that 6 Insecurity by the way Jack and Harry talk to him every time.

Content wise, Tubbo is getting bold and Tom is getting out of his comfort zone (Tom's personality switch is much more smooth). How would you take into account the Depression diagnosis to calibrate his type?

Enneagram stuff is flexible within itself, but when it comes to core types it’s actually pretty solid, so they stay 9w8 and 6w7 respectively. The thing is, this is a good thing. If someone were to do a core type transplant somehow, they would inherit the problems of the other type and theoretically start from zero again instead of working from the self-knowledge and development that they got through the years working with their own nature. I like enneagram stuff because it’s more fluid in terms of disintegration and growth than MBTI (Which historically came off as pretty static to me but I could be wrong) but isn’t as free-for-all as stuff like trait measuring in the science-y way. 

If Tubbo is going after what he wants, being assertive and leading with his sense of justice, that's going to be the best of Three integration and getting the most out of his Eight wing. I hear less about him lately but that’s my own busy-ness talking so I’ll have to take people's words for what he’s up to. 

Tommy might be on a journey to relaxing into Nine integration? One day? Maybe? But it’s more likely that his Six anxiousness is still at the helm and he’s just putting new feelers out to try and feel trust again. He might even be fighting back some Three disintegration with how tempting it is to be over-deliberate with how he presents himself if it “gets him where he wants to go.” The depression is clearly complicating things but his relationship to his persona is in flux right now so it’s hard to know where he’s landing. I’m still not good at being optimistic about him turning to live showbusiness to ground himself, because that industry is patient zero when it comes to deception and brutality in entertainment and he has seen enough betrayal for one lifetime. Also, this just popped up on my Youtube feed and illustrates why he’ll always kind of be tied to the online space if he wants to keep working, it’s not just a transition period thing (unless he gets hit by lightning twice, so to speak). Since I’m more of a critic / Audience Agency guy than a creative I’ll go on record to say that audiences only existing just to reward when creators do a good job never sat right with me, you gotta be offering something they want if you want to benefit from their time and attention, so this is not an unfair hoop to keep in the air.

[enneamage]

any thoughts on tommy’s latest video/his square videos? he seems to like to wrap up every video with a happily ever after/i got through it/i’m fine now conclusion which fails to ring true because he’s obviously not

I think that he’s really trying to lean into the idea of entering a different era (and he will, not casting doubt on that), because the emotional toll of him thinking that he’ll stay stuck is too heavy. He keeps telling stories about finding a second chance in comedy and Real Life and finding that fulfilling, and while my criticisms about him being too out-of-touch right now to be a social-critic style comedian (even in the goofy way) still stand, he needs to cling onto hope for change because he’s going somewhere bad if he doesn’t. 

Being in nature and touching grass has often been good for him so his traveling was a smart move, the travel vlog vibes are sweet, he just needs to bring his people next time. I hope he does take time to figure things out but as you kind of pointed out there’s an element of trying to rush towards/away from Something that’s influencing his actions fairly heavily. 

Side note: To make literally anything regarding the state of the world right now about Tommy should probably be a punishable offense, but on the micro-scale I’m concerned that he’s going to say something onstage in that kind of blind way he makes vague stabs in an attempt to let off steam and hit an unimaginably raw nerve. The world of now is not the world of three months ago, I think he could get tangled up in something bad very quickly if he doesn’t adjust his approach to certain topics.