cleolinda

I just wanted to thank y'all for keeping the movie discussion as civil as it mostly managed to be. It extended over two entries, the general movie discussion and then "Let me recap the discussion of this one line" entry; as of this writing, I have gotten a grand total of eight hundred and one (801) comments in response, 336 on the second, more specific entry alone. One of the reasons I posted that entry, despite severe feelings of dread and anxiety, was that I have a major problem worrying about Omg What Will People Think of Me for pretty much literally (literally) everything I do or say. Online, offline, everything. It might be the root of all other anxieties I have, in fact. So I thought, maybe this would be a good exercise in saying what I think and then just rolling with the reactions and working on caring but not caring, you know?

I kind of feel like I've had a colonic now. Drained, but in a zen way. In fact, there was apparently an anonymeme thread about how oversensitive or full of myself I am or something, and I even managed to close that tab within a few seconds and get over it. (I also may have been, in the course of linguistic discussion, completely desensitized to profanity of all kinds.) I'll probably be scared as hell the next time I decide to say, you know, anything, but we had a discussion this time and it happened and people were really, really invested in explaining over and over why they disagreed which was cool but got surprisingly insistent but nothing exploded although a few people on Twitter got kind of mad and we were mostly all okay. I was a little disappointed in "But it's just a WORD!" and "Well, your feelings are WRONG" comments, if only because--if you think that neither language nor emotional reactions are worth talking about, I'm not sure what this journal has to offer you. Particularly since I said over and over that I appreciated alternate interpretations as completely valid and was not calling for a public shunning of any kind and no one is bad nor should they feel bad. But there was very little actual flaming and things turned out all right.

The whole thing was strange in another way. As I noted elsewhere--well, let me just paste it in:

[Regardng Twilight fans:] Honestly, I think I only got one anonymous flame and one "cleoloindaisgay" username flame (my all-time favorite). All the rest were under legit LJ usernames. And honestly, they had a lot more to complain about, given that I went on about Twilight for (*counts on fingers*) four years, six book recaps and four movie parodies. Two Avengers discussion entries, in which I said I liked the movie, and it's 700+ plus comments. (Only some of them negative, but I couldn't estimate what percentage. Maybe half disagreeing with me on various points, probably less than 25% with some level of hostility. [...] But I had less than a dozen comments' worth of insistence that Edward Cullen is the perfect man and Twilight is a modern classic from a fandom incredibly invested in believing this to be true. I can't tell what conclusion to draw from any of this; I just seriously was not expecting an Avengers discussion this intense on two entries that said "I liked the movie but not this one line."

The other thing is that I now look like I care SOOO MUCH about this one tiny thing, and... I kind of don't, actually. But this is what happens when you end up having tiny individual discussions with 50-100 separate people who come by and want to weigh in on it: you spend so much time and energy engaging with your guests that it looks like you cared 700 comments' worth of argument on a minutely specific subject. Words don't even look like words now. I stand by my intellectual arguments, but I seriously am no longer able to feel any emotion about that line of dialogue now.

(Then I had a terrifying vision of the future: a Dark Knight Rises discussion entry.)

So, I'm mostly posting this to say that I'm all tapped out and have said everything I have to say about ten times over to a hundred different people and won't be replying to any more comments on those two entries. (Or to @ comments on Twitter. In fact, I think I'm going to filter "quim" right off TweetDeck.) I promise you, just about any point you would like to make has very likely already been made, and you can probably find my response to pretty much anything you can think of if you look long enough. I'm leaving comments open for other people to keep discussing, since I know the entry's being linked around again. I will read new comments and continue to moderate as necessary, but I won't actually be contributing further to the overall discussion, having already had a hundred tiny ones. Thanks for being cool.

(I would also appreciate any discussion of The Avengers staying on those two entries and not this one. I will freeze any discussion of The Avengers here because I am tired. I'm not even sure what anyone would even want to say on this post, but didn't want to just outright disable comments. Here's Jim Hines' follow-up, Criticizing Our Fandoms, as well.)


ETA: WELP, IT'S CLOSED. I think we had that discussion for like four or five days straight and I am pretty sure that is the first time I have ever locked comments on an entire entry, so mark it down in the record books. Still got something to say, take it to your own blogs and journals, godspeed.