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How to escape a rabid troll
Oct. 25th, 2013 05:19 pmDear readers of my humble journal, there once was a time when I wrote original fiction, which I never did post in my journal, because I knew it lacked deepness, finesse and polish, in plain English, everything that good fiction needed to have,and fanfiction, which I did post back then, when I was still young (haha) and green as hell, when it came to harassing. I thought: my journal,my fics=my private space=no intruders, because no one would read the crap. How wrong I was! Some people will always find a way via world wide web to invade your private sphere, particularly if you have no clue about security settings and haven´t made your entries private.
At first all went well, I happily typed along, posting one fic after another, all of them crossovers. Crossovers are recommendable because canon is dismissed, I was told, and no one will bitch because nought of what you write might ever happen in those combined fandoms,or better said, no one who has his head on straight will complain about canon violation because it´s clear that crossovers always go against canonical rules.At the same time I was an avid reader in the FF7 section on ffnet. And as a reader, you might come up with the idea of favouring some of the stories-not good at all, if there´s a troll lurking among those authors, one who appears on the scene the moment his or her precious fics suddenly are listed among non canonical ones. I did favour those fics of her/him because there had clearly been a lot of research involved, which I thought worthy of mention, and that was about it. Now I was not so politely asked to remove those precious fics, probably before their protagonists were infected with alien mindset and possibly fleeing the predefined happening out of sheer boredom. I did not react, of course. Played dead. Continued reading. Continued writing. Continued posting in my journal. And there he was, the troll.
You all know what trolls are notorious for, namely trolling for all one´s worth. Mine was outraged because I completely ignored the oh so holy canon of FF7, frequently twisted and inverted by Square Enix itself to adjust the settings of upcoming games. I deleted the comment my troll had passed for my one and only story set in the FF7 department, to get a new one the next day. And another to a crossover. So much about the privacy of my journal, I thought, and deleted these ones again.
It took me quite some time to detect that there was a certain resemblance between the comments in my journal and the one to my favourite list on ffnet. I did not do much to cover up my identity and utilized not the same but related usernames, so if one can put two and two together he´ll pretty sure find me on other social networks as well. It was only a guess, but I told the troll to buzz off or I´d report him or her to ffnet, dumped my fics into a brandnew journal for friends only, and took a deep breath. It´s no fun to constantly get insulting mails, all the more if your writing exercises should have contributed to stress reduction, and yes, writing helped me and still helps me decompress. A few days later I checked the troll´s LJ. Gone. Deleted. And after some weeks the fics on ffnet had vanished, too. Maybe I was not the only recipient of her/his demand to keep those fics away from noncanonical scribblings, and others had not reacted the way I had, namely not at all, and gave her/him a good ticking-off. Thus ended my career as a fearsome fanfiction writer, so I thought, up until the day I spotted a scribbling of mine on FB. Oh dear! What joker did that? The community you are a member of? But that´s another story...
At first all went well, I happily typed along, posting one fic after another, all of them crossovers. Crossovers are recommendable because canon is dismissed, I was told, and no one will bitch because nought of what you write might ever happen in those combined fandoms,or better said, no one who has his head on straight will complain about canon violation because it´s clear that crossovers always go against canonical rules.At the same time I was an avid reader in the FF7 section on ffnet. And as a reader, you might come up with the idea of favouring some of the stories-not good at all, if there´s a troll lurking among those authors, one who appears on the scene the moment his or her precious fics suddenly are listed among non canonical ones. I did favour those fics of her/him because there had clearly been a lot of research involved, which I thought worthy of mention, and that was about it. Now I was not so politely asked to remove those precious fics, probably before their protagonists were infected with alien mindset and possibly fleeing the predefined happening out of sheer boredom. I did not react, of course. Played dead. Continued reading. Continued writing. Continued posting in my journal. And there he was, the troll.
You all know what trolls are notorious for, namely trolling for all one´s worth. Mine was outraged because I completely ignored the oh so holy canon of FF7, frequently twisted and inverted by Square Enix itself to adjust the settings of upcoming games. I deleted the comment my troll had passed for my one and only story set in the FF7 department, to get a new one the next day. And another to a crossover. So much about the privacy of my journal, I thought, and deleted these ones again.
It took me quite some time to detect that there was a certain resemblance between the comments in my journal and the one to my favourite list on ffnet. I did not do much to cover up my identity and utilized not the same but related usernames, so if one can put two and two together he´ll pretty sure find me on other social networks as well. It was only a guess, but I told the troll to buzz off or I´d report him or her to ffnet, dumped my fics into a brandnew journal for friends only, and took a deep breath. It´s no fun to constantly get insulting mails, all the more if your writing exercises should have contributed to stress reduction, and yes, writing helped me and still helps me decompress. A few days later I checked the troll´s LJ. Gone. Deleted. And after some weeks the fics on ffnet had vanished, too. Maybe I was not the only recipient of her/his demand to keep those fics away from noncanonical scribblings, and others had not reacted the way I had, namely not at all, and gave her/him a good ticking-off. Thus ended my career as a fearsome fanfiction writer, so I thought, up until the day I spotted a scribbling of mine on FB. Oh dear! What joker did that? The community you are a member of? But that´s another story...
