Ah, TVTropes. A website that for many of its users changed how they saw and applied the meaning of the word “tropes”, and for that matter TV. Here I put down my thoughts on the place. Some of these thoughts are hard to process and write because on balance I don’t come off completely as the good guy here. I’ve done some things that I’m not sure I can defend, and in fact won’t defend. I’ll simply state it for the record. I’ve reached a stage where I am more interested in telling the truth and less in whether it flatters me. Included here is the origin story of my name JACK ELVING and why my online handle is “Revolutionary_Jack” in various places.
Be all my sins remembered.
I CAME IN AT THE END
Let’s start the story from the time I got banned from TVTropes permanently.
I got banned on August 27, 2019. I could still send a message to the moderators. The email I had with the chief moderator there (someone called Fighteer, more on him in a bit) went like this:
In reply to this I said the following:
I got no reply. My ban from tvtropes was pretty unusual since I could login to accounts and read stuff, but I could not go on message boards or use direct messages. I got direct messages afterwards and I couldn’t even read it.
A few months later, I pitched tvtropes to reconsider, and offer a general amnesty as a result of the pandemic.
The response I got from the moderator FIGHTEER was literally “Go to hell”. This response was so rude that I directly went over that guy’s head to tvtropes and raised an issue about his conduct, and in response, Fighteer wrote back with an apology while also clarifying why he wouldn’t ever remove my ban.
After that message in 2020, I kept periodically sending emails to tvtropes to see if they would lift the ban and so on. My last attempt was literally the day before I started this post. This last attempt is the true last attempt as I will delete my tvtropes account for good right before I publish this post. Bidding goodbye to a site that to be honest, I don’t even like anymore, but which I still cling to, as a crack addict stuck with permanent feelings for withdrawal. The reason for doing so is that I happen to like some of the posters there but also because I feel like I left behind a part of myself in my time on that site and I kind of want that part back.
Anyway, a few months ago, I found out that the moderator Fighteer was enough of an abusive jerk to the majority of the posters there and his fellow moderators that he was forced to step down essentially. Fighteer had become a devotee of the Muskrat and his legions of online followers on twitter, the site he bought and so on, and was vicious in his interactions with fellow posters and often banned people for no reason.
This left me feeling mixed emotions. On one hand I was happy to see him go, vaguely hopeful that this would mean I could get back in. Hence I made a few more requests for having the ban lifted which haven’t gotten any replies yet. Then I found out that Fighteer was returning to tvtropes in September 2023. Still, an aura of invulnerability has faded. The current era of tvtropes ought to be free of people like Fighteer. I looked around me and thought of all the people on tvtropes I feuded with, who I hated and got into heated arguments with: AmbarSonOfDeshar, TheMightyHeptagon, and all of them are gone from tvtropes. The removal of these assholes, among others, on balance seems to have made tvtropes a finer place without them than with them. And then I started to realize, hang on, hold on a second, I’m another one of those assholes.
You see, as horrible a moderator as Fighteer was, and is, when it came to me, he wasn’t wrong.
I did in fact do everything he accused me of doing. I was in fact a multiple ban evader who had repeatedly flouted and broken the rules of tvtropes. Knowing this, denying this, I lied to the tvtropes staff and moderators numerous times. In short, I deserve my permanent ban. I shouldn’t be allowed back into tvtropes.
So this is a story about me, and the site I went to hell for.
MY FIRST TVTROPES ACCOUNT
I started tvtropes so far back that I can’t even remember now. I was a teenager at the time. I had posted online on a lot of message boards about games and other stuff. Then I came across tvtropes and tvtropes seemed like a new kind of site. I read later that tvtropes began as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fansite where a bunch of fans had used Whedon’s distinctly slangy (and even at that time in my view, annoyingly twee as fuck) attempts to re-categorize concepts with some pop-culture reference and a joke reference (usually by adding “y” at the end of a word).
I actually don’t even remember what my first tvtropes account was called. The first of three accounts.
I’ve dug through email records but I can’t find a trace. Either I deleted it out of shame and rage at my first ban, or the email I used that site for has become defunct. The truth is I started and lost a lot of email accounts in the course of using tvtropes.
THE APPEAL OF TVTROPES
The appeal of tvtropes is hard to explain.
It’s more addictive than using wikipedia (I was a prominent contributor to wikipedia before, and I still occasionally make some contributions but not too often these days because it’s too much work) but more than that, there’s a creative application to tvtropes or at least it seemed as such at first.
The best way to explain tvtropes is by means of example. There’s this movie in the 2000s called Synecdoche, New York, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman (screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The movie, starring the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman in his finest role, is a surreal odyssey about a theater director who after getting an ambitious grant decides to mount an ambitious production in a large abandoned factory that amounts to a minute recreation of his life, with literally every detail reproduced, including the new details that happen to him during the production of the work. The film is hard to describe if you haven’t seen it, but it’s about an attempt to control life, an attempt to organize its chaos and give it shape and meaning, and the failure of that owing to time and slow decay.
Tvtropes is essentially the online version of Synecdoche, New York. An attempt to recreate and recapture a TV show, a movie, a game, and a comic and so on virtually, eventually extending to troping aspects of real life itself. You categorize every single trope, and when it’s not possible, you create a new trope, and that way you eventually create a trope page where literally every entry catalogues every aspect of the work. The creative application in tvtropes is in identifying the tropes, making a case for how it applies, and then listing it by describing it and so on. Virtually, you remade and recreated the work.
It seemed like an evolution of fanfiction to me (which yes I’ve dipped into before, maybe that’s a story for another time). This allowed you to more creatively analyze a work (or so it seemed) and your ability to list it out, identify and share details and so on helped enrich people’s experience of it.
Or so I thought.
RULES & RULERS
The thing with tvtropes and its creative application is that everyone who contributed (called “tropers” *sigh*) felt an ownership or protectiveness of their contribution. So if someone got something wrong, that is to say someone made a wrong trope entry, someone made a questionable application, or deleted without explaining clearly (or deleting but the other person taking offense anyway) then what you have is a recipe for fights. The tvtropes website has a function that allows you to follow pages and allow you to track and see if your entries were edited or altered by someone or not. So that meant that people could track and surveil any changes they made or felt protective about.
This meant that inevitably there were fights, attacks, and feuds online. This required moderators and the moderators on tvtropes were oftentimes as bizarre and arbitrary as the tropers. So the moderators had rules of engagement on tvtropes but the problem was that these rules were never accessible or clear to read.
The current layout on tvtropes is different from when I started using it but it still has the same basic problem. It is utterly cluttered on the home page, with no mention of “Rules for Tropers” anywhere clearly emblazoned. The page is designed to invite new tropers to apply and start right in, without them having any idea of what they’ve signed on for, what rules they have to follow and so on.
Tvtropes was patterned after Wikipedia but where in wikipedia if people had doubts they’d put a [citation needed] for a while before adding/changing and it was at least based on verified information, tvtropes was an essentially creative endeavor, which also meant that there were more fights and moderation and that meant that the moderators would often react by adding more and more rules. Rules that these moderators would never make accessible or clear to anyone.
What that meant was that inevitably, the first time that a troper learnt the rules of tvtropes was when they got their first suspension. And the nature of tvtropes, is that every infraction and interaction went on your permanent record there, so you could be punished for breaking a rule that was never properly explained or made accessible to you and that would then hang over every interaction you have later on. It’s very Kafkaesque and it quickly made what started out as a creative endeavor into something that felt like work where inevitably you have to follow the rules book everything you did anything.
Oh and the Rules, it looked like this:
No joke. It’s longer than the US Constitution and far less accessible. That’s the main page and only the top section (the scroll bar isn’t even a quarter of this part of the page), not including its sub-pages. And eventually, you had to become familiar with the online rules and precedents in the manner of a lawyer, but without the law degree and the higher pay. So the website wasn’t designed to make its workings accessible, it wasn’t designed for simple rules and guidelines, and it wasn’t designed for transparency. The fact that many of its posters, like me, started out as teenagers meant that many of us didn’t have a sense on what we were signed up for and mistakes made when we were young would be carried with us even as we grew older.
So you could make a mistake in early tvtropes history and then five years later you get another suspension and the earlier one is treated as if it happened the previous week rather than years before. The tvtropes moderators would treat any breaking of rules with the same brush, never excusing infractions or offenses no matter how minor. It felt like a bunch of nerds lording it over to several others who weren’t on the same level of nerds, and the moderators acted like they were on a power-trip.
To see this in action, go to the Edit banned thread, where essentially tropers who are banned are supposed to do the medieval version of kowtowing to the moderator master, admitting they did wrong, and the moderators imperiously lets them through or sometimes puts the thumbs down like a Roman Emperor. I was on there a few times and it was utterly degrading. There’s no debate on the nature of the miscommunication, and certainly no real means of redress, and likewise, not even the online version of rule of law where you know you are supposed to have a presumption of innocence, people ought to know ahead of time the rules they are breaking.
Obviously a site like tvtropes needed moderation but it doesn’t deserve the moderation it has.
MY FIRST BAN EVASION
This led to my first ban. Where I was told that my account was suspended and I couldn’t edit. Why I was suspended I can’t remember, nor my account either. Posting on tvtropes was kind of addictive for me, just the fun of adding stuff and so on. So when I got suspended, it felt like an amputation, I felt like a junkie who lost my fix.
So in my haste without thinking, I just cooked up an alternate account thinking that would work. Instead I got that account banned too. I learnt then that tvtropes could track my IP. And I had committed ban evasion, which is an instant permanent ban. And all because I was young and didn’t understand rules the site never made accessible.
After a few days of going through stages of grief, I decided to write an email to the main staff of tvtropes by going to the Contact us page. I went there and wrote to them and explained the situation. The person who responded (different from Fighteer I believe) was kind and explained the rules and so on, and they agreed to let me back with a new account. But the catch was that I still kept my record, which meant that me being a ban evader who was let back in, was on the books. So that meant that I didn’t get a clean slate. And that meant that when that guy left and new mods came in, my old record was still on file for people to look at without understanding the context.
MY SECOND ACCOUNT: JulianLapostat
So my second account at tvtropes was JulianLapostat. One of my favorite novels at the time was Gore Vidal’s Julian which is a historical novel about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, so-called because he was baptized a Christian but on reaching adulthood relapsed into the Hellenic Pagan polytheism and became Rome’s last pagan emperor, someone who wanted to preserve Roman antiquities against the rising Christian religion. Julian was critical of Christianity but he didn’t set out to persecute Christians and he sought to maintain a world where different faiths could co-exist. He was notable for trying to help Jewish people settle in Jerusalem. So he seemed, to Vidal and to readers, a person who represented this pluralistic inclusive world.
Anyway I liked the novel, I liked Julian, and I decided to use the French version (this is where I’ll admit that I know French, or at least I can read it) and called myself JulianLapostat.
It was pretentious, it was arty, and it was me.
As Julian, I spent most of my time showcasing my film history background. I made pages for movie-directors, well known and obscure. Pages on Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray among others are all my doing. I created pages for a range of movies. I added in stuff detailing film history and a lot of quotes. Then as I got into tvtropes as Julian, I enjoyed the process so much I’d read up stuff just to find something to add on to it. History was always a love of mine and I became a Useful Notes guy, I made tons of pages on historical stuff.
I also made some amazing online friends. It’s possible that many of them wouldn’t like their names mentioned but among the ones I can mention, there was Menshevik and MAI742. Biggest regret is missing out on the connections I had with them. I did manage to reconnect with Menshevik more recently. We first discussed stuff on the French Revolution page which became a kind of obsession for me, and while Menshevik disagreed with me on my readings he was so kind and respectful that I couldn’t help liking the discussions we had. And eventually we exchanged PMs and whenever I had questions I picked his brain and he responded, and he still does. Years later I managed to reconnect with Menshevik outside tvtropes and it was like Proust’s Time Regained.
Like me, Menshevik had a range of interests. He was interested in international movies, in history, and also in comic books. Like me he was a fan of Spider-Man, and he was the one who expressed skepticism about the narrative of writers like Roger Stern opposing the marriage when it was Stern who set it in motion with issues like “The Daydreamers”. This was the first I heard tell of Stern being the one involved in Mary Jane’s backstory and I was curious about it. But in my time as JulianLapostat, I hardly made many posts on comics. If it was comics it was Alan Moore and EC Comics and stuff like that, because at the time I was cut off from Big 2 stuff.
Most of my stuff was dealing with history and so on.
This was the high point for me. And in retrospect I should have quit while I was ahead.
GAME OF FORUMS
Eventually I made a terrible mistake.
I decided to start posting on tvtropes forums.
It was Game of Thrones. I got deep into the fandom and so on. And the show and the books and so on had passionate and volatile defenders. My interests in history, literature, and nerd stuff overlapped and so I got into GoT. The GoT fandom was, and is, very prissy. The people who watched the show took offense at any criticism especially on grounds of not making as much sense as the books.
It was ultra-juvenile and believe me, I was as bad as anyone else there. Eventually, people on the forums if they disagreed with someone would report posters to mods and have posts removed or “thumped” for rudeness, actual or perceived. And the mods would do it, and that would add a record to your activity. So eventually of course, I got a second suspension and the mod there, Fighteer brought up my full rap-sheet and so on.
After that I avoided the GoT forums and went to find a place called The History Thread and there I ran into the single biggest asshole I’ve ever come across in my online history: AmbarSonOfDeshar. Next to this guy, even the more annoying denizens on CBR Community are mere summer children. This guy was openly rude and hostile and a huge know-it-all. He was the embodiment of the “that’s a whole other sentence” meme on twitter. You’d say one thing, this guy would assume you said something else and respond to you based on that.
He’d also get absurdly angry for the most unfair reasons. One time I had a discussion with another poster, and I made a curt dismissive response. Then Ambar leaps in and says that poster was his fiancee and so on. How exactly was I supposed to know that? And again why should I give a fuck, exactly? In retrospect, I should have done what others do to my posts and reported the jackass but at that time I had this belief against narc-ing to win your argument (now I no longer do, online posting is such a brutal bloodsport that if you don’t narc, you get narc’d in turn). Eventually this guy kept reporting and aggravating me, this despite the messages I sent to him, and eventually I got banned from the forums.
Anyway in researching this post I found out that Ambar has been banned from tvtropes for a while now. I now post this screenshot as a form of vicarious gloat at this self-righteous prick’s downfall:
On the other hand: hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! I’m not so different from Ambar, am I?
This is all just petty lowdown meanness. In retrospect my main cause of regret is spending all this time knowing about such experiences and figures, because I recognize the negative impact they had on me, and maybe the negative impact I had on them and others.
MY SECOND PERMANENT BAN
Then I got the second permanent ban after about 5 years on tvtropes, through multiple suspensions, with my forum posting privileges completely shredded and gone.
The exact reasons I got banned is something I’ll touch on later in this post in another context. To summarize, it had to do with writing verbose and long paragraphs and not following some rules about example indentations. But mostly it seems that the mods got tired or people making complaints and rather than investigate those complaints, they decided to use the complaints as proof in and of itself. So I got removed for good.
Again the nature of tvtropes, where every action and interaction no matter how small goes on your record where each new action isn’t investigated but seen as part of established pattern, all the way to back to the first post made when you were removed. The whole atmosphere bred by the moderators on tvtropes, both in the pages and the forums was highly volatile and brutal, where everyone was constantly fighting for their scrap pile because the addictive nature of the site, the sense of you being part of building something, made everyone feel they had an ownership over it, and that often led to jealousies and grudges at opinions they disagreed with because the existence of one opinion contrary to others threatened one, and so the person and that opinion must be removed.
Even with me, it was impossible to feel that way though on balance I’d say that I did try and compromise when possible.
I made another appeal against my ban months later and that got rejected too.
The nature of online life and it’s parasocial nature is that the virtual life starts to feel like a life no matter that it amounts to a nametag “JulianLapostat” a profile image, and a profile page. I helped build a corner of the site and I put work into it, and then I’m removed and left unable to speak or interact with my online friends.
The experience of online banning isn’t far from death really. That sounds over-dramatic and it is. But emotionally it did feel devastating. The virtual world of tvtropes, with its creative additions made it feel like an extension of The Sims, but the difference is that you save your interactions on Sims in a saved game file and barring equipment breakdowns, you can revisit it and replay it, whereas with tvtropes you lose access to playing it, you also get to see others retouch your work after you’ve left. Sometimes in ways you approve of, oftentimes it ways you don’t.
Death is sudden and unimaginable. Death means that the plans you have for the next day, that little errand you planned, that new PS5 game you wanted to purchase and so on, is gone because you died midway. Death means never reading that book you have in your pile, death means never seeing the cool movie you wanted. It means an interruption of all your plans and the world continuing after without caring about your place in these things, or your unfinished plans. I had plans on tvtropes for what I wanted to do the next day but then I got permabanned and that’s it, no more plans. Occasionally I’d pop back and namesearch myself, feeling like a ghost haunting people I’d left back and it’d warm me a bit to seeing people remember stuff I said at the most random moments, such as this post someone made about an old post I made that I remember after seeing this comment:
It’s heartening sometimes to see that, and then it makes the pain of separation lessen. In real-life of course you can’t be a ghost and you can’t haunt people, so in that regards tvtropes isn’t at all like death. Tvtropes exists primarily to feed off parasocial connections between users and the stuff they are fan of. It’s unhealthy and sickening, and the experience of being banned from a place which gives free reign to your ideas is a kind of withdrawal effect, and you feel you have this energy that is lacking an outlet Still eventually that pain turned to a new task. .
After the many stages of grief (which by the way is not a real psychological thing, it’s pop psych), I turned to a new task: REVENGE. Not against a person or figure but against the website itself. Previously I was a naive teenager navigating a site, not knowing the rules, and I evaded bans unthinkingly. This time though I would knowingly go about breaking the rules, fooling the moderators, and exposing them as know-nothing fools. I didn’t expect to completely get away with it, but I did it far longer than I thought I’d get away with it.
The time was set. Goodbye JulianLapostat, Hello “Revolutionary” Jack Elving.
THE HOUSE THAT BUILT JACK
The name JACK ELVING was bestowed upon me by a friend. The purpose of the name which included with it a new gmail account and a new handle was done with the deliberate intent of breaking into tvtropes to circumvent a ban.
In other words, there’s no excusing what I’ve done. I broke the rules big time and it also meant that I had to lie about doing so for years on end afterwards, to keep up the charade. If there was a whiff of wrongdoing anywhere, if there was a leak, then the moderators of tvtropes, an annoyingly nosy bunch who do in fact police stuff outside tvtropes and so on, would get it. But becoming Jack Elving wasn’t just simply a matter of a new name. I had spent enough time on tvtropes that I heard and collected stories by the “oldheads” as it were. I had heard of previous attempts to circumvent bans, and what mistakes were made. Some stand on the shoulder of giants, I stood on the broken egos of schmucks seeking to join the company of the latter.
The moderators of tvtropes are bizarre authoritarian personalities but they were generally speaking quite good at their job. They could spot ban evaders a mile away. They would do IP searches. They also looked and investigated the writing style and writing samples. And they were able to do this while managing a very large community, with a host of new profiles made every day. So much as I disagreed with the site’s refusal to understand its own nature, I have to admit that these guys were pretty good.
So to become Jack Elving, I needed to do two things.
I needed a VPN.
I needed to develop a new writing style.
The former was easy enough. VPNs had become all the rage in the late 2010s, and it was affordable. With it, I was able to circumvent and hide my IP (more on this later). The second part was harder. Because it called for a considerable bit of discipline on my part, and also no small amount of self-reflection.
As JulianLapostat, I often gave into my craving to sound intellectual. I would make arty references. I was a cinephile into foreign films and classic films (I still am). I was a huge history buff, deeply into reading up obscure historiographical debates. The paradox of creating an alt account is this. In order to create an account and use it, you need to abandon some of the reasons you originally intended to use the site for. For me tvtropes was a place where a self-taught guy like me could sound like a historian, I read books and cited sources and read papers, did all the stuff that historians do (well at least popular historians, the real ones are the ones who dig into archives).
So if I had to be Jack Elving, I needed to throw off my scent. I needed to avoid my old pages. No more history, no more cinephilia.
The writing style had to change and become less arty. I was inspired by an essay by Jorge-Luis Borges, an Argentine author of short stories and all-around man of letters. Borges wrote about Shakespeare noting that he was a master of the “double register”. The English language, wrote Borges (who was a Spanish-language writer but whose command of English and other languages was quite good) had multiple influences from Germanic/Norse, as well as French/Latin, and he noted that in English you often had two sets of words describing the same thing, with the Latin word connoting a sense of intellectual distinction, and the Germanic/Norse being a more common way of saying the same things.
For common words, for the ideas, say, of a child, a rustic, a sailor, or a peasant, it has words of Saxon origin, and for intellectual matters it has words derived from Latin. These words are never precisely synonymous, there is a always a nuance of differentiation: it is one thing to say, Saxonly, "dark" and another to say "obscure"; one thing to say "brotherhood" and another to say "fraternity"; one thing-especially for poetry, which depends not only on atmosphere and on meaning but on the connotations of the atmosphere of words-to say, Latinly, "unique" and another to say "single."
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Enigma of Shakespeare”
I decided that Jack Elving needed to cultivate a more common touch. Needed to make the language less pretentious, less arty. So before I’d often say pretentious things such as for instance, “Scorsese’s stylistic verve and use of staccato editing” now I would say, “Scorsese’s film editing is very rapid and fast, one cut after another” which says the same thing (more or less) in different ways. [NOTE: This is only for sake of example. In general, Scorsese’s editing outside a few sequences isn’t staccato style] You often use intellectual words to convey a complex idea with fewer words: so “staccato editing” = “one cut after another” but the result is that the former word sounds very jargon-like which means people see that and take it the wrong way.
The name Jack Elving was created by someone else, it wasn’t the name I chose for myself. My name JulianLapostat is very arty, very pretentious, pseudo-French whereas Jack Elving sounds like a mix of common and uncommon words. Elving itself feels like an Old English surname (and yes I’ve come across real-life Elvings when I search it online and this is a way of telling you that I’m not related to any of them). There’s likely a Jack Elving or two in the real world. So I took inspiration from the name to model Jack’s identity.
The handle “Revolutionary_Jack” was created by my friend as well. Revolutionary was an allusion to my fascination with the French Revolution and especially the figures of Robespierre and Saint-Just, people who combine heroism and villainy in equal measure [Robespierre was an abolitionist who helped end slavery, briefly, in the Caribbean but he was also a self-righteous judicial murderer, who would send his friends to the guillotine if he felt he had been crossed]. He felt it was appropriate for me since what I was doing was in the realm of ambiguity and definitely was subversive of the tvtropes administration. Besides it again sounded “cool” in the sense of a young person coming up with a rad sounding handle would sound like.
It was not the nickname that I would come up for me. So that made it more convincing that the handle wasn’t me. Looking back I can see that my friend had a cool sense of humor. You know Jack Elving, or J El, has nearly the same initials as JL, aka JulianLapostat, so we were mocking the mods. Jack El, also sounds like Jackal, aka the sneaky animal (my friend wasn’t a Spider-Man guy so the allusion wasn’t to the villain of the same name but I appreciate the irony). It also sounds like Jekyll which made sense for someone remaking himself into a new identity.
As JulianLapostat, my language was more academic. As Jack, I’d pitch myself as a “I studied at Wikipedia Online University” kinda guy. So I’d use stuff like “my dude”, “my guy”, “pal” and so on. The nature of the online discourse of that period is that you often use “my dude”, “my guy” and especially “pal” to talk to people who were most definitely not “your dude”, “your guy” and most certainly not your “pal”. JulianLapostat would be long-winded whereas Jack' Elving’s was comparatively shorter.
It took a while to get into it, but I did. The weird thing about developing an alt persona and account, that is to say a true alt, the one with a different writing style and persona, is that over time, your pretend writing style displaces your original writing style so even in my off-line world, I nowadays write less like Julian and more like Jack, though sometimes (and especially on the Wordpress blog, there’s an overlap of both). Indeed I can see myself in future publishing books under the name of Jack Elving, and it might well happen that I legally change my name into that as well.
I have grown rather fond of myself as Jack Elving. I think he’s neat.
JACK HITS THE ROAD
Once I developed my style and got comfortable in my new persona [which in retrospect is by far the most fun part of the whole tvtropes experience], it was showtime.
It was a 8 month gap between Julian’s exile and Jack’s return, during that time I developed new interests. I became really into Star Wars having not been a big fan for ages. And I figured that, Star Wars was often the entry-way for many young people into cinephilia, people hear of Kurosawa and so on from watching that. So I figured that would be the way I can get to trope about movies. JulianLapostat was vocally not a Star Wars fan and was of the school that these movies ended the New Hollywood. Jack Elving though would be a Star Wars fan, specifically a Star Wars prequel fan (which recent cinephiles like Richard Brody prefer over the OT). And this wasn’t an act. In the 8 months period of exile I revisited Star Wars and got really into it, and found out that a lot of stuff people said about it were wrong, both the critics and its own fans.
Julian posted a fair bit about comics and Alan Moore but very little on Spider-Man. The Spider-Man corner of tvtropes on balance saw very little disagreement and feuds strangely enough (compared to Spider-Man elsewhere on the internet). In my experience there are little to no Dan Slott or BND fans on Spider-Man tvtropes which might be the reason why that’s the case. This was 2018 when I got back into Spider-Man big time, so I started collecting and cataloguing stuff on Spider-Man and that helped me escape detection by the mods. I posted on the Spider-Man Tvtropes forums and I made new friends. I avoided the people I used to be in contact with. I didn’t send DMs because that kind of stuff is open and accessible to mods (and if you think mods don’t read DMs, I have a Trump University application offer to sell you, and Fighteer has admitted to reading DMs during his 2022 meltdown). The part of Jack Elving that was frustrating was that I wanted to develop enough of a cache, and toss away my scent, that I could start being Julian again without repercussions. For me the eventual aim was to have the freedom of Julian with the spotless record of Jack. I wanted it all.
And essentially, I did have it all.
Eventually I did get found out, but it wasn’t down to the moderators. Those guys were totally fooled. I even got a suspension as Jack Elving that got overturned when I appealed it and Fighteer himself was fooled by me.
My downfall was largely down to my own tragic mis-steps.
FEUDING WITH HEPTAGON
There was a poster by the name of ‘The Mighty Heptagon’. I knew Heptagon as both Julian Lapostat and as Jack Elving. This was a major mistake. But at the same time, Heptagon was kind of unavoidable. Heptagon was constantly posting everywhere, constantly on discussions, and was like an uber-nerd interested in everything and anything. Looking back, I can say, a bit like me actually.
As Julian, I came across Heptagon a few times where he made, what seemed to me, excessive and dubious claims in edits. So on the Fridge Logic section of Harry Potter back in 2017, Heptagon made an edit arguing that the Four Houses of Hogwarts were allegories for England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland: with England as Gryffindor, Wales as Hufflepuff, Scotland as Ravenclaw, and Ireland as Slytherin. This allegory struck me as A] Excessive, B] Mis-timed, C] Potentially scandalous for equating Ireland with the House of Evil. And Heptagon wasn’t doing it critically, i.e. arguing that Rowling was doing a dodgy British national allegory but actually doing it in the view that this was a normative statement. Our full discussion is available here for public view on top of the page. Let me excerpt some points:
That’s part of a longer post but I think you can get the idea there.
The Mighty Heptagon and I were at times friendly, and truth be told we agreed a fair bit. But over time, I saw Heptagon morph bit by bit into what can be characterized as a ‘second Fighteer in the making’. Heptagon was another poster but it seemed he was aspiring to be a moderator and he often acted like he was a moderator (it’s a fact that posters and commentators do graduate to become mods). Heptagon understood the rules of the site and rather than see the site as creative, he often sought to delete and correct and remove stuff he disagreed with often saying phrases like “that’s bullcrap” and other rude statements.
Heptagon was also a pure fanboy, who often didn’t care about accepted norms and values.
So as Julian, when Before Watchmen dropped, I was very concerned that the tvtropes page of Watchmen would be inundated with additions from the unauthorized prequels created without Moore’s consent, and which Gibbons (despite half-hearted approval) said wasn’t canon. As Julian, I cleared out additions to Watchmen from Before Watchmen stories and deposited it on its sub-page and established a norm (still in force even after my ban, though maybe not after this post is written) that treated Watchmen as a standalone work on tvtropes.
As Jack, I removed edits referring to Doomsday Clock which treated the comic’s events undoing Watchmen’s ending as canonical and troped the main comic page. In response to this, Heptagon stepped in.
So here was a guy who didn’t value the integrity of Watchmen treating the same way as if it’s Star Wars, all the while ignoring the respective creator’s intents for both (Lucas approved additions to Star Wars and personally sold it to Disney, Moore did no such thing). This wasn’t at all an objective on fairness or anything but it was certainly based on an aesthetic fear that Heptagon had he gained more sway would make TVTropes a weaker place than it was (not that it was ever any good to start with).
From the perspective of survival, me sticking my neck out for one of JulianLapostat’s rules was a stupid thing to do, but again the travails of being an alt is that you have to constantly choose between being back in tvtropes and sacrificing the reasons for your being back. If I let a slight against Watchmen endure, then what am I here for? My defense is that enough time had passed that the mods didn’t catch me (when at the same rate many earlier alts would be exposed, as I will demonstrate later) and I also felt that the decision to treat Watchmen as standalone had a sizable consensus on it at tvtropes (which it did, and still does).
Heptagon and I had begun our holmgang, one which would lead in time to both of us being banned from tvtropes.
Heptagon then clashed with me on a tropes page called “Indecisive Deconstruction” which was a page that pointed out that tropes that attempt to deconstruct stuff run into contradictions similar to the “Broken Aesop” page. The great example is Bioshock which despite being a crticism of Randian objectivism, also ends up paradoxically, taking it more seriously than it deserves. Heptagon objected to this page, and I found out later that he went behind the scenes into a forum subpage called Repair Shop Morgue.
This indicates the essentially undemocratic nature of tvtropes. A trope page can be cut and removed because someone goes behind the scenes and finds a forum sub-page that isn’t legible or easy to find. While tvtropes isn’t 4chan in terms of its total incomprehensibility for navigation, it’s still exclusionary. Only deep inside base-ball types who understand the system can activate it, and the active everyday posters, the ones who make entries and go about their way are neither informed, nor offered a vote.
I tried to argue against Heptagon’s vocal attempt at ending the page, which got no takers from posters there (who I’d designate as grammarians in that they are mainly interested in acting as editors and aspiring mods rather than actively contributing). I was the only voice there and my attempt to get regular tropes to have a say got no takers (later one said they were too busy and they were upset that entries they put on the page was removed).
At this point, my suspicion of Heptagon as a hall-monitor type intent on sullying the creative endeavor of others on the site was more than confirmed.
ASK THE TROPERS
I don’t want to say exactly that I plotted Heptagon’s downfall and removal.
But I did wish for it to happen. When you wish for something to happen, it doesn’t exactly come true, but what happens is your actions, sometimes unconsciously, act in a way to bring that wish to fruition. Your instincts sharpen, and you pick up opportunities that you otherwise might not have let go.
So Heptagon went on a grand crusade editing the Common Knowledge pages of X-Men and Spider-Man and along the way in his typical angry style insulting the contributions of tropers before him (including me). This time I decided to raise the issue of Heptagon’s conduct on Ask The Tropers.
Ask The Tropers is a part of the website with a contentious history for me.
As JulianLapostat, I never used Ask the Tropers. I never posted there. But I learned of only after I got permabanned. After my permaban, I did some digging and found out that this post by the troper lalalei2001 got me removed.
Ask the Tropers is another facet of the essentially anti-democratic nature of tvtropes. The fact that your conduct can be discussed behind someone’s back, without you being aware of it and not being able to defend oneself. On one hand it’s a great place to discuss and sort out issues and so on, but it does have the air of ganging up on someone.
Or at least that’s what I would be allowed to say if I weren’t a huge hypocrite.
The part of my conduct on tvtropes that I cannot defend myself ethically from, and can barely justify is that as Revolutionary_Jack, I used Ask the Tropers to win debates and arguments vicariously. In ways that I cannot justify or defend myself from today.
I could say I did it for a good cause. I could say I did it for justified reasons. I could say that people like Heptagon had it coming. I could go on saying I could say. But ultimately, rather than finding a way to reform the system I used it when it was convenient to me, and complained about it when it was inconvenient. Anyway when I returned to tvtropes as Revolutionary_Jack, I paid attention to ATT. Sure enough after a while I got lalalei2001 complaining about me again on ATT. This time the commenters were on my side (and for me it’s proof at how successful I was with my ruse that I fooled the same people who got me banned, albeit unintentionally on the part of lalalei2000).
This time I got on top of things and I sent a DM to lalalei2000 where I politely asked them to approach me in future and they gave an apology and that was it.
After a while I used ATT to legislate and get a request to fix some posts here and there. My biggest intervention was a guy called “FastAsFastCanBe” who was obsessed with Hank Pym being innocent of abusing Janet (which is a whole can of worms worth devoting later). This ATT query got nearly about 50 comments and in my view is a summit of consensus-based discussions. So I was a habitué of the ATT that when I used it to make a fuss about Heptagon, it was done with some understanding that centering the issue around him could lead to a suspension. I didn’t call for Heptagon being banned, but neither did lalalei2001 the same for me. I am not gonna plead innocence here.
At the same time, my objections to Heptagon were genuine and they were shared by others in that thread, and Heptagon’s own conduct on those pages were entirely their choice and their doing. Not mine.
So I made a query about Heptagon:
This query, I learned shortly thereafter, apparently got Heptagon a temporary suspension which was lifted within a day. Heptagon responded with fury and indignation when another poster sent him a link to this page.
This reaction is entirely fair. My response to Heptagon was the following:
This part is me being totally disingenuous and unfair. “So please don’t make a feud where there’s none” is total BS on my part, since I was in fact feuding. Heptagon threw a tantrum and wisely noped out. I figured that Heptagon’s hissy fit would get him a longer ban, and so it happened.
I had vanquished and won my latest feud and I got rid of an annoying presence on tvtropes.
Eight Days Later, Revolutionary_Jack got permabanned.
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND JULIAN
Fighteer’s email banning me came 8 days later.
On the day I got banned. I got a bizarre message on JulianLapostat’s tumblr. This message, which was anonymous, said, “Hit the road, Jack and don’t come back.” Just from the tone of it, I could tell it was from Heptagon. So it seemed that Heptagon cottoned on that I was Julian, which made sense. Both Julian and Jack corresponded with Heptagon. While they are pompous and pretentious, they were smart. Given enough time, and motivation (which I supplied) it’s not a surprise I got found out. Of course that wasn’t the only reason.
The other reason was that my VPN service expired and my budget was tight that month so I couldn’t renew it in time. I also made a screwup. By mistake I accidentally logged in to my JulianLapostat account (which I never deleted and in retrospect that was a huge mistake) by accident. I shifted browsers and the Julian account was pre-loaded on the other browser and when I realized my mistake I logged out but without my VPN and with this login coming from the same IP, and with Heptagon accusing me, the mods at tvtropes had all they needed.
So in the end it wasn’t the Moderators who found me out. It was me and my own actions and mis-stakes that did me in.
As for Heptagon, well here’s an epilogue:
I continued lurking on tvtropes for a while after that. It surprised me that Heptagon didn’t get allowed back in once he finked me as Julian. But I guess the mods figured that they were well short of the two of us. Still a month later I noticed a poster called “friscokid182” using a very familiar writing style. I looked over the account’s history and found out that it’s an old account that hadn’t been used for a while but got back into use right after Heptagon’s banning.
I finked the case of friscokid182 with Heptagon to Fighteer, arguing that Heptagon was using another person’s unused account to circumvent his ban. Fighteer then banned him while also tooting his horn here:
The “we are not idiots and know how to investigate these things” is quite funny since in this case, friscokid182/Heptagon got finked by me, and this after me having provably fooling them for nearly 2 years as Revolutionary_Jack. A while back there was another account called “DerKrowtendoof” that was also self-evidently Heptagon and who I also finked in return. Krowtendoof got banned as well. Heptagon’s action shows the difficulties of ban evasion and how quick the detection can be. And how the true ban evader, like me, must adapt and change their writing style, their voice, and even their identity.
The problem is that you can never fully change your identity. A part of me was Julian and that part of me never faded when I became Jack. As Jack I wrote in a different style, but simply because of who we both were, namely the same person, we ended up feuding with Heptagon. We (Julian and Jack) couldn’t let a slight against Moore go unchecked, we couldn’t let someone aspire to be a new Fighteer go unanswered, not before it was too late.
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
I periodically kept knocking the doors of tvtropes, always claiming I was wrongfully banned. The last one I sent before I started this substack post.
Why did I do this? I dont know. Did I think it would go back to how it was? Like if they let me back in, I’d have to continue denying being Julian for who knows how long. I’d have to continue following asinine rules and be fearful of mods whose judgment and values I didn’t respect.
When I started this post, I was in two minds. On one hand I thought I’d make it a general post about tvtropes. But then I felt more comfortable about outing myself, about owning my past and my mistakes and actions. I felt that doing so would be helpful. When I sent the last lying email to tvtropes, a part of me hoped it wouldn’t get a reply. And I’m happy for it. Sometimes the reward you have to live with is getting to tell the story, even if that story often paints an unflattering view of you, because that unflattering version of you is you, and it’s the only self you ever have.
Looking back, being on TVTropes, those feuds I got into, the ban evasion and so on, seems like an adventure, one I feel grateful to commemorate and write about. So on that level, I’m grateful.
TVTROPES KINDA…SUCKS!?
At the end of the day, tvtropes is not a good website.
The creative endeavor and spark that proved so addictive at first glance is ultimately a parasite that sucks you up. My advice to current people engaged in with the site is get out while you still can. This I dispatch to the tropers, and to the moderators, and the readers. It’s not worth it.
Remember when I said that TVTropes gave you the illusion that you could recreate everything in a work of art by listing trope examples. I think that’s untrue. The evidence is the fact that you have frequent debates and disagreements about the trope title, its usage, and whether it applies or not. And ultimately I think those disagreements stand for the subjectivity of art, the impossibility to fully capture a movie, or anything, in all its details.
Tropes in literary criticism refers to themes and common literary devices, and by definitition it doesn’t include the broader meaning in the website which is to literally convert everything into a trope until all meaning is deprived from it. There have been a couple of video essays dealing with this, and the credo of “Art is not Lego” by “The Victorian” is worth considering.
The website is built to generate and sustain echo-chambers. TVTropes came into age in the late 2000s and 2010s, the height of RLM Star Wars videos and for the most part you still see the ideas of that infiltrate the pages of Star Wars about Lucas and others. I’ve made my own attempts to correct the record there and bring about a balance there but by and large the echo-chamber built in that time keeps sustaining itself. The posters of TVtropes stick to the place for ages and any attempt to challenge or overturn stuff, you know the stuff of artistic debate, is stifled or treated with hostility and so on. Lalalei2001 reacted negatively to my edits on ASM adding tons of information based on my growing research there. That’s one example but there’s others.
The website is hard to navigate, the rules are opaque and unclear, and the moderators are over-zealous. So that means that most people who last on tvtropes end up being scared or fearful of getting banned, and that leads to self-censoring and timid behavior. And that means it forces a kind of conformity of imagination and practice. While I think tvtropes should be moderated, it should not have the kind of moderators it has had for a while. The site should be more democratic, with clarity and ease of access given to everyone about important decisions taken on the site.
TVTropes is often out of touch. The website opened in the late 2000s or early 2010s, at a time when “apolitical” art was a mainstream position. But in the 2010s, we live in a time of politicized culture and the response to tvtropes has been out of step. Witness how the page for Trump or any of his actions are policed or locked.
Tvtropes is truly pseudo-intellectual. It makes things so broad that it makes everything hollow, it reduces and removes meaning and feeling. It misuses and abuses terms like Deconstruction (Full Disclosure: I’ve contributed to this myself, and I’m not proud of having done so) to the extent that you come away more ignorant than if you hadn’t heard the word in its original context. I’ve had to unlearn the pseudo-intellectual vocabulary I picked up and I counsel others to do so.
Tvtropes encourages poor critical-reading skills. Related to my earlier points, tvtropes on balance doesn’t understand the texture of art. The great and good works of art will always have new things to say and do, with moments of interiority and mystery that’s truly elusive. Movie analysis is reduced to an artificial three-act structure, comics criticism is reduced to a collection of genre cliches, literary analysis only exists for big franchise stuff which isn’t discussed in literary terms at all. The Harry Potter tvtropes page which I contributed to, didn’t unearth half the stuff that The Shrieking Shack podcast unearthed. The Useful Notes pages on history are either neglected or subject to polemic footballs of some kind or another.
THE SILVER LINING
That said, my time on tvtropes wasn’t all bad. And here’s some of the stuff on tvtropes that I’ve done as both Jack and Julian that I am proud of:
USEFUL NOTES: I developed and improved a ton of Useful Notes pages as Julian. My proudest achivement was The Viking Age. I did reading for that and contextualized and listed everywhere the Vikings wandered, and until that there wasn’t a page for the historical Vikings there. In addition I made contributions to the page histories of Germany, Italy, Poland. I am especially proud of bulking up the page history of The French Revolution, The British Empire, Red October, as well as the Quotes Pages for the American Civil War and the French Revolution.
FILM HISTORY: I included a lot of obscure film history stuff on a variety of pages and was especially proud of making pages for obscure film-makers like Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray and bulking up other films.
LITERATURE: I am proud for making pages for NOSTROMO, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (book and TV series).
COMICS: A lot of my comics stuff was as Jack, not Julian. But creating the grand summary for every individual run on ASM on the comic’s Spider-Man main page, as well as a page for the original Lee-Ditko run, was fun. As was making up the Quotes Pages for Spider-Man.
A lot of my work is still there on these pages. Some of them are stuff I no longer agree with (I loathe the Deconstruction page I put on ASM which is an abuse of the term), some of them is stuff altered by others. But mostly I’m glad I wrote this and it’s been of value to people who’ve come after.
I’d like to share one memory I have online. A while ago on twitter, I came across a poster complaining about a tvtropes page on Pauline Kael, one which I had made.
And that’s the note I’d like to leave my time on tvtropes at.
CONCLUSION
So ends this long epitaph of my tvtropes era. The good and the bad, which exist as they are, unresolved. The experience of Tvtropes was essentially an extended era of juvenile rivalries and pranks, with the moderator as Principal Skinner to my Lisa and Bart.
The experience is interesting today to me in conveying some of the issues of online performativity and identity formation. But mainly I’m glad that in writing about it, as honestly as I have been able to, I can hopefully wrest the weird pull this site has on me. Ultimately I’m glad I moved on and built my own blog with my own one-stop Spider-Man research housed here.
Alan Moore’s novel What Can We Know About Thunderman? is a lament about comics personalities and their fandom and how their identity gets warped by corporate marketing. Something like that happened to me in terms of websites like tvtropes and others. I wrote at the start that I felt like I left behind a part of myself there, and that’s true. What’s more true is that a part of tvtropes has remained in me after I got banned, and today I hope that part is laid to rest here.
You are a sad, strange little man. And you have my pity.
Farewell.
I'm going through something broadly similar at the moment with tvt and so much of what you say resonates with me. I don't want to go into details (yet) as it's still ongoing, but I do have a resigned sort of feeling that the end is near and this is saddening. If and when the axe falls, I hope I can come back and write about it with the same sort of candour, clarity and lack of self-pity that you show here - but this was a reassuring "you're not alone" delight to read!