Peaves Vs. Humanity
By RM Peavy
As I sit here with my depression cheesecake and coffee, I have to tell you, (so you get the tone in which I am writing this) I am a mess. I don’t even want to take a computer selfie. If I could, I would grow an “alcoholic Jack beard” like every time Jack went on a bender in Lost. Speaking of Lost…
I have to go back.
My favorite screen writer and Twitter personality, Damon Lindelof quit Twitter this week. He didn’t quit because he was bored of it or no good at tweeting… he quit because of people.
Yes, that’s right. Because so many people were horrible to him, he quit. If you aren’t the tweeting kind, or didn’t follow Damon on Twitter then you might not understand why this is such a big deal. He was an incessant tweeter, and his followers enjoyed his tweets. This isn’t the first celeb type to quit twitter because of trolls. I am pretty sure the Twitter Quitter club included Ashton Kutcher and Leo DiCaprio, whether or not they reopened Twitter accounts is irrelevant. Some might say, “What a wimp, why stop because a few people say negative things?”
I am not going to recap Lost because believe it or not, ten years later people will complain about spoilers because they are stupid, goat testicle garglers. Let’s just say, it’s common knowledge that some people didn’t like the Lost finale, and so Lindelof had become an internet leper because of it.
I don’t think the trolls understand the human condition, which is what got us in this position in the first place. Most literature, movies, TV Shows, music all pretty much tell you about a point in the human condition, that’s what it IS. That’s why we write. And most audiences get it. Which is why a show like Lost had so many followers, and also why Damon Lindelof had a lot of Twitter followers…hold on, I swear, I am getting somewhere.
Lindelof’s tweets were funny, some were engaging and some were brilliant. But through it all, there was this group of people that just wouldn’t let up on him. He is a writer that really valued what his audience thought, and this is ok for us, but not for him because people are horse feces.
The popularity of the show Lost, and the nature of the show itself bred rabid fans and not the nice kind. You have the people who loved it, (ahem) were obsessed it with it, then there were the people who thought they were intellectual for watching it and were looking for an Easter egg, where there were no eggs. THOSE are the people who were so personally devastated by the finale of Lost, that bagged on Lindelof years after the finale aired. I am not even going to argue with you about the meaning of it. I get it, and a majority of the fans understood it. And, like most things, there is always a fraction of the group that doesn’t like it. They are always the loudest and the most troublesome.
This is why I saw it coming.
I saw this coming a couple years ago when I noticed Damon tweeted back to obnoxious contrarians and not as often to people who loved his work.
I found this delightful and entertaining for awhile, but no gentleman and good person could carry on for that long. I saw it in his article about the Breaking Bad finale in the Hollywood Reporter a few weeks ago, which was a beautiful piece paralleling the BB Finale and the finale of his own show, Lost. You can read that article here.
To recap, Lindelof mentions that the hate saddened him, but at the same time he was proud of his work and basically said he was no longer going to mention as it wasn’t healthy for anyone to continue down that path of self-disdain. I am assuming that the aftermath of that article must’ve released the blood suckers from under their bridges and basements.
Which brings me to humanity as a whole. Seems to me, people’s excuse for mistreating other humans on the internet is that “it’s their opinion.” That’s all fine and dandy but no one would say these horrible things to someone’s face would they?
I know why I am angry. I am angry because people can’t be nice to other people to the point of emotionally damaging them- because of something fictional they wrote. And for some reason, if you’re a celebrity the consensus is, you don’t have feelings. Lindelof didn’t write declarations of war or about any genocide or anything sexist… he wrote an ending to a story that some people didn’t understand. He wrote an ending to a story that most people have to actually think about in order to like it.
One time, I read a tweet to Mr. Lindelof that said, “The finale of LOST was dumb why don’t you kill yourself.” What in the frak kind of human being tells another human being to end their life because they didn’t like the ending of a television show? Now, this must mean, somewhere in crazy land that that person cared so deeply about the show, this unreal thing, that he asked the person who created it to “kill himself” because they were dead in the end. Also notice I said, dead in the end. Not the whole time.
And because it took two more steps of the thought process to understand that Prometheus was not in fact the prequel to Alien, but a cool story set in the Alien Universe, they verbally abused the man who doctored the script? What the hell is wrong with people? This is why I fraking quit.
Whether you’re Stephen King or Matt Weiner or a homeless person writing on the back of a half used legal pad you found in the dumpster, writers can never fully explain how shit works in their heads. There is a certain level of self-loathing that occurs with your writing because you are constantly taking wounds and reopening them as you write. Now, to be a writer with a fandom- like Damon Lindelof, if you already are self inflicting the loathing, being receptive to it will undoubtedly drive you away.
I am not claiming to know all the details and certainly, there are people out there who will more eloquently explain all the reasons he quit. Nor do I know the actual sequence of events that made Damon Lindelof quit twitter, I can only gather from what he has put forth that he was sick of all the crap. I was sick of the crap and it wasn’t directed towards me.
I bet you’re wondering why, if you aren’t a huge pop culture nerd why this is significant at all? Well, it may or may not be. Certainly with it’s billions of accounts, twitter will not be a lonely place without Damon Lindelof but let me tell you something… it’ll be shittier place. When people like that butthole Justin Bieber who posting pictures of his bodyguards carrying him up the Great Wall of China to millions of followers while brilliance is trolled on, it mirrors the world to me. Even if you aren’t a pop culture fan, you still should know that saying rude things to people affects them.
It’s none of my business as the specifics, but I for sure I hope he finds peace in being twitter-less and his work continues. He went out with a gigantic nothing, in a Soprano’s style ending.
So, thank you twitter for connecting people, and frak you twitter for dehumanizing people and frak you again for being such a loving and cold necessity.
But I quit you humanity. Frak you and your Bieber, and your Duck Dynasties. Frak you and your arrogance and your ignorance and your retarded cat pictures. Frak you preaching Christianity when if Christ walked up to you with a fraking box of donuts you’d probably spit in his face because they’d make you fat. And, most of all frak all of you illiterate, grammar-deficient twitter trolls who ruin people for everyone else. Think about the fact that you are talking to a living, breathing, soul before you type something stupid and shitty. I can quit you. I can quit you just fine.