On Arrow, Olicity, and Why I’m Not Writing About It Anymore

Tonight, I told the editor and my co-writer at GATV that I’m going to stop writing for Arrow going forward (basically just the reviews/second opinions, maybe the roundtables…haven’t decided on the latter.) If you followed me and didn’t know I did that…well…there’s that.

I’ll be upfront, I’m a little peeved at myself for getting to the point where I have to vomit a bunch of stupid words about a stupid thing that’s so stupid on my goddamn Tumblr. But that’s also kinda why I’m vomiting it up – to get this stupid dumb thing out of the pit of my stomach and stop worrying about it so much, because it’s so fucking stupid.

A bit of background: I’m fully aware that if you’re going to write anything on the internet ever, you’re going to go in with the expectation that people are sometimes assholes. That’s fine. Shitty comments are a thing. Trolls are a thing. Gamergate is an awful, awful thing.

I’ve always had an interest in doing more things to be published, and thanks to some networking I have a really nice outlet to write practically whatever I want in KSiteTV. It’s totally volunteer, which I’m okay with, because at this point in my life, I’m just doing it for fun. I also write for the GreenArrowTV portal specifically for Arrow, which is one of the bigger fansites on the web that the star of the show has shown support for. And again, I just do it for fun, because I like writing about TV in my spare time as a form of escapism.

But talking about Arrow isn’t fun anymore.

That show crept up as being one of my favorites because it was just so interesting how it could course-correct and improve on every complaint. Season 2 is pure joy. And the stuff we wrote got a lot of hits! Not a lot of comments, sure, but a lot of hits. One of mine got tweeted out by Colin Salmon once. That was a new kind of thing for me. I was just doing it because it was fun to do, and more people paid attention than if I were doing it on a blog that 2 people read, so hey. That’s pretty cool.

Which is why I don’t think I ever got over the shellshock of how absolutely nasty a hugely vocal portion of the Arrow fandom is. I suppose it’s not any different from any of the more…uh…rant-y vocal people from every fandom everywhere.

The editor of GATV, who actually does run the Twitter and surely overworks himself by writing 99% of everything, is the one who generally sees all of it. He’s paying attention to the stats and probably Tweetdeck and whatever else I don’t know about (I’m kind of ignorant when it comes to running a website.) So he sees and gets messages that are full of weird attacks and accusations of bias and baiting and insults.

I have no clue where it came from, because I didn’t really hear about it until well into the harassment taking place, but at a certain point people started claiming the site had a “Laurel bias” – aka, bias for the Laurel Lance character rather than the Felicity Smoak character. You hear a lot about “Olicity,” and that’s kinda what it spawned from, apparently.

I think it was too many photos of Laurel and not enough of Felicity, or maybe not heaping enough praise on one over the other, or whatever. I honestly don’t know specific examples, because I’m not sure there are any. Whatever there are…they must be petty.

(Apparently in the world of fandom on the internet, you’re only allowed to like one female character at any given time. Or rather, only one female character is allowed to be “good enough” for the main male character, because defining a female character solely by her relationship with a man is not misogynistic at all, nosiree.)

But I’m getting way off-subject – I’m not totally naive to shipper culture and fandom stuff (I’m on Tumblr, after all), and I know you can be a shipper and not be an asshole about it, as evidenced by some mutual “Olicity” followers on here. But it’s not really my cup of tea nor is it where my critical eye lies. No biggie. What’s changed in this last year for me, though, is that things have progressively gotten more personal, and kind of creepy. No more of this loony “GATV Laurel Conspiracy” bullshit, which was sometimes even amusing.

(Clearly the best place for a secret read-between-the-lines conspiracy would be a fansite where a couple of people literally spend thousands of words writing out their own opinions every week.)

The editor started getting directly called names, or would get mounds of hate for every joke or comment, misconstrued or not. He baited people sometimes; I’m not going to lie I don’t necessarily condone it, just like I don’t always agree with what the other people on GATV have to say, or how they say it, or what the headlines are, etc. But they don’t always agree with me either, and I’ve definitely fired back at people when they really irk me. But I know the people I work with have good hearts, even if their opinions make me annoyed sometimes. I wouldn’t write for the site if I didn’t think they were good people. But that also makes it worse to see them getting called “little boys” and “hacks” and throwing out insults about how the site is a piece of shit, etc. Again, over a fucking TV show.

And then, apparently, it stopped being direct, and started involving screencapping things from our personal Twitters as “proof."

Since these things come in through Tweetdeck searches and whatnot (I believe), the editor will often get wind of stuff that isn’t actually tweeted at any of us. And that’s, ultimately, what’s set me off the most and pretty much made me decide to end it.

A while back, some weirdos who don’t follow me apparently made it a point to go to my Twitter and find a specific tweet – either they saved it the night I tweeted back in November and kept it for months, or they went back and searched through months of tweets to find it.

Either way, it’s absolutely creepy as fuck.

All my stuff is public, because I don’t really have anything to hide and I’m very upfront about my thoughts. I still don’t regret that. But that doesn’t make me less creeped out.

It was a comment on an episode where Felicity basically slut-shamed her own mom (it makes sense in context) and I remarked that it was kinda weird, given the creators have put Felicity in very similar outfits to what she tore down as being slutty. I don’t think I made that very clear, which is totally my bad; essentially, I thought it was strangely hypocritical for the show to do that, and makes Felicity’s costumes seem more like the product of male gaze ("this character is getting popular so let’s put her in tighter dresses!”) rather than any kind of empowerment.

I regret not making that clear, because out of context, that tweet got shared in a conversation that eventually came back to me, unbeknownst to the posters. The screencap was being used as proof that GATV “slut shames Felicity,” and reaffirms Laurel bias. And since then, I think people have been on a kick with claiming everything is on the site misogynist (which is ironic given what I said earlier, but I digress.)

The thing is, that hurts. I’m extremely uncomfortable having misogynist attributed to my name, when I’m constantly trying to be a better feminist. And I think I do pretty well in that regard, as well as a dumb cis white guy can acknowledge his privilege. So to have my face and name, which are part of that Twitter handle, in the same sentence as “misogynist” and “slut shamer” because of opinions I don’t even have about a fucking fictional character from a CW superhero show…fuck, man.

This is personal to me, but it isn’t scary personal. Again, if you’ve heard anything about Gamergate, I’m a screaming whiny baby in comparison. I’m not afraid of getting doxxed or anything, and no one has harassed me personally (though the creepy way my name is being tossed around the grapevine with the GATV hate still freaks me out.) But still, it’s progressed over the last year. And that’s scary. I don’t want it to keep progressing.

It makes me weak and a coward and letting the trolls win, I get it. But I’m not writing about human rights issues or anti-vaxxers or our fucked up healthcare and education systems or media sensationalism or the horrors of big business. Those are things I would stand up for in the face of disgusting assholes who get off on being as relentlessly psychotic as possible.

No, I’m writing about a fucking TV show about a guy who fights crime with a bow and arrow.

I did it for fun, and it’s not fun anymore. You took a show I really grew to enjoy, one that I used for escapism to forget about the generally shitty state of society for an hour a week, and turned it into something I can’t watch without remembering that there’s a group out there that vehemently hates Derek B. Gayle, because he’s a misogynistic little boy who slut-shamed Felicity, apparently.

So I’m out. You won. GATV lost one of its disgusting Laurel-biased hacks, or whatever you want to call it.

So can you chill out now and spend the time you would have spent trashing a superhero fansite instead, say, making some care kits for the homeless in your community? I can tell you from experience that people in need really appreciate it. Do some good. Make people’s lives better. Maybe you won’t be so angry all the time if you do.

The hilarious part of all this? I actually really liked Felicity as a character.

Peace out, guys.