CAPSLOCK_SPN IS SRS BZNS
So there's this community called capslock_spn. It's a f-locked comm for mocking Supernatural, its actors, its production team, and anything else even vaguely associated with it (and for venerating Michael Rosenbaum, which can never be wrong). I'm a member there, although I don't do much except leave comments that probably aren't as funny as I think they are.
It's not a polite place. Some of the stuff that gets posted is really bizarre and offensive and puerile. Some of the links I choose not to click on because eww. Some of the jokes make me cringe. But no one ever means it, it never, ever has any bearing on reality, and honestly, I think that it's awesome to have a place like that. Because a comm like CL_SPN could very easily become fractious and lame. If the comm was a little less awesome, a new member's "WTF?!" or "HALP!" post would earn mockery and personal attacks. But that's not what happens. The mockery is reserved for SPN and for people who've been there long enough to tell that a LOL at their expense doesn't mean no one likes them. (If they really didn't like you, as far as I can tell, they would just ignore you until you got bored and went away.) A lot of the comm's members are people who do a bunch of different things in fandom, and they take their srs bzns other places. There is no pressure to be all capslock all the time outside of the comm, or to not have actual opinions about the show, or to troll any other journal, at least that I've seen. It's a little box of crazy separate from the rest of fandom, and I've really appreciated that. The fact that it's f-locked means that hopefully no one wanders in without knowing what they're getting into.
But yesterday capslock_spn got itself into some trouble with fandomsecrets, having to do with the influx of joke secrets technophile saw showing up in F!S (as well as one self-contained thread worth of trolling on Saturday's secret post, I think). He announced that he would be cracking down on troll secrets and specifically called our comm out on this (the post has since been edited), and that was taken as a call to arms spam the comments of that post. We didn't spam the comments to an actual secret post, which would have interefered with other people's fun. Everyone (well, except for a couple of people who came to "apologize" on behalf of SPN fandom and were shouted down) was having a good time, including technophile himself. But it wasn't going on in private anymore, and it's sort of like telling a joke on a streetcorner, only you're doing it really loudly and in a language only half the folks on the street understand. The rest just think you're an asshole for being so loud. Which was... not quite as funny as regular CL_SPN, but still amusing because the majority of actual commenters on the post got the joke.
Then this drew enough attention to end up on Fandom Wank (which a lot of people in the threads at F!S had been hoping for), and I'm not saying it wasn't funny at first, but then there were a ton of CL_SPN people flooding the comments - anonymously, of course - and it just... felt like overkill. It felt like breaking the fourth wall. It felt like the end to the shiny, happy, friendly comment-spam and lunacy, and an invitation to CRY MOAR and BUTTHURT and people being actually pissed off at each other. Which made me sad. So I left a comment asking if maybe we could go back to our own damn comm where everyone knew it was all a joke. I don't think that had any effect, but I think people started to get bored and wander off. Good, but it still kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm not entirely sure there's a point to this post, but I've been thinking about it all for the last two days, and I guess what it comes down to is I'm really glad that capslock_spn exists, I'm really glad it's friendslocked, and I really hope it doesn't change in the attitude of its members. I'm pretty bad at figuring out when people are serious; apparently other people have a hard time telling if I'm serious; it's awesome to see a place where the answer is just NO. I also think this whole thing has helped make it really clear to me how important it is to differentiate between public and private discourse. Despite the fact that in an academic context I write about textuality and the impossibility of determining authorial intention (death of the author, blah blah blah), in a community like fandom, it's really, really important to me to have a sense of what other people are thinking and how that influences the things they say.
Anyway, I can't imagine that anyone particularly cares about the above and I hope this whole thing blows over.
Love all,
B&z
It's not a polite place. Some of the stuff that gets posted is really bizarre and offensive and puerile. Some of the links I choose not to click on because eww. Some of the jokes make me cringe. But no one ever means it, it never, ever has any bearing on reality, and honestly, I think that it's awesome to have a place like that. Because a comm like CL_SPN could very easily become fractious and lame. If the comm was a little less awesome, a new member's "WTF?!" or "HALP!" post would earn mockery and personal attacks. But that's not what happens. The mockery is reserved for SPN and for people who've been there long enough to tell that a LOL at their expense doesn't mean no one likes them. (If they really didn't like you, as far as I can tell, they would just ignore you until you got bored and went away.) A lot of the comm's members are people who do a bunch of different things in fandom, and they take their srs bzns other places. There is no pressure to be all capslock all the time outside of the comm, or to not have actual opinions about the show, or to troll any other journal, at least that I've seen. It's a little box of crazy separate from the rest of fandom, and I've really appreciated that. The fact that it's f-locked means that hopefully no one wanders in without knowing what they're getting into.
But yesterday capslock_spn got itself into some trouble with fandomsecrets, having to do with the influx of joke secrets technophile saw showing up in F!S (as well as one self-contained thread worth of trolling on Saturday's secret post, I think). He announced that he would be cracking down on troll secrets and specifically called our comm out on this (the post has since been edited), and that was taken as a call to arms spam the comments of that post. We didn't spam the comments to an actual secret post, which would have interefered with other people's fun. Everyone (well, except for a couple of people who came to "apologize" on behalf of SPN fandom and were shouted down) was having a good time, including technophile himself. But it wasn't going on in private anymore, and it's sort of like telling a joke on a streetcorner, only you're doing it really loudly and in a language only half the folks on the street understand. The rest just think you're an asshole for being so loud. Which was... not quite as funny as regular CL_SPN, but still amusing because the majority of actual commenters on the post got the joke.
Then this drew enough attention to end up on Fandom Wank (which a lot of people in the threads at F!S had been hoping for), and I'm not saying it wasn't funny at first, but then there were a ton of CL_SPN people flooding the comments - anonymously, of course - and it just... felt like overkill. It felt like breaking the fourth wall. It felt like the end to the shiny, happy, friendly comment-spam and lunacy, and an invitation to CRY MOAR and BUTTHURT and people being actually pissed off at each other. Which made me sad. So I left a comment asking if maybe we could go back to our own damn comm where everyone knew it was all a joke. I don't think that had any effect, but I think people started to get bored and wander off. Good, but it still kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm not entirely sure there's a point to this post, but I've been thinking about it all for the last two days, and I guess what it comes down to is I'm really glad that capslock_spn exists, I'm really glad it's friendslocked, and I really hope it doesn't change in the attitude of its members. I'm pretty bad at figuring out when people are serious; apparently other people have a hard time telling if I'm serious; it's awesome to see a place where the answer is just NO. I also think this whole thing has helped make it really clear to me how important it is to differentiate between public and private discourse. Despite the fact that in an academic context I write about textuality and the impossibility of determining authorial intention (death of the author, blah blah blah), in a community like fandom, it's really, really important to me to have a sense of what other people are thinking and how that influences the things they say.
Anyway, I can't imagine that anyone particularly cares about the above and I hope this whole thing blows over.
Love all,
B&z