#the old ones look SO TERRIBLE. tbf I did those 4 years ago when I didn't know texture atlases were a thing

[deeva-arud]

B A L D

[afishlearningpoetry]

Still seeing people call us a cult in 2021 😑 🚬 Is there anything that broke this blogging website's brains more than a 2010s BBC show?

Tbh and I’ll get to why it connects to what you’re saying but what really broke this website’s brains is the crab bucket culture of disposability and cycle of online abuse that it nurtured for years until it spread to the rest of the internet... like the early social justice awakening to the yfip blogs and call out posts and anonymous stalking and commenting (that carried over partially from livejournal/older fandom, tbf) that’s translated into like, faulty, second-hand sourced fanwiki websites tracking the perceived dancing with the devil transgressions of some person, a random stranger essentially, has made in their online life, and for what reason, really? For what purpose? Like I think a lot of us gained some awareness at a certain point that these tactics were thinly veiled guises to harass and take personal shots at basically random people for mostly petty reasons (clearly plenty of people are pretending that’s not what it is and went back to it), but I also wonder what it did to the brains of like the youngest people on here, who started using the website since they were children, not just high school age or close to, but even younger people.

That frame of mind is everywhere now, especially with younger fandoms, not just on here. Twitter is pretty terrible. I was watching the Mask Off video from Lindsay Ellis recently and it’s just horrifying to me the way this website essentially birthed that form of harassment. Every step of the way, the way that she (and Natalie, in her own video) detail how it happened is absolutely identical to how it happens on here, except it’s happening in daylight where public figures are in the same fight-to-the-death arena as the rest of us, which is what makes it easier to articulate. This is not to dismiss anything someone like Lindsay has to go through, considering what she disclosed in the video and that she’s been harassed by the alt-right for years, but she also has enough of an online standing to publicly face those charges and refute the majority of them. Like Natalie also said, but what happens to someone else? Someone with no name, or social or financial security, and that’s basically what I’m getting it. That kind of online abuse happening over and over and over and over again trickles down to everybody else. That’s what broke people’s brains. That’s what ruined this website.

And it isn’t just the reactionary, cringe culture post-fandom nihilism that shifted into online culture in 2016 and onwards (I’ve mentioned this before, like, the constant jokes about bad and infamous moments from tumblr), but harassment that still happens on here. You can accuse people of being a pedophile with no credibility, harass them about their eight year old fandom history, or dox and shame them out of public life without much effort, granted there are enough people willing to hop in the crab bucket with you. It has nothing to do with genuinely caring about anything but being an asshole. So for most of that to be distilled into people hate following tjlc (which was named such as a self-aware joke) for literal years when it was largely one of the most fun, positive, creative and dedicated fan spaces I’ve ever been in, and then finally having the wind at their backs to essentially cut everyone down and collect some heads because series 4 finally got the critical backlash they were waiting for to do so with widespread permission (they tried this with series 3, but it just didn’t take because the quality was too consistent), is severely aggravating.

I’ve had plenty of other, smaller negative experiences on here, whether they be trends or staples, and I’ve certainly contributed, but there’s always been enough good for me to stay. But after series 4 that was no longer the case. I just hit a breaking point where I couldn’t be as personally invested anymore, it got so bad. As much as I still want to come here for specific reasons and contribute what I can, I have a lot of trouble engaging with anything because I’m ready to see any new blog or topic I follow to dip into those same habits all over again, which is inevitably what happens. To watch anti-intellectual post-fandom nihilism — and if you’ve been here at all between end of 2016 to now you know the kind of attitude, posts, rhetoric and style of speech, and blogs I’m talking about — kind of dominate this website, has been a large part of why I only pop up sporadically. After Nov. 5th it’s been ironic watching so many people I’d describe that way unironically get into the paranormal show again. Not because I think that’s bad, I follows blogs that talk about it and think it’s cool, I made an edit at the time, or that anyone should be “above it”, we’re on tumblr after all, but because that kind of venomous behavior is still there underneath, like we’re not all also blogging specifically about superwholock shows.

A few months ago when someone accused me of being part of a q anon-level conspiracy and that we’re all “monsters of your own making”, this being before the capitol riot where dozens of members of the US house were nearly murdered en-masse, one of the things they said was that we couldn’t admit that our show was bad, but it was fine what they were doing with the other show because they were just having fun, and that we couldn’t, I don’t know, do anything or whatever about it until we were ready to admit our show is also bad. Which is a pretty revealing look into how that line of thinking, all the way from the early tumblr days, to other places like twitter, all the way back to here again has evolved despite staying the same. This bizarre blend of ironic detachment, self-deprecation, moralizing over a show’s perceived wrongdoings as perceived personal transgressions, bullying, rumors, fan wikis, and years of witnessing or being in on online harassment rewiring people’s brains to the point where not only is it impossible to do anything without jumping through twenty mental hoops before you do it, it’s essentially a both a constant threat and entry-level trial by fire into having any kind of existence in an online fandom space.

Of course it’s not just the barraging from people on here that’s contributed to that kind of culture, it’s everywhere else, because it spread everywhere. Think pieces by people not involved in the space, summaries of what happened mostly written by people who were hate following it to begin with, academic papers by ex-fans, faux-investigative pieces from wanna-be media critics trying to canonize their version of what happened into definitive internet history after preemptively blocking everyone involved so no one can respond to what they say — it’s extremely exhausting every step of the way. I can’t blame ex-tjlc people for just abandoning this place or any online space completely, because it’s still relentless four years later, and if the initial experience of series 4 wasn’t already distressing enough, whatever you think about it now, everyone’s faced the same challenge of being gradually smothered into relinquishing any ties to it through that cycle of shame that’s been perfected and streamlined right down to quick and recognizable beats on this website for over a decade.