Current mood:	Snarl
Entry tags:	fandom is fucking stupid, it's okay if i don't like you, jesus wept

At least SA goons are honest trolls, or, Fandom double-standards FTL
Over the years, the unspoken rule of fandom "What happens in fandom, stays in fandom." You don't contact a fan's place of employment, university, etc. unless it's serious shit -- "serious shit" meaning illegal or life-threatening, not fannish wars or bruised egos.

Apparently, not anymore.

hypersurfaces posted a con report about WisCon that focused on the obesity of the con attendees on the Something Awful board . The post is seriously unfunny and full of fail. She later had the post deleted, but it was later reposted at a related site, Something Awful Sychophant Squad.

Attendees on Wiscon discover the post, and all hell breaks loose. Massive amounts of rage, including posts (locked and the source for this didn't get caps) of several people threatening hypersurfaces about how they would hurt/STAB her if they saw her on the street. hypersurfaces is forever and ever banned from WisCon. But not content with that, people -- including badgerbag -- find her real name, her school, and write to her dean saying she was violating the schools sexual harrassment policy. I'm not posting the link because it has her real name in it, and I like my permanent account here too much to risk the ToS.

hypersurfaces real name and real info are posted all over by fen who have previously rallied against that sort of thing - because in this case, she clearly deserves it. The casual threats of violence are astounding, and now apparently people are writing her and saying they're going to hurt/kill her - using the real name/addresses so thoughtfully provided by the angry wisconners. Kudos to the mod there for at least stepping up and telling people to knock the shit out.

But nada about this behavior from fen normally so worried about community standards, like coffeeandink.

So it's okay now to post people's real names and similar information, as long as they do something that really, really pisses you off. Because they deserve it.

ETA: Clarified where hypersurfaces's post originally went up.

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pyratejenni
2008-05-29 06:23 pm UTC (link)

I was misinformed about the SA connection. I'll edit that.

It doesn't matter that she had her personal info in her LJ. People did that it the past, and some still do. The more fool them, but it's their call.

if their motive was just "she mocked us!"

Boil down all the rage and verbiage,and that's just what it the motive is: she mocked us. It's not unique. It's not even unique that it was done by a fan to other fans. SWMNBW posted pictures of people on the Sunday of a con and mocked them for being fat and ugly and not as hot as her. And she didn't even block out faces.

I don't remember anyone contacting her school's dean over that.

Fandom spent the last few days raging against

jameth, LJDrama and ED trolls... then turns around and uses their tactics. Because she deserves it.

Not only their tactics, but their rationale. Nice.

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sgaana
2008-05-29 07:11 pm UTC (link)

hypersurfaces posted a con report about WisCon that focused on the obesity of the con attendees on SomethingAwful picked it up and reposted it in their forum.

You might want to further fix that sentence; get rid of the "picked it up..." part, since that's now repeated in the sentence below about it being reposed to the SASS forum after being taken off of SA.

It doesn't matter that she had her personal info in her LJ. People did that it the past, and some still do. The more fool them, but it's their call.

It seems like you're talking about two different-but-related Community Standards issues.

First is "don't connect a person's real name with their online identity, esp. if they have asked that it not be". I think that's why her connecting her two identities first *does* matter.

Second is "don't take a fannish kerfuffle into real-life; that's facilitated by the first, but it's a different activity and a different step.

Boil down all the rage and verbiage,and that's just what it the motive is: she mocked us. It's not unique. It's not even unique that it was done by a fan to other fans. SWMNBW posted pictures of people on the Sunday of a con and mocked them for being fat and ugly and not as hot as her. And she didn't even block out faces.

I don't remember anyone contacting her school's dean over that.

This is where we disagree, I think. I can see why you think that's all the motive boils down to. But I don't think that's the driving rationale behind people taking this extra step. I think the people advocating the extra step really do see this as fundamentally different from the other examples you're talking about -- this is much less "just within fandom", and much more local and personal, with one corner of it overlapping with online fandom.

I mean, you're right -- it's not unique... and yet, it is. That is, if sufficient rage were all it took for large amounts of people to feel comfortable breaking that barrier, then we should see this happening *more* often. But here we are, able to come up with many examples of similar mockery/slander that caused rage, but not this.

So what *does* make this different? Something is making *this* case different from the others, to the point where many people do feel it's serious enough to warrant breaking the usual fannish-privacy barrier. That why I say I don't think it's *just* the level of rage over just mockery, because levels of rage have been very high in the past, but not led to this.

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