current mood: queer, petty and tweeting mark plot inconsistencies for the rest of my life
Do you realize this is harassment, will get you reported to Twitter and that you’re fucking crazy?
I’ve seen references to stuff like this on my dash but this is the first I’ve actually seen it and, frankly, it’s startling. All of the notes of support and acceptance are as well.
This is not how you should treat other people. They made a TV show, you watched it, that really and truly is where your relationship with the creators begins and ends. The creators don’t owe us anything. It is ok to be upset at the way the show went. It is fine to discuss it in the fandom. It is not ok to harass the creators, and this is harassment.
Please imagine for a second that someone was doing this to you or your friends on twitter because they didn’t like something you said/did/made. Just because they are famous does not mean we stop treating them like people with feelings.
As a fandom we need to be better than this.
(And in the event anyone actually read this, please no harassment of the OP or others either. That also doesn’t accomplish anything.)
Tumblr is a public platform. It belongs to anyone who joins and is not private. Nor is Twitter, and what the OP is doing is not writing on Tumblr, but sending dozens and dozens of antagonistic yet almost nonsensical messages DIRECTLY to Mark Gatiss on Twitter by tagging his username and being boosted and applauded for it by a toxic community. It is the definition of harassment.
I don’t give a good goddamn if some of you all didn’t like an episode of a TV show. Don’t like it, don’t watch it again. Rant about what you don’t like, then move on. Watch something else. Create something else. Better yet, turn off the computer and go outside.
Here’s what fandom isn’t: it isn’t the gatekeepers of anything. It isn’t the guardians of these characters who aren’t yours. They are not in need of protection. They are fictional characters. They are not real. Johnlock is not real and never was. It was a fun theory that turned into a diversion that turned into a cult.
I have seen dozens of example of Johnlock conspiracy theorists threatening and harassing other fans, cast and crew. I have seen people making open and public plans to do worse and bring their online harassment into physical reality, egged on by a toxic community. That is not okay.
Tumblr is an often an echo chamber that tells people whatever they do or feel is okay. Most of the time it’s harmless. But I am not going to sit back and watch people get away with being patted on the head and told that their mentally unstable behavior is worthy and should be applauded. Don’t kid yourselves that these are children either, because most are not. These are adults going crazy because two characters on a television show didn’t kiss. They are being actively reinforced in their rage and irrationality. They are being told they are brilliant and were owed something and that was taken away. They are being whipped into a frenzy and treating the real people behind a fictional creation as also fictional, as if they are mere names or two dimensional characters on a screen.
This is frightening because it is pathological behavior. A crucial component of celebrity stalking is dehumanization. That we live in an era where social media can magnify and reinforce that is terrifying. Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Sue Vertue, et al are not invisible gods who materialized a creation into thin air and who you can rage against blindly. They are not symbols of a conspiracy specially built to target you. They are real human beings with friends and family and lives and people on this site are responding to threats and harassment with cyberchants of, “Yeah, nail them to the wall, yeah dog ‘em, yeah get them, make them pay.”
It’s not normal, it’s not typical behavior, it’s not “for the fans.” It’s fucking disgusting.
Over the past couple days I’ve seen more than one post saying “Let’s stop pronouncing Gatiss’s name ‘gay-tiss’, [a reference to this tweet] he doesn’t deserve to be associated with the word”
His identity as a gay man is not some sort of prize for good behaviour that can be taken away on a whim. Jesus christ.
