by Darr, Brian
“Are you done yet?” The Moderator started to say. “Because…”
“You’ll know I’m done when I stop talking and when I stop talking, I’m shutting down the broadcast because I can’t think of anything in this world that I care less about than whatever bullshit you’re going to fire off when I finish.
You lost today Mod and you lost big, and the world saw it, and to the world: Soon, you will no longer be enslaved by Psi. This moron has been in charge way longer than he should have been. Just hang tight. You’ll know you’re free when you see The Moderator paraded around town with his head on a stick.”
The Moderator opened his mouth, but The Troll shut down the broadcast. Moments later, the screens turned on and The Moderator broadcast more of the same: “Follow the rules…the rebels are terrorists…I created peace,” but it didn’t sound the same. It sounded phony and transparent, and even The Moderator had lost his showmanship.
The Troll grabbed the life boat and brought it to the edge of the bridge and turned to The Guide, who hadn’t recovered, but looked hopeful after The Troll’s trolling. “We ready to do this?” he asked.
“I thought you said we were going back to Chicago,” Iris said.
“Strategic thinking,” The Troll said, tapping his temple. “Give them another direction to watch. We can get this thing to Vegas. I learned a little about the layout of the land from The Acrobat. There are ways to get there. We just have to find them.” He reached out and extended his hand to The Guide, who slowly reached up and let The Troll hoist him to his feet. “The Surfer was a good man,” The Troll said. “Let’s finish what he started.”
The Guide said nothing. He walked ahead and The Troll and Iris followed as they descended the hill and climbed into the life boat. As the current took them down the river far from the bridge, Iris and The Guide fell asleep in each others arms. The Troll watched them, wishing it was him instead. He watched as the scenery passed, wondering if he had what it took to fulfill this mission, but knowing he would at least make life as hard as possible and do as much damage as he could along the way.
I’m a Troll, he thought. And I’m the face of a revolution. He laughed to himself as he shook his head in disbelief. It wasn’t the best combination of things to be, but maybe it was exactly what the world needed.
A note about trolling from the Author
A little over fifteen years ago, I decided I would try my hand at screenwriting. I wrote what I believed to be the best script ever written at the time, though to this day, I have a hard copy in a binder that I refuse to open because I know I’ll cringe at how bad it really is. The script led to the next which led to nine scripts, all of which will never see the light of day, but through screenwriting, I became a troll, and eventually, a writer.
Let’s go back in time a bit. Fifteen years ago, I had what I believed to be a great script. I knew nothing about what I was supposed to do with it, so when a friend told me about a reality series called Project Greenlight, the brain-child of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, which was essentially a scriptwriting contest, I submitted immediately. Those who entered a script were to read at least three other scripts entered, judge them, and the thousands of scripts entered would filter down to 250. They would be filtered two more times until only one winner remained and that script would be made into a movie.
For those of you wondering, I didn’t make the first cut. I entered all three years that Project Greenlight existed and never made the first cut. Each time, I thought I had gold. Each time, my ego took a hit. I don’t write screenplays anymore and I have no desire to, but Project Greenlight was a gigantic spark in my life that set me on a path that ultimately led me here. Without it, I would have moved in another direction and I have no idea what I would be doing today.
Project Greenlight had a message board. I can still remember the green font and black background of the boards. I remember going there because I was navigating the site to expand my knowledge of all things screenwriting.
When I found a board where hundreds of users were discussing writing, arguing with each other, critiquing each others work, I knew it was something I needed to pay attention to. I lived in a small-town in Iowa and never interacted with people who shared my passion and here I’d fallen into a crowd of witty, intelligent people who knew something about writing. I latched on to some and others I ignored, but for awhile, I read what they had to say and learned what I could. To my surprise, there were relationships, rivalries, and group discussions. It resembled, believe it or not, a community.
Then one day, under the user-name mcbrainder, I jumped into a thread and posted.
I don’t remember what the fight was about. It was two users, arguing back and forth. I thought I had something witty to say and attacked one of them with what I believed was a clever comeback. A moment later, two other users attacked me back and told me that the user I attacked was a “good egg.” Apparently I went after a popular user and picked the wrong side.
I don’t remember the progression from there. I remember posting a lot, starting to fit in, making a name others knew, and somehow becoming part of an on-line community. I was still very young and playful. I didn’t have contributions that would help an amateur learn the craft. Instead, I played the role of a goofball, and when I was tired of that, I started creating multiple user-names and posting as many people at once. At one point in time, I had as many as thirty user-names.
I’m aware of the fact that anyone reading this will have discovered that I had way too much time on my hands, and they’d be right. I got sucked into the message board vortex. If I’d spent that energy writing scripts, I probably would have produced ten times what I actually wrote. Instead, I interacted, and sometimes, I played the bad guy. Sometimes, I antagonized newbies just for sport.
Somewhere along the way, playful became mean and sport became Internet-vigilantism. As I became more intelligent, I would approach a conflicting viewpoint with a rant that I would use one of my fake names to voice. Mcbrainder remained a nice goofball, but I started to feel like I had something to say. I would see what I considered to be ridiculous behavior, attention seeking people in need of ego-boosts, and other users enabling them, telling them they were right (though often they were clearly self-destructive) and that it wasn’t their fault. I wasn't a fan of victim mentality.
Enter me, trolling with my fake names, trying to hold a mirror up to people. Sometimes it was mean-spirited. Sometimes it was just brutal honesty, but brutal honesty that I knew would provoke attacks. I preferred to keep the attacks aimed at the names who weren’t linked to my core name. As life progressed, I realized people had a lot to say to my fake names. Mcbrainder was just a goof who would get an “lol” here and there, but there was no substance behind that. People wanted to talk to the trolls, even if it’s a negative experience. The common anti-troll stance is to say “Don’t feed the trolls” because if you don’t react to what they say, they go away, but the funny thing is, people feed trolls far more than they do serious posters.
I no longer troll, but if you visit any message board anywhere with high traffic, you will see that there are going to be a lot of threads clearly designed to antagonize, and many where someone has something they just want to say.
The threads where someone just wants to hold a discussion die. The trolls are fed constantly, and in saying “don’t feed the trolls,” they continually feed the trolls, because trolls only do what they do because everyone wants attention, and when a person can’t find a positive way to create interest, they search for a negative way. Responses fuel trolling, and unless a thread sinks, every person in it has “fed the troll”.
Contrast this with everything in life: The actress who thought her career would never take off and committed suicide by leaping from the Hollywood sign, kids who aren’t acknowledged in positive ways and act out in negative ways because they know it’s the way they’ll be noticed, the man whose spouse cheats on him and he realizes his real self isn’t good enough and offs himse
lf and her. Everyone wants to be noticed, and when they’re not noticed positively, they don’t give up there. They find another way, often in ways that hurt other people or themselves.
It took me a long time to realize that trolling was just a waste of time, but so was being mcbrainder. Though Project Greenlight and those message-boards set me on a great path in life, I can look back now and I know that everything I did, good or bad, was to be noticed and I put too much energy into that—time I could have used creating other good things. Talking about what I was going to do took away so much time just doing what I needed to do. I have no regrets, but I could never troll again. It’s simply something I did and snapped out of after awhile.
I’ve angered people in chat rooms. I once went to a role-play sex room and made someone cyber with me as The Hamburgler and him as The Pillsbury Dough Boy. I’ve been kicked off and banned from a Scientology board forever after multiple warnings from their moderators to stop pretending to be Xenu (I claimed I was the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy and my profile pics were of Alf). I once had a Kevin Federline Myspace page and interacted with his fans and even Brittany Spears, going out of my way to make him seem like a fool. I’ve had people threaten my life through Craigslist, and I’ve had people try to send me viruses.
Everywhere you go on-line, from the user comments on CNN to the IMDB message-boards, the majority of what you will see is vile, politically or religiously motivated, hatred. From fights between whether or not a movie was any good, to Facebook disagreements where friends become enemies because of their polar opposite viewpoints. People have become detached from one another because we see words—not faces. We can easily hide behind a keyboard, angry that life hasn’t given us everything we want and channel that anger into spreading our poison to others.
Behind every user who is doing this, is a person who very likely is polite to their peers, loved by their friends, who spends holidays with their families and is maybe highly reputed at their job. No troll carries that troll persona throughout their daily life when they’re off-line.
When I started writing The Troll, my hero was not a troll, but as the idea developed, I came across the anti-troll creed on an article: Don’t feed the trolls,” followed by, “He’s probably just some kid in the safety of his parent’s basement. He wouldn’t say this if he was face to face with us. He’s a coward.”
No truer words could be typed. Most trolls are likely decent people. Put them behind a keyboard, and a beast is unleashed. Put them in a room full of strangers, they probably try to fit in. People aren’t truly trolls in life. People are just people who turn into trolls when they sit behind a screen and forget that a user-name represents an actual person. It makes them a coward, but not necessarily a bad human being.
The stage was set: A world where no one could speak out against authority because to do so could mean instant death. I knew my hero had to be a troll. There was no better demonstration of my feelings on Internet bullying versus living among people in real life.
Maybe the problem is we’re too dependent on electronics. Maybe the problem is that people need to be reminded that other people essentially all want the same things to be happy. Maybe there’s no problem at all and we need to brush off the words of strangers.
I hope this story is something everyone can relate to in some small way. We all pick our battles carefully and we all know when to shut up or speak up, but whether you’re the troll, or the person being trolled, at the end of the day, whether you take route A, B, or C, for most of us, the destination is the same.
Thank you for reading part one of The Troll.
I encourage you to leave a review of my book at: TheTroll
https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review?ie=UTF8&asin=1511407204&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&ref_=cm_cr_dp_no_rvw_e&store=books#
Please, no reviews from Scientologists.
Special Thanks
Beta readers:
Sunshine Yoders, Jennifer Darr, Michael La Ronn, Joey Dursky.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to usernames who were more than just usernames to me:
The Dread Pirate Morgan, Redwings16, khleigho, Ami1, MagicallyDeelicious, Amj, Uilani, Dirt, Aurora2001, saeph47, Aspie, Grimaceb, GeoffFoley
Other cool people, many of whom I haven’t met:
Stonygirl, bonadea, mets, Beaver Toast, felix black, Devereaux, Chereefrog, alexus, vorpal, Sam, edgewyze, BillytheKid, JackAwful, CDNFilm, PearlsBeforeSwine, frederickcleveland, Jack’s Wasted Life, Jack’s Wasted Liver, RandallFlagg, Quetee, Queen Uhuru, Queenie, Nostromo, Rockstar, Dr. Gonzo, Red Rover, summer, mack daddy, oliver, daisy, maze, walt, stacy, MingChen, bjn, quickkick, Daisyphreak, RickDeckard, justina, Naseer, Couchguy, Dfogg, backgroundgrrl, Smichael, petunya, Safteydancer, Hong Kong Cavaliers, Shine, outsiders, eyesnot, magicalcat, DLane, Siren Six, skeely, hikarate, Tyson Zoltan, Heder, El Topo, Steel Linx, mdb, coyotesix, gnasche, not that button!, Misterorange, markpenny, celticjack, 1take, Wrighty8, Motherof8, atezinc, Pinata, heizer, Shapely Stooge, Talespinner, Mihalow, patthedog, Siren Six, Estrogen, Mjarbo, Hollygolightly72, Rollerfink, Webster, ToeJam, Abbe, flikwrtr, OscarETTE, Skeeley, noonespecial2310, Joe's Hero, scribbler, Gamma, SirVince, dawncallahan, pinto, carv, KSoze327, Meskey, dawncallahan, Ajl, FilmAsArt, Hassamassahoff, Jeskey, dafemmefatale, marcn, Jennifer8, Mojave, Keesha63, tombliss, mrshakopter, Stacy, Bittrich, HarmonieMoore, tpow, maestro8, Grimlock, TeresaMLA, Complexman, Eddie Zipperer, krowkcolcfilms, Stone Rose, bunny, Fivepointfilms, beazyb, Hammered, mjfryar, Aryss, Jp, JusticePeace, Parrot, FutureMrsAffleck, FutureMrsDamon, darzam, Rocketman, Izzy, Nephratari, drenajo, Shilohswolf, fiveswinya, closetwriter, celticjack, Sallyomally, 1take, smichael, Legendmaker, Keesha63, Americano, Ksoze327, Gnasche, JovianDeadees, Furstlady, little devil, serendipity, not that button!, meskey, RickDeckard, Artra, Toejam, Wasabi, Bigfish, Oscarette, Jefferson, Carv, Limpsquiggy, Sam Raimi, snack daddy, pinorpala, makememeow, Blue Cardinal, backgroundgrrl, Bruce, Talespinner, Vance, Isabel, BigZWillis, gman8343, atezinc, Hbeachbabe, dommah, abbe, Hippiechick, Wrighty8, DeadlyBlackNinja, ANNOYANCE, CheezUMS, PartyofOne, AsRiaL, Bad David, Andromeda, typo, Webster, lax211, Athanor, Gwinks18, Maven Quibble, cloudkick, Hawking, lostfairytales, theblondewritr, frederickcleveland, Batgirl3780, IcequeenJ, meow, vanilla thunder, Trufaut Cavalier, Damian, A true faux cavalier, Serenity7911, Pinky d elephant, Mojave, CrackHeadKitty, 12vob, Whoopie Cushion, cw!, Wisened, julie, vanderwoude, the apocalypse is upon us, Moria1, Chow, Montanagrizgirl, Ilovemydogbutnotinthatway, Pickel87, Frosty, 1000$ per citizen, Ashlane, 2cute, Theodore Rex, Lkulikoff, Hoaxed Totem, Gravity, Cbas, Salty I liftus, Juan Valdez, Shankroid, Prettygurl, Poop club, The Marlboro Man, ANNOYANCE., FilmAsArt, Str8jive, If hair was liquid I'd be Don Johnson. For Real, Greendaze, strangerthanthou, dhh hhd, Bboog, Bad juju, ms. spacecase, Hourly wages, Molly49, dmburrows, Carrie, gldnswife, infinite monkeys, Karma Marie, Sweetmellymel, smee, Mike Brady, Lilthblue, athenablue, Just Reading N Stuff, Down and Out in NYC, dh!, 2questionable, Actor director supreme, Actor burrito supreme, Beaker, jkk, Penny Lane, DEVELOPEXEC, Miss lady Laura, Sassy, Fgonello, paperstreet, Dijonete, Camirox, Whore of Mensa, Randall Flagg, zackfu, plumsmuggler, Motley Cool, Disney69, athena, yeddle, moviecre8r, dharris, Opie32, Kit, allyn, chinle, Bones, urnvs, Mikeinlalaland, VLBarnhill, whosurdaddy, BigButtBlonde, justcallmesandea, Shecky the goat boy, Urban Windingo, Texas Dave, greggg, greenie, skuhn, hat, cafechick, tiny fonts, Gracilou, Str8jive, scarlet begonias, Jade15, Shine, Enigmatic Flounder, otis the good time party clown, lilpixie, psychic, psychicmuse, animaxitele, Bruce, Grey, Captain Caveman, Seestone, KilgoreATrout, Cj220, longerfellow
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