#drchucktingle

Concrete example: I spent an Alarming amount of time while making this post debating on whether I should keep my habit of Capitalizing Random Letters. (What can I say, I read too much Winnie the Pooh as a very small child.) I decided to keep the capitalization, because I think it helps me be more easily understood-- but it also gets certain people to think you're cringe and make fun of you. I think it's worth it, but another writer might not.

And every Internet Maker Person has to deal with a series of tradeoffs like this. Do you talk about your political opinions? What about those political opinions, the ones that would definitely tick off part of your audience or get you doxxed by the Horrible Old Men of the internet? Do you talk about your childhood? What about the parts you don't want to talk about, or the parts that someone could weaponize against you if they wanted?

Do you just post links to your work and run? If so, are you willing to forgo the kind of intimate connection with your audience that Posting can help you build up? Do you meme and try to build a community? Are you willing to do the kind of work you need to do to welcome new readers/followers into that community, and if not, are you willing to let your work become completely inscrutable to anyone but your audience?

Dr. Tingle has publically spoken about why he* chooses to talk the way he does online, to wear the mask, and so on-- she's consciously choosing to play up aspects of himself that don't play nicely with society's consensus on Acceptable Behaviour. It lets her express those sides of himself, and brings in the audience she wants to bring in-- weird buckaroos who believe Love Is Real. It's an authentic expression of who he is. It is also, on some level, a curated performance. We're not seeing the full buckaroo behind the mask.

But the reason I made this post, and the reason I've been wanting to make it for a while, is that I don't think most readers know:

Every writer wears a mask.

Yes, even the Queer Vulnerability Folks who talk a lot about their trauma-- they've taken parts of themselves that most people hide and turned them into their mask. Even the folks who seem completely mundane and anodyne, or the folks who give chatty updates about their lives-- they're not wearing a very thick mask; it's a COVID mask and not a Halloween mask.

But they're wearing a mask, and as a reader? You don't actually have the right to see behind it. Because writers kinda have to keep a separation between who they are when they're performing for you, and who they are when they're alone, or they go a bit mad. Most writers will do you the courtesy of giving you what you expect-- they give you a persona that is very closely based on who they are in their workaday lives, that matches what you'd expect them to be from their writing, and that is passably 'normal' enough that you can fool yourself into thinking that the persona is the person.

I think people get big mad at Dr. Tingle because he makes the mask very obvious and literal. She doesn't let you sit confident that you Know Dr. Chuck Tingle (TM); he's making it very very clear that this is a persona he is choosing to use to interact with her audience. 'These are the parts of me that I want you to see, they're the parts of me that are the most important and the least palatable to society, they're the big loud queer autistic parts that ride off into the sunset, and that's what you get to see. No more, no less.'

So people get big mad and go "oh, this has to be a group of people Doing A Bit, Cynically", because that's the only way they can conceptualize a Writer Mask. But... no. Everyone does this. Even the people you don't think do this, do this. And the sooner you can accept that, the sooner you can take people's work on its merits instead of trying to judge it based on your idea of the person who created it.