The Phrase I Used To Use
It’s a weird thing being in comics. I don’t consider it ‘celebrity,’ at all, because I think even REAL celerity is mostly ridiculous, and misplaced. And those people in comics who insist on being treated like a celebrity, well, I find them hilarious.
But there’s no question that some people do become a little affixed and not always in a positive way. Most creators I know who are active on the internet have at least a couple people whose non-stop negative attention seems WAY creepy and weird, and I think I have, hmmm, maybe three people like that. Even really nice people like Dan Slott seem to have a couple people with very obsessive and oddball nasty behaviors.
The problem is, it gets to where you can sometimes misjudge people based on some of the worst of these perennial trolls. And I stress again, we are talking about ONLY the most extreme cases here, the one in ten thousand types. If I told you some of the stories about these people, you’d see why it’s easy to get a little bit wary. There are some familiar traits that many of them share and when you see those, the warning flags go up a little.
So sometimes it’s easy to mistake fair criticism for one of these guys in-the-making. And then people get labeled unfairly by the writer in question, which is really rotten and uncool and does no one any good, it just creates more hard feelings.
I used to use a phrase, “waiting to be offended,” meaning someone is just lying in wait to be pissed off about something. And while I do believe people like that exist, it occurs to me that it’s a really terrible thing to imply or say about someone you don’t even know. I’ve seen it used unfairly on people with legitimate concerns and gripes, and I KNOW I’ve used it improperly myself.
The more I think about it, the more mean it seems to say to someone you don’t know at all. All it is is pure, dumb defensive scorn. It’s preemptive, a way to negate not just someone’s criticism, but their manner and entire opinion.
The internet has enough of that already. :)
I won’t use that phrase again and if I never see it again, it’ll be too soon!