I Read 20,000 Tweets From The Lindsay Ellis Cancellation And Here’s What I Learned
On March 26th 2021 at around 2:16AM EST, Lindsay Ellis, a popular YouTube video essayist who longform analyses videos about movies tweeted “Also watched Raya and the Last Dragon and I think we need to come up with a name for this genre that is basically Avatar: the Last Airbender reduxes. It’s like half of all YA fantasy published in the last few years anyway”. A second tweet in the thread read “This time Zuko’s a girl”.
Initial responses to this two-tweet thread were mostly suggestions for names for this genre: ‘Anime but make it Nicktoons’ read a fairly popular early tweet. ‘Peewee Wuxia’. ‘Atlikes’ read another. Yet, around twelve hours later, these tweets mounting backlash for its apparent anti-Asian bias. Ellis deleted the tweets and clarified the intent of the original tweets in a thread, expressing some remorse.
It didn’t go down well for some reason.
‘Lindsay Ellis’ began trending on Twitter and would continue to do so for duration of that weekend. Seven hours later, at around1:55AM GMT, Ellis deactivated her Twitter account. This action sparked thousands of tweets in the coming days, some gleeful, some calling Ellis a coward, some claiming she had ‘reaped what she sowed’ with long lists of past transgressions, and many lamenting this latest instance of cancel culture run amok.
It seemed that barely anyone could agree on anything: whether Raya and the Last Dragon bore any similarities to Avatar: The Last Airbender or if people were comparing the two only because of their Pan-Asian-inspired settings, whether the criticism Ellis received in the beginning was sincere or merely the pot-stirring of bad faith actors, whether Ellis’ response was her simply clarifying her point, or doubling down because she was unable to take criticism, whether she was right to deactivate her account, whether she should apologies or not, whether she was being hounded by a mob or facing justified demands for accountability. People continued sharing their opinions on these issues well into the early weeks of April.
On 15th April 2021, at 12:06 PM EST, Lindsay Ellis reactivated her account tweeting ‘breaking my silence…’ followed by a link to her newest video ‘Mask Off’ which dealt with the events of the weekend of March 26th from Ellis’ perspective, her explanations for some of the previous examples of Ellis’ “problematic” behaviour, and an explainer of how Twitter’s site design enables such a febrile atmosphere. Going by the numbers, both the tweet and ‘Mask Off’ were undeniable hits at 13.8K likes and over 2M views respectively.
These together helped revive the debates of the past couple of weeks that had slowly been fizzling out, now with most participants’ awareness of Ellis’ intentions and the impact this event has had on here. Now most people were on Ellis’ side, were angry about the ordeal she had been put through, and were questioning the way they engaged with Twitter as a platform. Within a week, though discussions about the events of the March 26th weekend mostly fizzled out, baring a thread on May 8th that vocally supporting Natalie Wynn a.k.a. the YouTuber Contrapoints which revived the issue to a small extent.
Why Did I Read Almost 20,000 Tweets About This? And Who’s Side Am I On?
Because I hate myself and also want to position myself as the world’s leading expert on the Lindsay Ellis Raya Cancellation.
On the surface, it would seem absurd that a tweet about a new Disney movie would spark such controversy and divided opinions, but I would argue that the seemingly inconsequential nature of the original tweet is a large part of what makes this whole saga compelling. Why did the Raya tweets attract so much widespread backlash when initially it looked like Soul was the far more unpopular tweet? Were most of the people criticizing Ellis really arguing from a place of bad faith, having finally found the perfect moment to strike, as Ellis herself claims? Why were so many people compelled to defend Ellis so fervently that they themselves were accused of harassment?
These are interesting questions to me, for better or for worse, and my aim isn’t exactly to answer these questions — I don’t think either Lindsay Ellis or I could really investigate the intentions of all the people calling her out to arrive at a conclusion of whether they were acting in good faith or not. What I want to do here is gather as much of the information that is publicly available to get as clear a picture as possible of what actually happened.
As for where I personally stand on the issue — I do think the original tweets when taken in context with Ellis explicitly saying she disliked the movie and “Zuko is a girl now”. She was absolutely saying that Raya is an inferior rip-off of ATLA. And without any more elaboration on that opinion, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the Asian cultural influences of both works is what led her to compare Raya to ATLA in the first place. She also definitely didn’t do a good job of clarifying the tweet. It reads as self-pitying, sulky and dismissive of the things people are accusing her of (“it is truly exhausting to just be constantly blindsided by these really uncharitable interpretations of whatever offhand thought I’m having”, “I don’t get the luxury of a throwaway tweet”, and the infamous “squint” tweet).
However, after looking at the tweets collected throughout the issue, she really did receive a staggering amount of criticism, as you will see later. At the high point, she received 400 negative tweets in one hour. Each of the 5,389 tweets had an average of 1.7 replies, many of which were in all likelihood also negative. I can’t claim to know if I would do any better if faced with that scale of backlash. I think she communicated her point of view effectively in “Mask Off”, and I do think she was right to not apologies, because she isn’t sorry and I think that’s a fair enough response to have.
But I think on the whole, the issue of whether Ellis was in the right or not isn’t as interesting to me as gathering all the pieces of what happened here, and getting better at data analytics, data visualization and effectively communicating my findings.
Methodology
I collected 13,573 tweets between 24th March 2021 to 9th May 2021 that contain the words ‘Lindsay Ellis’, ‘thelindsayellis’ (replies to Ellis’ tweets) and ‘raya’ using Snscrape. Since I wasn’t able to find a good model to label tweets as being supportive, critical or neutral towards Ellis and the original tweets, I classified them manually, meaning that I went through each of these tweets and labelled them as ‘C’ for critical, ‘S’ for not critical and ’N’ for tweets that referenced the issue but I couldn’t detect a stance either way. This data forms the basis for all the analysis that comes later. I did most of the data analysis with R.
Since the initial tweets have been deleted and it wasn’t possible to collect the quote-tweets for those tweets, I’ve somewhat compensated by scraping tweets containing ‘raya’ from around that time period relevant to the issue. Most of these tweets are critical of Ellis and I’m assuming most of the quote-tweets would have been negative in tone as well which means I can sub these in the dataset, rounding off the total number of tweets to 19,045. You can find the data and the code on my GitHub
The Shape Of The Issue
When looking at the tweets from the 26th of March, i.e. the day of the original tweets, it’s important to note that since Ellis deleted the two tweets that sparked the controversy, I was not able to capture many replies and all quote tweets. To attempt to find some of these tweets and other relevant tweets, I also specifically collected tweets containing the string “Raya” that reference this issue. Given all these tweets we can extrapolate that the true spike probably looked like the one that happened on April 15.
Based on the days where there is an abnormally huge number of tweets, the reasons for these spikes and the changes they have had in the nature of the tweets, I believe it makes sense to split the issue into three phases
· Phase 1 — From initial pair of tweets until just before the clarification thread
· Phase 2 — From the clarification thread to just before Ellis’ return on April 15th
· Phase 3 — From Ellis’ return to the last collected tweet on May 15th
It’s also helpful to look at the number of critical (red), neutral (green) and supportive (blue) tweets throughout the drama. The majority of tweets are initially critical in tone, and the number of tweets explicitly supportive of Ellis is less than half of the critical tweets. However, the very next day, on the 27th, after Ellis deactivated her account, there was a noticeable increase in support for her while the criticism sharply dropped off. From the 28th of March onwards, with a few exceptions Ellis almost always receives more support than criticism.
The uploading of “Mask Off” is the flip side of the initial backlash. Roughly the same number of tweets as then, but now the amount of support Ellis receive nearly doubles the criticism. This reversal of tone carries all the way through to the Contrapoints Defence Thread.
Phase 1
Some time before the original Raya tweets, Ellis also shared her thoughts about the Pixar movie Soul
The Soul tweets generated a significant amount of discussion in the early phases of data collection, proving to be fairly controversial. I wasn’t able to find very many tweets even in the replies being wholly in agreement with the tweets. In my dataset, all tweets pertaining to the Soul tweets have been labelled ’N’ whether the tweets are supportive, critical or neutral, because ultimately, what Ellis faced widespread backlash for the Raya tweets. The discussion around Ellis’ Soul take was more or less civil even though very few people wholeheartedly agreed with her. I suspect this is because it was mainly a discussion with her followers and did not spread outside that circle.
She was asked for her thoughts on Raya, and she didn’t mince any words.
Sometime after this comes the Raya Tweet, and the slowly building backlash to it. So what happened exactly?
It helps to look at the amount of criticism she got throughout this phase
There was some sporadic criticism since the beginning, but the ball really gets rolling around 2:50PM with more and more critical tweets coming in every five minutes until just after 6PM when Ellis addressed this criticism. In terms of direct replies to the original tweet, Ellis received more critical tweets than supportive ones, at 248 and 232 respectively.
Looking into critical tweets from this time I think there were two tweets that may have brought this tweet to the attention of a broader audience. At 2:40, literary agent Pam Pho, who has more than 16K followers, replied to Ellis:
At 2:53, YA Author Margeret Owen quote tweeted Ellis and criticized her in a thread. Owen has more than 10K followers. These weren’t the only high-profile users to call Ellis out, and given that I can’t locate most of the quote tweets for the original tweets, this is only an educated guess as to why the Raya tweets sparked such a wide backlash when the Soul tweets didn’t.
It also helps to look at what each camp says, especially the side criticizing Ellis, since they significantly outnumber people defending her at this point. Using a formula found in the paper Fightin’ Words, we can calculate the likelihood of each side using a particular word. Here are words most strongly associated with each side:
The Ellis-supportive tweets in this phase earlier on were the tweets that went along with the suggestion of the original tweets, coming up with names for the genre that is “basically Avatar: The Last Airbender reduxes”. People also responded to Ellis’ tweets discussing the movie, especially the redemption arc of the character Namaari. Hunger Games makes an appearance as someone suggested it an example of another YA franchise that has spawned imitators, sparking some discussion. The appearance of “Disney” on the Ellis-supportive side is because a common rebuttal to the backlash was that since the movie in question is a Disney movie its status as a culturally Southeast Asian movie is questionable.
Meanwhile, the Ellis-critical side presents a much more clear-cut breakdown of their arguments, since there are simply more tweets with this label and their contentions are mostly the same: that Ellis, a white woman, is dismissing Raya as an “ATLA redux” because she perceives them both as incorporating Asian cultural elements in their story-worlds, even though ATLA takes influence from East Asia and was created by white Americans, while Raya is influenced by South East Asian culture, and includes some people from that area in its creative team. This leads to them arguing that the two stories have no similarities outside of having Asian cultural influences and both stories use generic fantasy tropes that ATLA did not invent, that the comparison of the two is reductive and ignorant and that Asian-inspired fantasy stories shouldn’t be compared to one made by white people, that Ellis is treating two different Asian cultures as interchangeable, and that to do so is racist.
Looking at the plot for likelihood for phrases illustrates how some of these arguments were made. Adele Lim is one of the people on the creative team of Raya who is Malaysian American. “Two white guys” is a reference to the creators of ATLA. Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings are used to illustrate tropes prevalent in the fantasy genre including works like ATLA, to argue that the only direct similarity between Raya and ATLA is the Asian cultural influences.
Meanwhile, the Ellis-supportive side is messier since there is less data to work with, although it is worthwhile to look at the lower part of the plot, as that is where responses to the backlash appear. “Carlos Estrada” and “a Latino guy” are a reference to Carlos Estrada, the movie’s director, the argument being that the movie is not authentically Southeast Asian since the film’s director is an American Latino man. The phrase “western lens” is also used to argue that the movie’s portrayal of Southeast Asian culture is not authentic and has been filtered through a Western lens.
So that’s where we are now. Accusations of racism, and some defense against these accusations. Next: Lindsay Ellis wakes up to a barrage of criticism, and addresses it in a way that makes everything worse. But how much worse? Tune in next week to find out!
[Part 2]
