Twitter war: Why did Lindsay Ellis post a two-hour-long apology video?

So there’s this tactic that I’ve seen played online over and over and over again, where it doesn’t matter where someone is currently in terms of content, maturity, personality, online presence, etc – their entire life, start to finish, seems to be defined by one or two events, forever. To thousands of people PewDiePie is “that guy who said the N-word one time 4 years ago” and this is how he will forever be remembered – going forward, everything positive he does, like the millions he’s donated to charity, will be met with “Well, it doesn’t absolve him of his racism”, and anything negative he does will be met with “Well, what do you expect from a racist, I’m surprised he hasn’t been cancelled already”.

We saw that exact same thing happen to Ellis. The Rape Rap was the big thing which forever marked her into the eyes of thousands of people (even though she lies in the video and says that it was just in the Gamergate right wing circle – I’m as leftist as they come, and it was pretty common knowledge on Tumblr and Reddit). So yeah, when the Raya tweet, which really wasn’t that bad at all started blowing up, it was very quickly met with “Well, what do you expect from someone who made fun of rape, I’m surprised she hasn’t been cancelled already”.

Now, in any other case this would just be “a thing that the Internet does” and we’d leave it at that, but what I find most fascinating is that this time Ellis did the same thing on herself. People in the tweets the author linked in the article are saying “Wow, they made her share her rape story, that’s going too far!” But the fact of the matter is that no, actually nobody made her do that. She could’ve easily left it at “It was an inside joke and a coping mechanism which was never meant to be public”, like she did with Mara Wilson where she deliberately omitted any details which weren’t any of our business. But she didn’t do that. She went into the sappy details in order to use the cancel tactic I described above to her own advantage. Suddenly she isn’t someone who said some problematic shit and did some bad videos a decade ago, she’s a rape victim – and therefore can do nothing wrong, and the criticisms are going too far. We see this a lot with people who use, say, their religion, gender or sexual orientation (like JK Rowling, who used her status as a domestic abuse survivor to justify her transphobia), but I’ve never seen it done with rape.

And what’s truly bizarre and paints Ellis in a really negative light to me is that she’s lying. Not about the rape – but about how she claims she just made some small jokes in private which were never meant to be shared publicly. I used to watch her videos back in the Channel Awesome days, and she made quite a few rape jokes, or even a few where she played herself as a rape victim in a sketch (like Spooning with Spoony 2 off the top of my head). You can’t claim that you’re a rape survivor who used private rape jokes to cope with the experience when those jokes are so numerous and so public.

So to summarize – Twitter’s pulling some BS moves to make Ellis come off like Satan herself, and Ellis herself is pulling some BS moves to make the people criticizing her feel bad. I’m not typically a “both sides” kind of person, but when both sides are using the exact same malicious tactics I think it’s very fair to say that both sides are wrong here.

Yeah I still don’t get how this came from that tweet. Ya’ll need to see/read/hear what she said and not what you heard/read/saw.
Kinda like “The Red Pill.” Cassie Jaye when interviewing was not listening to what her interviewee said she was listening to what she wanted to hear.

The tweet says movie A is like movie B and other young adult movies. Should we create a new genre for these similar movies?

Haven’t seen the movie I already pay for Disney + I’m not paying more cause they’re upping the price this month.

Also Twitter and social media is cancer.

Lindsay Ellis wants to have her cake and eat it too. She’s an eager supporter of online Cancel Culture when it benefits her against people or groups she doesn’t like, but the second it turned on her, she brushes off her (overstated but still sometimes bad) behavior. She also deflects in weird ways going on about how it’s the right wing doing it and.. honey the right wing DOESN’T CARE. It’s those further Left than even you are who don’t think you measure up to the purity standard. I’ve always felt she kinda comes across as what I’d call the “Intellectual Mean Girl” type and she’s really showing it more and more lately.

the thing is that. for me, she has become self-aware as a media property. I agree that she shouldn’t be vilified. at the same time, she cannot be, simultaneously, as say as she is and ignorant of how the internet in general and YouTube in particular work. she isn’t entitled to a living on the web without its ups and downs. this upset is less damaging than what most folks experience as teachers, soldiers, worker bees. so, while it is regrettable, it isn’t horrible. after all, she didn’t do anything bad. it was a minor mistake. nothing she will have to explain to an employer.

savy*