12:30 pm • 17 October 2011 • 60 notes •

1. The reblogging.

On Friday, I didn’t do much, because I didn’t want to miss UPS when they came with my new iPhone. I realized I’d been lagging on updating this Tumblr and Community had blown my mind the night before, so I wrote a post about that. I had seen a couple of things on the internet about the episodes airing out of order. I looked into it a little more and I realized maybe something was up. I had enough evidence to warrant a blog post on a Tumblr that averaged about ten hits a day. Plus, I got to use Skitch for the pic, one of my new favorite toys.

I saved the post. Almost immediately, my BlackBerry, in its final day of use, started beeping. And it didn’t stop. Communitythings reblogged my post. Reddit picked it up. People were excitedly tweeting at Dan Harmon. Whoa.

I don’t think I was the only one theorizing, but my post was the one that Dan Harmon refuted on Twitter. Cool!

And then we got this awesome post from the big man. Should I feel bad? Should I feel good? Should I feel anything? Does this even have anything to do with me?

2. Why I care

I have been in love with Community since NBC put the pilot up on Facebook in 2009. I wondered who Dan Harmon was whenever the credits rolled, but I either didn’t think to look him up or didn’t recognize his credits and looked no further.

At the time, I was studying (for college credit!) at The Second City. Toward the end of the program, we started to learn about screenplay structure and the hero’s journey. Over winter break, I was writing something and trying to use the structure I’d learned, but I needed help. I searched the internet and found this. Mind blown. Then I looked at the top and saw the name Dan Harmon. Okay, man, you got a fan.

Anyone who has worked with me in the past couple of years knows I have “you need go search find take return change” going around and around in my head at all times. I even printed Harmon’s article in the program for my thesis play in college, in case anyone else wanted their minds blown (the structure not only guided the writing, but played into the plot of the play).

So I hope I wasn’t responsible for giving Dan Harmon too much of a headache. I think part of being a fan of anything in 2011 is once and a while posting theories, reviews, or rants on the internet that, really, no one is supposed to read and even fewer are supposed to care about. It’s pretty ridiculous to have your heroes responding, positively or negatively, to things you write while you’re sitting around doing nothing.

By interacting with his fans the way he does, Dan Harmon (and other actively tweeting celebs, surely) has created a weird new kind of long-distance star-struck feeling. All day, people tweet at him in the hopes that he will acknowledge their existence. Why? Are we at the point where we want the television to watch us back? Do we want to be loved by those we love, even if all we can get is a tweet and all we can give is 22 minutes a week of viewership? I just know for whatever reason I wanted to tweet my theory to him and I felt feelings when he linked to my post. More specifically, there’s a certain feeling I’ve gotten the few times in my life when something I did turned into a (let’s say “relatively”) big deal. It’s like nervousness and excitement and fear. It’s when things get completely out of hand, for better or worse, and I can’t think of how to make Tumblr stop sending me an email every time someone acts on my post.

3. They Were Dead the Whole Time

What about Dan Harmon’s post about abusing power and fucking over an audience? It’s a great point and it’s something I’ve thought about. I even made this video with my comedy group, which I think is relevant.

Some people have commented on that video that the characters in LOST were not dead the whole time. The inspiration for the sketch, however, wasn’t LOST, which I didn’t watch. It was the confused comments circulating the internet after the LOST finale. Tons of discussion threads titled “so were they dead the whole time?” Posts basically like the one I wrote about Community just trying to figure out what’s going on. And somewhere in Beverly Hills, maybe there’s a writer lurking on those forums laughing and laughing because he fucked everyone (I’ll say again because I now know that sometimes things get around the internet: I’m not saying anything about LOST specifically. I’m a fan of plenty of things J.J. Abrams has written. LOST was the relevant example when I wrote the sketch, and is purposely not mentioned in it).

I watched a thriller recently in which the twist is that the people you’re tracking who are running away from the killer turn out to be the killers. I felt waaaaay fucked over. Like I’d wasted hours watching the movie. Because they spent so much time trying to convince the audience that that wasn’t a possibility. Because I thought of that possible twist long before the reveal but there were so many scenes that were clearly there to eliminate that possibility, so I forgot about it. They fucked me.

So I get that there’s a line between doing something cool and fucking people over. Would the Community audience really have felt cheated if it turned out a few episodes down the line that Jeff and Annie kissed? Would we have sent angry tweets to @danharmon? I don’t know. I think there are ways that my theory could have held water without abusing the audience. I’m not saying this as someone who fancies himself a writer; I’m saying I trust the people making this show enough that when I thought that maybe they were being sneaky, I didn’t feel fucked over. I felt excited about the possibilities.

But of course Dan Harmon is right. Cool. Sigh. He read my blog.

4. Something smart about social media

I also wanted to say something smart about social media and how things go viral, but I’ll just leave you with a Skitch of Google Analytics pageviews for this blog (and this doesn’t count anyone who read the post from other people who reblogged it):