Please share your thoughts on the Bad Art Friend article. I saw your tags and I'm obsessed. There's just something about a person who would invite people to a group lauding their own altruism, and then systematically dismantle a woman's career with single-minded zeal. Add a sprinkling of artistic circlejerks, blatant admissions of plagiarism - not to mention a blistering caricature - and it's like looking into a funhouse mirror of authorial intent.
Apart from everything else, I think it’s just a superbly written article, a story excellently told. The way Robert Kolker shifts your sympathies back and forth between Dorland and Larson is masterful. Even after the last view of Dorland, stalking Larson through virtual writing workshops, I still feel the occasional pang of sympathy for her. I have been that second-string friend, where you're welcome at the lunch table but no one's going to invite you to the sleepover. It hurts, profoundly. And that gives everything that follows an almost Richard III vibe---if I cannot prove a lover, I am determined to prove a villain, etc. Except of course that Dorland’s retaliation is both petty (a copyright claim? on what seems to have been an unregistered facebook post?) and vaguely pathetic, laced through by her sense of her own victimhood.
(Not that Larson and Co. are innocent in this---the smugness of being writers, published writers, has to be at least equivalent to Dorland’s self-righteousness over being a kidney donor. But Dorland was the one who escalated, and kept escalating, all the way to pitching the story to the NYT herself. Which still blows my mind.)
However, mostly it’s just exquisite petty drama. @tobermoriansass called it "low stakes high intensity" and that's the draw for me. It's almost a return to the sprawling fandom wank sagas of yore---a group of people in a certain small community, drunk on self-aggrandizement, working out their own emotional issues in a completely inappropriate forum. It has no impact on my life whatsoever, but man, is it delicious.
