v-s.net v0.6

Friday, 5:56 am in Bloglife

Once upon a time – not so long ago – I jumped aboard the SS Blark.  Now, I’ve been through a lot of online communities – I’ve seen cliques come and I’ve seen cliques go – and one thing above all other things really stood out to me almost immediately; everyone was nice.  Really nice.  It was a veritable love-in of mind-boggling niceness because you see, although I’ve gone through online communities like a fat man through cake in my day, I’ve almost never encountered one that was… nice.  A lot of them pretended to be nice, but almost always running underneath that was a current of bitchiness and jealous cliquishness that tainted the whole thing like a David Lynch movie.

Not so, it seemed, with the SS Blark.  Fics especially always seemed to attract mountains of glowing comments; irrespective of the actual quality of the writing.  And, I suppose, objectively it should hardly have been surprising; at the end of the day, it was all about fun.  You were there because you wanted to read some pr0ns, and if someone provided then that was the end of it; the pr0ns were good and you said thank you.  It didn’t really matter if the characterisations were a little off or the premise was just stupid; pr0n was pr0n, and you were grateful that someone had written some.  Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I’m not saying that certain authors aren’t considered to be better writers than other but it’s something that’s… not talked about, really.  Because mostly you’re just glad that anyone is writing it at all.  There are no shipping wars and even less wank.  Everyone just floats along and writes stories and makes icons and teaches themselves Kryptonian and it’s all very relaxing.  It’s all about the fandom.

See, the thing is, to get ‘famous’ aboard the SS Blark you’ve gotta produce something other people enjoy and for the most part this means you’ve got to be a writer (or an artist).  If you write the fics, and if the crew likes them, then you get to sit at the officer’s table and it all just seems to happen naturally.  Because not everyone can write, and I guess people accept this.  The fandom is about the craft and if you can’t do it then… that’s just not such a big deal.  It helps that most of the prolific authors are jolly good sorts, too; for the most part they’re just as grateful to receive comments as everyone else is to receive fic.

And it’s weird, you know, because I’ve been in other creativity-based communities that are completely the reverse; that are cesspits of backstabbing and bitching and moaning and viciousness.  The grungefurs were like that, back in the day, and they taught me one very valuable lesson; if you want to get famous, you’ve gotta get controversial.  I mean, sure, the good artists are still good artists but… that’s not enough, somehow.  You’ve got to have drama; enemies and allies and hangers-on.  You haven’t really made it unless you’ve got those.

I don’t remember what originally made me decide to create the skullkitty.  It was an online persona – theoretically unconnected to me¹ – whose sole intent and purpose was to point out drama happening in the community and comment on it.  The skullkitty wasn’t unbiased and didn’t pretend to be – it usually took the side of the underdog – because its purpose was as a new source and a forum to comment on it that wasn’t necessarily clogging up the participants’ dA pages.  The deal with the kitty was that the second it became about her – the second her secret identity became public – then it would stop.  I think from memory it lasted for, like, two glorious weeks.  But it did its job; every now and again I still hear her name whispered…

I’m not sure if it was before or after the kitty – I think it was before, and was likely formative – that two of the more well-known artists in the community staged a stunt that I still think, to this day, was not only absolutely brilliant but one of the best demonstrations of just how… retarded a lot of this shit can be.  The culprits were neogeen and the then Push Tyber; formerly Best Friends For Life that one day apparently, and quite inexplicably, started drawing hate art of each other.  Kaboom!  The community exploded; suddenly, everyone had a two-bit opinion on the situation.  You either supported Push or you supported Neo and never the twain shall meet.  The comments and the drama mounted up and up and up and then finally the Big Reveal; guys, it was a set-up.

“Oh,” says the community.

I don’t know if their immediate friends were in on it or not, but the main point was to demonstrate how these completely inane situations escalate because everyone suddenly feels the urge to jump on the bandwagon.  The same thing happened with the skullkitty; if everyone had just ignored it the project would’ve failed.  But people didn’t.

And I’m sure you’re all thinking, “That’s great Dee, but what are you pretending to prove?  Because of course if you talk trash about people they’re going to react!”

But, of course, that’s not what happens.  Yeah, you talk trash about someone and they bite back… and then their friends bite back and then their friends and then some other completely random people and it just.  Gets.  Bigger.

And it’s easy.  I mean, it’s reallyeasy; years after skullkitty retired it was pulled back out again for Furc!Wank; which, for all intents and purposes, let’s think of as a WPR site.  My attention for F!W was brief and bright but I still get comments and review requests and – who knows – maybe I’ll pick it back up again one day.  But the point is that you don’t need talent, you don’t need something original or interesting; all you need is to talk crap about someone else and it’s a fast-track to instant fame.  Because apparently there are only two types of people on the internet – people who want to be told what to think and people who want to tell you what to think – and drama suits both of them.  Sometimes it seems it hardly matters how qualified they are to actually do it, so long as it gets done, you know?  Pick something, stick in a few pithy remarks and you’re there.

And the grandmother of the whole genre?  AQ's Worst of the Web; the very first WPR.  This, my friends, is where it all began, over ten years ago now.  Places like PSGR are pale imitations compared to the AQ which, in its day, was absolute gospel.

The thing about AQ, though, was that it was a one-way street; no blogs, no comments.  I mean, sure, people made anti-AQ pages, but that’s what they were; static pages.  And it kinda took, you know, effort.  It wasn’t as easy as just banging out a couple of hundred words and pressing the Blog This! button.  Noadays, there’s so much more room for drama.  And drama there is; at the time of writing there are currently two moderate sized shit-fights going on in the immediate community, and this is coming straight off the back of about three others.  It’s just not a good week if there’s not someone biting someone else’s head off… right?

And I get back to the SS Blark again.  You might hear people occasionally talking about “buyer’s remorse”; that nagging little voice most people get in the back of their head after purchasing something major.  The, “Was this the right choice?” voice.  And of course it’s not confined to consumerism; almost all major life choices can easily be triggers for buyer’s remorse and some people are so crushed by it that they literally get to a point where they can no-longer function.  And if it happens in life you can bet your boots it’ll happen online, too, hence we end up with troll's remorse.  I think everyone gets it, really, but everyone also deals with it differently.  The main problem being, of course, that most people’s methods for ‘dealing’ involve stirring up more; I think in some respects it gets to a point for people where you just can’t go back.  There are people out there who’ve staked so much of their e-fame on being the biggest, toughest, meanest bitch in the yard that renouncing it is pretty much tantamount to e-suicide.

And, yeah, I’m no innocent – as anyone who was here yesterday knows all-too-well – and this is what I mean, because it’s really easy to get embroiled in it all.  Like I told ~Belinda [h]; I can make a month’s worth of art and writing and I won’t get a single peep from my imaginary readers.²  But post something that even vaguely smells like controversy and suddenly people are crawling all over you, throwing in their two cents, and lo and behold we’re back to Neo and St.Push again.

And if you can pull it off, then you can be famous.  But the front is damn hard to keep up.

There’s no remorse on the SS Blark.  In a couple of days I think I’ll post a new chapter of UIP.  And maybe I’ll get three or four comments on it and they’ll all be along the lines of, “Great work!  Can’t wait to read more!”  And it’ll occur to me that it’s fun.  The whole process is fun.  It’s fun to write the fics, it’s fun to read the fics, it’s fun to get comments and it’s fun to leave comments and get friendly replies in return.

It occurs to me that there are people out there who’ve probably never experienced this.  And that’s… sort of sad.  Because don’t get me wrong; the skullkitty gets restless with alarming frequency and sometimes it just… has to be exorcised; lest I accidentally turn it against someone I’ll really regret later on.  But the drama is like a holiday, you know?

Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

1. Though, of course, people guessed.  Including some people that I didn’t even think knew who I was, which just goes to show you. ^
2. Well, usually with the exception of randomredux but I totally trick him into it by writing about his characters.  Mwahahaha! ^

• Tags » bloglife, dramallama, fandom
• Comments By » ~Belinda [h], ~Jem [h], Vera
• Mood » it's 5:47 in the freakin' morning