#like i've made a point of being extremely approachable wrt this stuff!!!

[thevioletcaptain]

pov! you're me, considering signing up as a participant in a new challenge, but as you're reading the rules and requirements you notice that they've straight up pasted in several sections of copy you wrote for a challenge you founded and have been running for the past seven years (and they didn't ask permission or provide credit!!!)

[batsplat]

I watched Marc’s all in documentary recently and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on it

icl it's been a while since I've watched it and I'm not sure I have any particular original thoughts about it that haven't been extensively covered elsewhere. it's the closest equivalent to valentino/casey's autobiographies and the jorge biography (that was written in close collaboration with jorge) in that it's marc mostly writing the narrative himself of his career... which makes it primarily interesting not in terms of the knowledge it imparts, but in the editorial choices made wrt what to focus on, how to frame the events it covers, etc. now, personally, I'd rather we had an actual autobiography to work with given how those are a little meatier than five half hour episodes... inevitably, this documentary is very much centred around marc's injury and comeback from that, which is obviously compelling in its own right but means an awful lot is being left out. I found it a rewarding watch, but in a lot of places it did leave me wanting more

all that being said, it's still interesting! quite emotionally vulnerable - a work with strong confessional vibes that makes a spectacle out of marc's own suffering. it's not just about being open, it's about being open as part of the show. it's making a point of lowering his guard, letting the public in... the laser focus on his own torment does feel quite specific to him, like I can't really imagine any of the other aliens feeling all too comfortable applying that particular lens to their own experiences. which makes it the strongest aspect of the documentary - you kind of want to tease out the things that are unique to his approach, right, and this quasi-exhibitionist fervour in drawing the viewer into the suffering is a very marc way of going about things. marc has never been particularly shy about showing off his injuries... but obviously this arm situation made everything even more extreme, it transformed his outlook. for a while there, his pain went from being ever-present to being everything. no wonder that's what he's most preoccupied with... no wonder that's what he wants to really let the public in on, where he feels particularly misunderstood. still, it's a very deliberate vulnerability that also functions as a bit of a sleight of hand. when someone is being that honest about one aspect of their internal life, it's worth wondering if they're attempting to distract from something else, to draw attention away from all the areas where they're being considerably less revealing. marc is willing to be vulnerable when it comes to his injuries (to some extent, cf him pretending like he's no longer in pain this year where that admission might now hinder him competitively), but he's a lot less willing to be vulnerable about a lot of other things

again, all the injury journey stuff is really where the documentary shines. the other stuff is primarily interesting for the editorial choices - I'm a big fan of how they're actively showing him give his opinions on the editing lol, very meta. it's got quite a scattershot approach to what got included or not... just little tidbits of his rivalries with dani, jorge and valentino that are all too short to be entirely satisfying. obviously, the valentino stuff conspicuously buried in the third of five episodes is what marc truly wanted to get off his chest... I enjoyed how he said he just had to talk about it, like how could he possibly have left it out. buddy, it's a self-produced documentary about your injury! you can do what you want! there's a few nice lines about valentino... plus marc himself pinpointing the ranch as a turning point in their relationship (both in the documentary and in a separate interview from the same time, I believe). now, I've always been a bit curious about how much that excursion was really a turning point. it's not something that valentino has ever brought up... as fun a narrative as it is, for a long time it was reliant on a couple of rumours and that one motocross bloke saying they were extremely competitive with each other on the track - which, no shit. going purely by the eye test, it's only really in 2015 that the two of them are getting more distant towards each other in pressers. so it was neat that marc himself confirmed that there really was something there! might still be an element of retrospectively making sense of what happened, marc himself trying to figure out where it all went wrong... but it did make me buy into the centrality of the ranch a lot more

but yeah, otherwise... the valentino stuff was pretty interesting, but the jorge and dani stuff just sometimes felt thrown in there willy-nilly. as I recall,, some rather awkward transitions between the present day injury stuff and then suddenly talking about aragon 2013 or whatever. it is a documentary that could have benefited from a little more focus and direction, also really just more space and energy devoted to telling the story of marc's whole career. there is something a bit odd about having a five part documentary that's 75% about his injury comeback and 25% about a specific three year stretch in his career. I don't even have any particular enthusiasm for that rivalry, but pretty much my first thought after finishing the last episode was 'wait, where's dovi'. I might be misremembering, but I don't really think he was featured at all? that guy finished runner up to you three times, marc! I know valentino wasn't interested in participating in the documentary, but did dovi refuse? really? obviously you can draw conclusions from this exclusion if you so please about how seriously marc really took that particular rivalry - but just wrt the actual contents of the documentary, it's a bit of a shame that 2016-19 was a bit of a black hole. anyway, my favourite part of the whole thing was marc talking about sabotaging dani within honda <3 that was funny as shit because a) you are demented, b) no, marc, everyone does not do that, and c) WHY are you admitting to this. I'm always a fan of some good old fashioned intra-team politicking but that one did throw even me the first time I watched it,,, like, giving actively inaccurate developmental feedback to fuck over your teammate would feel a bit much even for valentino lol. obviously I think this is fantastic and I fully support it

and on a similar note to him going 'well EVERYONE tries to sabotage their teammate' (again, marc, I'm pretty sure they don't all do it like that), the whole thing was interesting in terms of the kind of image marc was trying to project. now, apparently it's not quite accurate to say he called himself an asshole on track -

- but nevertheless, there's an interesting tension between kind of playfully leaning into the competitive dickhead persona while also wanting to come across like a chill, affable guy off the track (while also saying that there wasn't any difference between the two, which... hm). really leans into how image conscious he is, you can always kinda tell to what extent sepang 2015 also spooked him in that regard. trying to appear open while also needing to be as closed off as possible... wanting to seem normal while quite clearly being pretty weird. there's something really endearing/compelling about how hard he's trying... always enjoy seeing whenever he's a bit more ill at ease, more unsure of himself. his disappointment at nobody apart from aleix coming to visit him pre-surgery!! all those years of distancing himself from the whole grid - and yet at the end of the day those are still his people and he still wishes they cared... it's all those little contradictions, those internal conflicts and underlying tensions, that are fun to dig into with him. he can be as cold and calculating as he likes,, but when it comes down to it, he's also a little bit sad his childhood rival didn't wish him well

and for all my critiques, it's still my favourite motogp-related documentary by a fair margin, and it's one that I generally recommend to people looking to get into the sport. I don't have any problem with how much it was focused on marc's injury given the comeback story was very much the point of the entire project - just felt that at times it didn't really mesh comfortably with the bits that suddenly delved into his wider career. and yes, obviously there is something inherently revealing and pretty funny about the choice to juxtapose all the horrid injury stuff with the emotional wounds valentino dealt him. it's all about his fear of being misunderstood, right... for marc, this documentary represented the opportunity to set the record straight on some things, to tell the public what he thinks they need to know. which does make it notable that his major focal points are a) the public needing to know how awful the injury was, and b) pushing back against valentino's narrative about their feud. that's why some elements of the documentary feel so disconnected - because it's a work that's really just interested in the parts of marc's career he feels he has something to say about. hence no 2017-19! so. like. from the perspective of 'I wish this were a better documentary', I'd have quite a few notes for what to change - but from the perspective of 'what a funny little guy', it's a pretty strong work yeah

[thevioletcaptain]

My long tag rant was largely an accident if I'm being honest. I wasn't planning to say anything beyond what was in the main post, and by the time I realized I'd typed a lot it was almost 2am and I couldn't be bothered turning it into body text.

Anyway, here are my original tags as screencapped above:

#hoooo boy this pisses me off lmao  #at first i was like... am i imagining this? #but i made a point of going through it  #and there's several sections where they've flat out just thesaurus'd in a new word and switched ''pinefest'' to their challenge name  #and to be clear if people want to use rules from pinefest *as a template* for their own challenge rules that's totally fine by me #like i've spent seven years ironing out the kinks and it runs pretty smoothly these days #so i'm more than happy for other challenges to take inspiration from how we run things #but to lift entire sections of the rules/requirements/posting guide i wrote #only changing a couple of words and shuffling the order of a few things around but keeping large chunks of text and formatting #all without bothering to provide credit or even just ask!!! #is so damn rude!!!!!! #like for crying out loud the pinefest askbox is open my askbox is open the pinefest email is listed on our page #i've shared ''how to build your own challenge'' guides here and on twitter through the challenge account #and have publicly offered help and advice on getting started when people have asked #like i've made a point of being extremely approachable wrt this stuff!!! #because i want to help people set up challenges! having well-run challenges makes fandom better!!!   #but passing off other people's hard work as your own does NOT make fandom better!!!! #and yeah writing copy for a challenge IS hard work #also i have deliberately not mentioned the name of the challenge publicly and i'm only going to mention it to my co-mod #though if the people running it see this and feel like reaching out they are welcome to do so #like legit no hard feelings if they were using our rules as a guide and somehow published our stuff in their rules by mistake #i'm just super heated about this because i've put so much work into pinefest over the years #like huge amounts of time and energy and thought dedicated to contributing to the fandom #so to have someone take a bunch of that work and pass it off as their own feels pretty damn shitty! #it's especially frustrating because other parts of their rules have clearly been written by someone who has a distinct voice of their own #like evidently they're capable of writing their own stuff so why didn't they just do the rest of the work? #wank adjacent #...but is it really wank when it's being pissed off for legitimate reasons? who's to say

I'm still pretty mad tbh. This has happened at least one other time in with someone lifting copy from the DCBB, which I remember because someone got confused about which challenge had done it and sent the Pinefest blog an angry anon.

I'm still not going to publicly name names, but I have decided to tell the mods I know from other challenges that this has happened, just in case any of their copy is in there too.

pov! you're me, considering signing up as a participant in a new challenge, but as you're reading the rules and requirements you notice that they've straight up pasted in several sections of copy you wrote for a challenge you founded and have been running for the past seven years (and they didn't ask permission or provide credit!!!)