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I’ve been reading through the archives of the Anti-shur’tugal Livejournal, and I finally came to the point I reached going backwards (I was most recently going from the very first post forward)—and yet, I haven’t seen anything about the actual site’s demise, which I believe happened sometime around 2008 (which is where I’m at). So my question: what happened to the original site? Why did it go offline?
(Sorry if this is sort of a random topic; I don’t really have anywhere else to ask this, not having a Livejournal account.)
Ah, okay—thank you for the information. I was pretty late to the critique game…
If you want something really detailed, there’s a thread somewhere here titled: The Backstory of II. I don’t know if it addresses exactly what you’re looking for, but on page 2 of the thread, SlyShy provides something called ImpishIdea: a History. It’s quite long. Maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for there.
Oh, wow, thanks! I’m insanely glad I’ve missed all the drama—goodness knows I might have actually gotten involved, and I can be a huge idiot when I want to be.
I sort of left not too long after the schism, although to be honest it was more just wandering away because I didn’t care that much any more (and I’d done some stupid stuff and just wanted to leave it all behind me). I ended up on the “old forums” side of the split (Uru’baen Forums) and yeah, I remember a lot of bitterness toward the AS staff, feeling like we got abandoned or something. So I’m kind of the opposite of you—I never really got too involved on DE, and for the short period of time thereafter when I still was on UB, I had a lot of negative feelings toward DE. (feelings that I should point out I no longer have. I just don’t really care any more. But that was how I felt at the time.)
In retrospect, I understand why they wanted to remake the forums. It’s a large part of the reason I left, too—things were getting really vicious and nasty and poisonous, at least from certain parties. (I don’t say “certain parties” to protect them, it’s been so long I genuinely don’t remember specifics!) Dog-Eared was the attempt to tone things down and start over, but unfortunately it led to a lot of anger/bitterness. I’m not sure whether or not UB could have been saved. I feel like maybe it could’ve been, but maybe things were worse than I remember behind the scenes or something—viewing something as a casual member can be very different from viewing it as a mod/admin/long-term member.
Anyway, the point is, I feel like that was kinda the beginning of the end of AS. Not that the specific splitting was the catalyst, but that it was indicative of the underlying problem with AS—when you have a community entirely centered around disliking something, you’re going to end up with nasty people, and you can’t live forever on anger and hatred anyway. By contrast, those things that have endured (such as II!) aren’t focused on disliking something. II is focused on liking something—specifically, liking writing. And while yes, we criticize stuff out the wazoo here, we don’t just do that, and we don’t just do it to one thing. We spread our dislike around, we’re willing to admit when we genuinely like something (or when an unliked author gets something right for once…), and we also have a lot of articles and conversations about good writing.
I guess the important part of all that is the “can’t live on anger” part of it. Eventually, you’re going to get to the point where you just don’t care about something anymore, and then what do you do? And trying to base everything around negativity isn’t going to help either.
EDIT: Apologies if this came out kinda ranty. Ever since I left UB, I’ve had a very strong aversion to “anti-fans” and all that. It just seems like… you can be critical of something without being nasty, and in the experiences I’ve had, the whole “anti-fan” thing went way beyond “critical” to just plain nasty. I guess I just don’t like anything that is constantly negative, you know? You’ve got to be positive about something eventually.
swneson- yes, that’s kind of my angle. I’m much too nice to seriously hate on a book, although if it has prejudiced undertones I normally can rant a bit. It’s not that I don’t care, I just hate thinking that there’s anything that isn’t the slightest bit redeemable.
Of course, rules are made to be broken, and I always break mine.
This whole schism stuff is kind of interesting. It kind of reminds me of Lemony Snicket, for some reason.
While anti-fandom might bring people together in mutual dislike, I don’t think it’s sustainable.
True dat.
Eventually, you’re going to get to the point where you just don’t care about something anymore, and then what do you do? And trying to base everything around negativity isn’t going to help either.
Also dat.
I think the reason the LJ group has survived as long is because we’re not entirely and only about anti-fando many more, and certainly not exclusively about Paolini. We “discovered” miss Tesch, we have dissected Mr. Stanek and ‘Big Dog’ Jones, and we have even formed a related comm for discussion of our original works. And the atmosphere is rarely entirely about negativity at the LJ group, either. A lot of the time it’s about “what can we learn from this?” and “how could this have been improved?”.
Haha, yeah, even coming from my position, I must admit that IF’s… stringent policies didn’t exactly encourage open dialogue regarding the books. Likely one of the contributing factors.
I was on that forum for about three days. I left when my first thread got a single, very angry, response, and a PM from Axegrinder that warned me about spamming. In case you’re wondering, it was about fights between literary characters—nothing more frivolous than what was being posted at that time. It wasn’t until I left in disgust that I realized the problem: I had been using the screen name TwiLyght, which I had been using since two years before the Twilight books were published.
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