grey areas

I’ve talked about it on oth­er plat­forms, but I had a se­ries of tik­toks ex­plode last week (I mean, ex­plode on my scale, with the first 42k views or so).

Ba­si­cal­ly, there was a to­tal­ly out of con­trol ru­mor on the plat­form af­ter his death that Bob Saget mo­lest­ed the Olsen Twins or was a preda­tor in gen­er­al, based on mak­ing crude ac­tions with the Michelle stand in doll (some­thing he ex­pressed re­morse about years lat­er, but also not some­thing he did at least in front of the twins, if not the kid cast pe­ri­od) and jokes made at his roast.

So I broke down that no one has made an ac­cu­sa­tion against him, the con­text of edgy hu­mor in the 20th cen­tu­ry and why those jokes don’t work any­more, and why the lim­it to be­liev­ing sur­vivors is that, like, y’know, sur­vivors have to be say­ing some­thing hap­pened.

Re­sponse hasn’t been like en­tire­ly that the sun shines from my ass, there’s ba­si­cal­ly mil­len­ni­als who want to pre­tend that rape jokes were not a com­plete­ly nor­mal part of 90s–00s life (good luck for­giv­ing your­self for that which you pre­tend you didn’t do, besties) and sur­vivors who did not speak out against their abuser who are pro­ject­ing onto the whole sit­u­a­tion.

It’s been a crash course in how to deal with peo­ple ar­gu­ing in bad faith, my new fa­vorite thing is thank­ing peo­ple for boost­ing my con­tent with en­gage­ment.

The pos­i­tive re­spons­es though have taught me a bunch about my­self.

I’ve changed peo­ples minds on the sub­ject. I ar­tic­u­lat­ed things oth­ers have strug­gled with. I made an off-hand­ed com­ment about start­ing a YouTube and peo­ple were like “PLEASE DO.”

Those things, it would seem, val­i­date me a great deal. I feel like I have this stronger sense of where my life is go­ing? At least my pub­lic-fac­ing life.

I al­ready had this plan b in my back pock­et, for if I don’t get into grad school or if I need a side hus­tle in grad school, for mak­ing videos that are ba­si­cal­ly cre­ative writ­ing lessons couched in the sorts of things I find in­ter­est­ing: me­dia analy­sis, in­ter­net weird­ness, etc.

And I *have* been dy­ing for an ex­cuse to dis­cuss the dif­fer­ences be­tween prob­lem­at­ic his­tor­i­cal ac­cu­ra­cy that pro­pels the plot vs prob­lem­at­ic his­tor­i­cal ac­cu­ra­cy that just re­flects the writer’s bi­as­es …

 

—mel­ony ppenosyne

Flom­mist Mel­ony Ppenosyne is a writer and weird artist type. In the last year alone, she’s trav­eled to Vir­ginia as a com­pet­ing poet, co-writ­ten a play on men­tal ill­ness that is present­ly be­ing pro­duced, and craft­ed a pub­lished es­say check­ing the priv­i­lege and scope of art gal­leries. Copy­right © 2022 Mel­ony Ppenosyne.

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