#everyone else gets to be stupid on the internet

[baravaggio]

I have talked about this before but I think what a lot of people are struggling to understand about video-essay-deep-dive-analysis content is that its ubiquity has to do with it being one of the easiest ways to deliver the perception of value to an audience...people who like this stuff want to be entertained, they want to be talked to about things they like or are interested in, they want to be made to feel like they're gaining new insight, benefiting from someone else's wisdom, acquiring the tools to articulate their thoughts on a topic in a more sophisticated way. On Tiktok, consumers of this content want to be able to experience all this in the couple minutes it takes them to use the bathroom lmfao. From a creator POV, making analysis content is an efficient way to position yourself as an entertainer, an authority, a teacher, someone who is delivering clear value for the follow or subscription.

Unfortunately the hell of personal branding that we live in isn't conducive to deep analysis, which is why we get so many shallow "deep dives" where people skim the surface of a topic and avoid articulating a thesis or coming to a conclusion (or my favorite, people giving a thousand disclaimers before articulating the most middle of the road, milquetoast take in an effort to avoid criticism). Brands aren't typically praised for being dynamic and messy and tinkering with the product/service you know and like them for, they're praised for their consistency, convenience, and inoffensiveness. I think a lot of creators, even if they're just doing Tiktok more casually, implicitly pick up on this and avoid engaging with ideas in ways that are going to be less palatable or shake people's image of them too much.

Tbh my annoyance with seeing people express that Substack is their backup option has more to do with the fact that I think a lot of these people would benefit intellectually from exploring ways to engage with ideas and criticism that isn't a) bound by the constraints of what people want video essay/analysis/deep dive content to be and b) internet-facing and shackled to the concept of personal brand lol. I really don't like the criticism of "these people are too stupid to structure an essay" that gets bandied about because I really don't think most of these people are stupid, I think they've internalized the social media value proposition and are clumsily trying to assert their worth within that framework just like anyone else lol. But not everyone needs to be - or is best served - by doing analysis. Like, make some art, write a poem, go on a hike about it, even if no one but you is watching or gives a shit about what the output of that process is...in trying to optimize the value and marketability of everything you think, you're putting a lot of constraints on your own thought process, I just don't think it's a helpful thing to do in a personal growth/self esteem sense 😓

It's been kind of nuts seeing how many Tiktok ""cultural commentators"" are saying they plan on moving to Substack if Tiktok is banned...there are definitely some people on there who have genuinely interesting things to say and who I think have the versatility to make that jump, but I think a lot of these "creators" have not yet grasped that the reason they have a following is the medium, not the message

[mayedays]

At the risk of sounding deranged again...

Because my brain hates me, I occasionally get hit particularly hard by The Paranoia™ that the people saying ~the Darkling is basically Hitler~ are interpreting authorial intent correctly and that Bardugo might literally think it appropriate to base the Grisha on the Jewish Scientists who fled to America in the era around WWII and base their leader on Hitler (or Stalin).

However, I've come to some conclusions surrounding this.

(1) regardless of her opinion, I think that its deeply NOT okay, and don't think I'm insane for holding that viewpoint no matter what The Paranoia™ says (although I'm frustrated that I don't know that I have a logical justification for the viewpoint, but on the other hand, I'm not sure that I should have to),

(2) if Leigh disagrees with me on that front (i.e. he is supposed to be Grishaverse!Hitler), she certainly has a right to do so, but I have an equivalent right to decide that I don't respect the judgment (artistic or otherwise) of anyone who would consider that a reasonable thing to do, and so I don't actually care if she did mean for him to be Grishaverse!Hitler, and

(3) arguing he's Hitler is fucking stupid and insensitive because the thing that sets Hitler apart from other tyrants/dictators/facists/etc is the massive industrialized genocide he committed against two vulnerable ethnic minorities (who had a long history of being horrifically mistreated by the ethnic majority) and not only does Aleksander not do anything like that, he is part of a historically-vulnerable (although not ethnic) minority (Hitler was not--anyone saying otherwise has swallowed some rancid & bizarre Nazi propaganda). It's clearly canon that he's a mass murderer and was long before the start of TGT but there's no evidence of deliberate systemic persecution, let alone systematic genocide, of a vulnerable minority demographic to destroy them as a people (at least not on his end, Fjerda is another story). I'm pretty sure that bombing a city is only genocide if its part of a project to destroy an ethnic or national group. (I'm not going to try to claim that he would never commit genocide--its debatable but not something I'm all that interested in seriously litigating--only that I don't think he actually does.) Its insensitive because, leaving aside for the moment if its possible to compare a fictional person to a real-life war criminal without being insensitive, by comparing a character which does not preside over death camps to a real person who definitely did...it treats the Holocaust (& the specific form it took) as dismissible and unimportant.

But having said all that...I don't feel like I have a very good rational explanation for why its beyond the pale to base the Grisha on the Jewish scientists of WWII while also basing their historic leader on Hitler. I just basically have a disgust-based argument, which leaves me kinda dissatisfied because I feel like if I'm right I should be able to construct a logical one...but its slippery like an eel and squirms away every time I try.

[maeamian]

Actually research skills are hard to learn especially unsupervised so maybe telling people to just "Go figure it out" especially if you already know they've been failed academically in other ways, might actually be a great way to just send them to a PragerU video on the topic.

[eclaire-went-bam]

bcs i'm aware of how i automatically percieve people, i earnestly try to give the benefit of the doubt a lot. i tend to believe people are Actually Just That Dumb™ when they're joking about something, so i try to get ahead of that & tell myself people are joking when they say something stupid, so that i don't look stupid

all i've learnt in doing that, is most of the time, people aren't joking. they actually did mean what they say, & i made the situation 10× worse by laughing at what they said.

not only does it reinforce the idea in my head that people are Dumb so i need to take the reins on literally Everything, but it also leads people to believe i'm making fun of them for saying something silly & talking to me less, when, if i knew it were a genuine thing they thought, i would have gladly explained it without judgement

but i don't really know how to stop treating them as jokes, because what if they ARE joking so they laugh at me for how Stupid i am for taking the bait? i can't handle being made a fool of, i think i'd rather die

[lunar-wandering]

head hurty

[whoviandoodler]

you ever go into a tag for a show or whatever and find several painstakingly created gif sets from interviews with the actors where they're just like. fully mocking fans? talking about them like they're the most despicable thing on this earth kind of bitter mocking. and on the one hand you're like, okay, i get it, fans can really be shit and get overly parasocial and think you owe them something beyond the work you created but on the other it's like. bro this makes me not want to engage with anything you do at all. ever. you don't have to sing your fans praises but you can do them the basic courtesy of professionalism and not ridiculing the entirety of everyone who both engages with your creative work and whose interest ultimately results in your paycheck.

[peapod20001]

Did sleeping help

No </3

[thrilling-oneway]

Also shout out to the person who said in the tags of that airi post who said that half the debates in this fandom are over gender or sexuality because that’s true and it pisses me off immensely

[sideflorfauna]

I love my little brother because he is chill enough to sit through an hour and a half long, winding diatribe of how I hate the direction this website is headed in, and the stupid specifics of online queer infighting and crab bucketing I’ve bared witness to in the past several years that never ends. I can air out my bad decisions and NEET habits to someone who isn’t there but understands the words I say and it’s so. cathartic

[minakoaiinos]

Several things about the **** and **** drama is how many people have hopped out to go omg so is the lady we have decided is the only big bad villain responsible for planting all of the hate against insert group/idol here when I watched in real time for all of those examples their own fans jumping on their favorite idols for things that were clearly just scraps of bad rumors they just completely made overblown THEMSELVES under the guise of trying to look 'critical about their faves'

[rotisseries]

Ur so new to this its making me giggle. also you should share more I need to Know

gloomy I can't stress enough how bad I am at this. once we got past stats and I had to actually come up with real character things it was awful. dragged kicking and screaming through character creation. also I'm realizing as I type this how little I still have in mind for this character bc I never even decided what gender they are. we've been referring to them interchangeably as "my new cringfail losergirl oc" and "my new weird little guy"

[theheroand]

uuuUUGHGHGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

appalled and disgusted to report the two (2) very manageable, very time-sensitive, very doable tasks that i've been putting off for two (2) weeks took ten (10) minutes total

[fappellmoan]

cocaine bear 2.8 stars on letterboxd??? jesus christ you people hate fun...

[leoninekelter]

oh my god people really have this stupid a take

I hope everyone who tries to act like emphasizing Miles blackness 'erases' his puerto rican heritage knows that that's literally not how it works in actual latino culture.In fact,it's the opposite.I'm the daughter(and son and child)of a divorced dominican couple who are a black man and a white woman and i was raised by my mom's side of the family and i CANNOT TELL YOU how many times her and the other nonblack people in my life like my teachers downplayed my blackness.I was told i'm 'not really black' because 'we're all mixed at the end of the day!' and that i look indigineous as a compliment because i look like a perfect mix of both of my parents.Not only that but that caused me to grow up almost completely disconnected from my blackness because i had no black friends either and gaining them later on in my life was incredibly healing and i love myself for being not just latina but afrolatina

Black people aren't erasing Miles latino heritage by being happy he's like us.You're erasing his AFROlatino heritage and perpetuating something that traumatized me and so many other afrolatino kids and i DEMAND you either cut out that shit out or leave the fandom.Now

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.