Theoryofficgate Clarification and Follow-Up

It's been over a month since fanfic writers, specifically user waldorph, discovered that a UC Berkeley class had required students to write reviews as part of a course on fanfiction. I initially wrote a bit to explore some of the issues being raised as tensions still ran high. Since then, tempers have simmered down and most of the problems have been resolved.

Now that most of the details have come out, I wanted to clarify some points from my previous post as well as add on to some of the discussion regarding fan aggression.

The class, "The Theory of Fanfiction", is not taught by professors. In case it was unclear, the course is student designed and run. By undergraduates for undergraduates. So, it's basically a glorified reading group with the added benefit of college credit. And as later uncovered profiles revealed, these undergrads had a personal interest in fandom and even participated in it. One of the teachers was found to go by the pseudonym of FiveMinutesTilBedtime on many sites, including ao3 and tumblr.

Unfortunately, fandoms tend to get rather prickly when disturbed. There were reports of targeted harassment and malicious posting on top of the general drama the course caused. It got so bad that the fan-turned-instructor has since deleted or deactivated these accounts, but traces can still be found on the wayback machine or through tumblr correspondences. Sure, they made a mistake, what young adult doesn't, but the responses were excessive and cruel.

Such behavior truly highlights the ugly and destructive sides of both fandom and internet culture in general. BNF copperbadge, for example, allegedly posted a spiteful response (that has since been deleted) to theoryofficgate:

If you’d like to share your thoughts with the “teachers” of the “Let’s go be dicks to fan authors” class, their emails are listed in this cached document.
You know, if you wanted to. Unsolicited criticism seems to be the order of the day, after all. 

And since the original poster has a large presence in online communities, the post gained a lot of views and traction. It revealed personal information about the instructors and called for further harassment. Such behavior cultivates a very negative space in fandom and encourages cruelty. At least one fan was run off as a result and felt pressured enough to destroy their fandom identity completely. After all, it can be easy to forget, but FiveMinutesTilBedtime was first and foremost a fan and content creator.

A few anonymous commenters weighed in on this incident while criticizing the phenomenon of BNFdom:

Original thread here.

The class has since edited the syllabus and stopped the reviews in favor of revising the assignments. Now aware of the close scrutiny, the teachers and students have been much more closed off about the course. But discussions like the above still continue.

The attempt to bridge fandom and academia was overly eager and ill-conceived, but it was still genuine. They are all fans. Both teachers and students are trying to respectfully study, analyze, and document a culture they love. This particular experiment may have failed horribly, but perhaps the lessons from their follies may create space for future success.

Pseudonym Sunday: The Rise and Fall of MsScribe

Fewer pseudonyms live on in infamy than that of the notorious MsScribe. The story is a saga that literally spans years. It has become a bizarre piece of internet lore, a drama-filled story that entertains as much as it repulses. An absurd comedy that has become the stuff of legends. It is probably the definitive piece of fandom wank, the likes of which we might never see again. Users can and have written thousands of word about the events and their fallout. The most famous and comprehensive of these write-ups is so long that it’s even segmented into chapters. Charolette Lenox’s work is admittedly a super long but very entertaining read if you have the time. It is perhaps the most referenced work, almost a required reading, when people discuss MsScribe.

I’m not going to try and summarize everything. Others already have done a much better job than I could hope to replicate. One blogger, Scott Alexander, succinctly summarizes:

In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fanfiction authors and readers get embroiled in an apocalyptic feud between people who think that Harry should be in a relationship with Ginny vs. people who think Harry should be in a relationship with Hermione. This devolves from debate to personal attacks to real world stalking and harassment to legal cases to them splitting the community into different sites that pretty much refuse to talk to each other and ban stories with their nonpreferred relationship.

These sites then sort themselves out into a status hierarchy with a few people called Big Name Fans at the top and everyone else competing to get their attention and affection, whether by praising them slavishly or by striking out in particularly cruel ways at people in the “enemy” relationship community.

A young woman named MsScribe joins the Harry/Hermione community. She proceeds to make herself popular and famous by use of sock-puppet accounts (a sockpuppet is when someone uses multiple internet nicknames to pretend to be multiple different people) that all praise her and talk about how great she is. Then she moves on to racist and sexist sockpuppet accounts who launch lots of slurs at her, so that everyone feels very sorry for her.

At the height of her power, she controls a small army of religious trolls who go around talking about the sinfulness of Harry Potter fanfiction authors and especially MsScribe and how much they hate gay people. All of these trolls drop hints about how they are supported by the Harry/Ginny community, and MsScribe leads the campaign to paint everyone who wants Harry and Ginny to be in a relationship as vile bigots and/or Christians. She classily cements her position by convincing everyone to call them “cockroaches” and post pictures of cockroaches whenever they make comments.

Throughout all this, a bunch of people are coming up with ironclad evidence that she is the one behind all of this (this is the Internet! They can just trace IPs!) Throughout all of it, MsScribe makes increasingly implausible denials. And throughout all of it, everyone supports MsScribe and ridicules her accusers. Because really, do you want to be on the side of a confirmed popular person, or a bunch of confirmed suspected racists whom we know are racist because they deny racism which is exactly what we would expect racists to do?

MsScribe writes negatively about a fan with cancer asking for money, and her comments get interpreted as being needlessly cruel to a cancer patient. Her popularity drops and everyone takes a second look at the evidence and realizes hey, she was obviously manipulating everyone all along. There is slight sheepishness but few apologies, because hey, we honestly thought the people we were bullying were unpopular.

(I stress that this is a very abridged version that glosses over and skips A LOT.)

If it has not been made apparent yet, this tale starts over a decade ago in the early 2000s. It was the time when livejournal acted as the central hub for fandom activity. Everyone was recovering from the 90s, Myspace was still starting up, and many internet users still had to go through dial-up connection instead of broadband. (For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, be glad you were never subjected to this awful noise.) Even so, the MsScribe story may still provide some sections that echo more modern activity and may still have some relevance for people.

At its core, the MsScribe story is one of a user who was determined to reach fame (BNFdom) by any means possible. She constructed wild stories for her pseudonym, generally just caused a lot of drama, and used a variety of sockpuppets, both to prop her up and slash her down. Of course, the latter only further endeared her to her followers. In the process, she stepped on more than a few toes. It’s easy to forget that MsScribe’s dramatic show involved other real people, people who were personally invested, deceived, and hurt. She caused a lot of chaos and backlashing in the circles she frequented. And as she moved up in popularity, the ripples only grew.

In the fallout, many users began to look critically at the structure of online fandom and fame.

Original thread here.

MsScribe's heyday is over, but her legacy still lives on. It provides the perfect study for a lot of behaviors that are prevalent on the internet today - the drive for internet fame, sockpuppeting, stirring up drama. It speaks to the dangers of imagined hierarchies and internet communities who all too easily believe almost anything with minimal information. It exposes how easily some social structures on the web may be exploited and manipulated.  People still refer to her usernames and even claim them as their own at times. Some people have even role played as the users involved.

And above all, it makes a really entertaining read.

Hateful Confessions or Venting?

A few weeks ago I gave a general introduction to confession blogs and how people used them, but I talked about them in a mostly positive light, which makes sense. I didn’t want to scare people off from them by highlighting the negatives. That’s more of a second post deal.

The example that I gave last time was of a Dragon Age confession blog, which the owners carefully moderate. The blog contains a clearly visible set of rules that the owners actively enforce for submissions and behavior in order to keep a safe and welcoming environment. But not all confession blogs are structured in the same way. Some advocate for much looser community behavior and standards. They don’t bother with including any submissions guidelines, and the culture they cultivate looks a lot more different as a result.

This time, I’ll be using a blog dedicated to Flight Rising, a virtual petsite similar to neopets but with dragons. It goes by the tongue-in-cheek moniker "Drama Rising".

It’s not solely a confession blog, but it operates in pretty much the same way. Users submit confessions, rants, complaints, observations, or drama anonymously. A lot of the posts are similar to those I outlined in the previous discussion on confession blogs, so I won’t rehash an old subject. Instead, I’ll be focusing on some of the differences, mainly that there are no rules or apparent moderation on Drama Rising, which allows for completely different types of posts.

Since the posts are mostly unmoderated, a lot of them single out or attack users.

“can N please stop being a fucking little bitch…? so people don’t find your dragons ‘names’ (if the pile of garbage you create by slammingyour ape hands against your laptop’s keyboard can be considered namies) funny.big deal. please continue to cry some more, darling.”

A least they tried to keep the target somewhat anonymous?

As a result, other posters might in turn retaliate against an anonymous rant on the same blog. There is no room for vague phrases like “some users” or “the fandom” that you might find on confession blogs with strict rules. These are targeted messages.

“Alright you filthy pieces of shit targeting Snap you are all disgusting human beings and you all make me sick stop abusing her over messages she has no right to be attacked by some low life asshole’s who are greedy and only want to take advantage of her kindness

Deities help you if I find out who you are.”

Any policing of the behavior on this blog are completely community driven. Anonymous users will try to attack or shame other posters to keep others in line.

“about 90% of this blog is downright rude. i mean, if you have a problem with a user, why don’t you keep it to yourself instead of sending it here where that user may end up seeing it and getting hurt, or you can tell a friend about it just to get it off your chest. Or you can use here to rant, but why not leave out their username? that just causes so much shit for them and makes other users get pissed at them as well and its not cool. I love FR and it makes me so sick to see how RUDE the community can get when they aren’t on the site itself.”

Such tactics make work to some degree and possibly change behavior. But it also creates a lot of hostility that may result in fewer users wanting to participate (especially by those who are specifically named in posts) or even stronger retaliations from others. No one likes being told what to do or how to behave, after all. Not to mention, with no explicit rules, the unspoken expectations for behavior become inconsistent at best. It just makes people squabble more about what should be considered unacceptable or unnecessary content. Yes, the setup allows for more variety of posts, but the tradeoff comes with a more vitriolic community.