On Callouts, Triggers, and Problematic Content
So as I’m apparently in A Mood Today, let’s talk about callout culture and fucking drama a little. Via a story.
So once upon a time I followed a person on here. They posted about stuff I had an interest in. And every once in a while they would go all manic about something that pissed them off. Something someone said on the internet that was Wrong about their favorite topic. And sometimes I read these rants, amused, and decided to avoid the person they were talking about. And sometimes I just ignored them. Sometimes they got annoying when it was post after post about the same damn thing.. You know how it goes, the Tumblr posts of “…and ANoTHeR ThInG…”
And then one day, the rant of the day was about….me.
Someone on the internet, they wrote, had recommended at Thing That They Liked and in so doing had compared it to a Thing That They Didn’t Like. And it was like 1-2K about how idiotic the comparison was and how inexperienced you had to be in the genre to even make that comparison, and how it was borderline homophobic and emblematic of everything that was wrong with….fuck I don’t know.
So I read this, bemused, going…is this about me? It has to be about me, right? I did that. Could someone else have made that same comparison? Maybe…but no, pretty sure this is About Me.
So I commented. Yeah, that was me, I said. I wrote that in a post three years ago. I was trying to get my followers, who are fans of That Thing You Hate, since that’s the fandom I was in and the main topic of my blog, to consume this Piece Of Media You Like by making comparisons between them. I was trying to encourage people to support this indie creator and expose them to new art. Uh, sorry?
And I got a private apology and they took down the post, which, you know, good. I just sorta went okay and kept following them. But then I couldn’t react the same to their one-sided rants about How Wrong Other People Were anymore. Because I’d seen the people reflexively agreeing on their post about me, without any of the context that made the central OMG Wrong Thing make sense.
And finally this person went on a multi-day rant about someone else, a creator who I happen to know from a fandom. They were complaining about how terrible their work was, how offensive because of this one small aspect of it. An aspect that they found horribly objectionable because it reminded them of their own past abuser.
And you know, I didn’t have that reaction to the work. I didn’t see the horribly offensive flaw. I mean, I saw a character who did bad things, but I didn’t see that it completely morally compromised the whole work, the creator, and everything they would ever produce ever.
So I stopped following this person, because it wasn’t contributing to my enjoyment of the internet anymore.
But I was thinking about them today. Not only the way they took my own post out of context and made it a Whole Moral Deal, but the way they were personally triggered by a work of art due to their specific life history and then used that to label the work and the author Objectionable.
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