Just some other case of online harassing/bullying/doxxing over some disappointment. This does not surprise us anymore, let’s just contain it.
In a column, a TV writer praises screenwriter and Rick & Morty creator for ranting against a fairly vocal subgroup of its own show’s audience, to which he and others refer as “bad fans”.
Before we are allowed to get more details, we are briefed about who are those “bad fans”. They are tuning in for the lesser intellectual parts of otherwise great TV shows. They can get quite angry when something does not turn out as they wish it would. We then learn why: these bad fans were campaigning against the couples of newly-added female screenwriters, which were mostly male-dominated. They blame what they perceived as a diminished quality in the jokes in the episodes, credited to these female writers. You can guess the rest: the new writers were of course directly harassed online on social media by these bad fans.
We then get back to the main news behind this article, which indeed is news. The show’s creator is overtly criticizing these bullies, as other show creators in the past did not see the opportunity in criticizing parts of their own audience.
The article then follows about why the audience is being wrong-headed and comments the relevant recurring themes of the series that this very audience apparently fails to grasp about themselves.
Then the show creator gets to reaffirm his stance on this debate, and we are informed of a fan-based movement going against these bad fans on the same digital platforms (like Reddit).
This article sure is a nice case regarding narratology. We do have a clear set of characters, a setting that is increasingly common and some inspiring movements. The author plays a bit with the temporality, the mimesis/digesis and other narratology concepts, more or less. Let’s break all this down.
Characters, Settings and Movement are the new 5 W’s (more or less)
The Characters are clear, although they are not all given direct voice. Their is the narrator of the article, which does not take part in the action but does offer his two cents on what is going on (since it is a column). This makes the author/narrator an added character. There is also the creator of R&M, which insists is part of a collective, organic bigger character composed of the screenwriters that are all and always writing together anyway, despite what the enemy characters, the mad part of the audience, claims. The “bad fans” think of the screenwriters as individual stakeholders taking part in the process of the screenwriting. Another character, the showrunners’ defending audience, is acting as the mirror character of the mad audience, coming much later in the story.
The Movement aspect is interesting. In fact, we are given some broad context about something (“bad fans” as a phenomenon) as a Setting (so-called golden age of TV, universal internet access, social networks, everyone in their living room or elsewhere with their devices, etc., versus the collective screenwriting setting), and then we are informed of a recent and newsworthy Movement following something of which we are still not aware. The creator of R&M has just put this mad crowd in its place. We don’t see that often in the world of TV screenwriting. This movement follows the claims from the bad fans that the newly-added female screenwriters wrecked the quality of the show all by themselves. More precisely, it was the Movement undertaken by the bad fans, namely trolling/doxxing/bullying directly the females in question on Twitter and probably elsewhere in the digital sphere. Later on, we learn that a new character, the cheering and defending part of the audience, took the initiative (Movement) to speak out and take the side of the screenwriters on the bad fans’ own preferred Setting that is Reddit (which is also of course a Setting for the more receptive R&M fans too).
The Temporality and the Mimesis/Digesis
The headline suggests an inverted pyramid structure is coming, but it is delayed by some broader, narrative context instead. The pyramid structure comes in right after, although it does have a narrative colour, as many columns have. The pyramid structure is again set aside at the end of the article as we learn that receptive fans have taken the side of the creator on Reddit, which can only be more recent than the outrage of the bad fans.
For focalisation, the story is clearly told from the point of view of the showrunners, the creator and the sympathetic column author. This latter is obviously more on a mimesis pattern — partly “all-knowing” narrator (because he does not have an intimate knowledge about the bad fans) while the creators’ side is alternatively on a mimesis and digesis one. His statements, quoted, is part of his performance, and he also tells us about what’s going on with his team.
Acceptably one-sided?
Sadly, we are now all accustomed to hear that some unhappy digital crowds are hugely overreacting to something which itself is debatable. This is way above the purpose of this post, but I do remember a time when places like Twitter and 4chan were not especially known for their cruel trolling or bullying events (I might be wrong). For what matter in the immediacy, the author invites everyone to this “battle that needs to be won”. We may assume from this that sexism and random and damageable online rants against mere individuals will always be there online and that we must mostly focus on containing it. To do something more upstream about this is, again, certainly way above the purpose of this short post and that short article, but it would be worth investigating.
Even though many will assume that the bad fans R&M have been impolite to the point that it would be pointless and disrespectful to give them a direct voice in the article, we might have wanted some more acceptable examples. Or else, many some other TV critic could have talked about whether the show actually did change a bit or not on season 3 (the show is quite popular, it would not have been hard). To this, the article author himself argues it only got better and crazier, for the good reasons. He also could have talked a bit more about cognitive bias, because this is precisely what it is, according to the article: the bad fans learn about the new females screenwriters and then perceive the show as less good than it was.
Others might have found that the show might have changed a bit in quality, but not because of the new screenwriters. TV series change overtime and they rarely keep the same quality, even when the screenwriting team does not change much. Producers might be into something else, or the writers wanted to experiment other things, and so on.
The article was thus effectively more about praising the reaction of the R&M creator.
