I want to give a little bit of background on me. In all my internet past (and I’ve hung out on the internet since the mid-nineties when it was first becoming a common thing) I basically used it for just a few things. Research for school, looking up practical stuff (e.g. movie times or how to best clean grout or whatever), and pop culture stuff. And the pop culture stuff that always attracted me was not straightforward news or only-positive fan stuff (though those things are great). The things I always had the most fun following were snark-based, such as the now-defunct Television Without Pity or Cleolinda’s Twilight deconstructions or that kind of thing. That kind of environment was a way of being a fan (even of things I would never actually have been a fan of without the snark community) that I really had fun with. And it’s a way of endearing projects to me, oddly enough. If I was reading Twilight straight (and apologies in advance to its fans) then things like Edward’s scary possessiveness or Bella’s self-absorption would just be painful to get through. But with the power of snark these are almost pleasant (anti-fandom?) truths that we’ve all come to accept and refer to.
I probably don’t need to go into all this detail because my only big point is what follows. Without realizing it I’ve conditioned myself to only speak about pop-culture in a snarky way. It was never intentional, it just is what is. Now, I love The Vampire Diaries in a very straight forward way, which is one of the big reasons I wanted to start this blog. And I’m finding it very difficult to write about. When the show does something I think was well done or that I want to compliment, I can mostly just speak in generalities (e.g. “that acting in that scene was good” or “that plot twist worked for me”). I mean, I hope I’m better than that, but you get my drift. When the show does something not-so-good, I’m much better, through my internet-upbringing, of narrowing right in and laughing at the character fails or the continuity collapses or whatever have you. And as this show (which I still love love love) has increasingly failed (more more more) over the years at certain things, it’s been hard to write on this blog. I feel, whether it comes across or not IDK, like I’m spending most of my digital ink pointing out the bad things.
And I don’t really want to do that, because this was never meant to be an anti-site. So I’m at a bit of a crossroads here. I like talking about the show, and it is my favorite show that’s currently on the air, but I’m having a problem as a writer talking about it without being snarky or overly-critical. Which I guess means that I’ll probably just keep doing what I’ve been doing, which is checking in when I have things I want to check in about, but otherwise the blog will mostly be dormant. I’m just trying to give a headsup to anyone who might be stopping by, that this is what’s been going on in my absence.