The Time That Lindsay Ellis Got Chased Off Twitter By An Angry Mob

[Part 1]

26th March 2021, 6:03PM GMT. Linday Ellis’ two tweet thread about Raya And The Last Dragon is generating mounting criticism. Ellis deletes the original tweets and adds the following clarification.

“Okay this was fun to wake up to — probably going to delete the original tweet even though it’s going to screencaps town, but I’d rather them have fun with screencaps than QTs, so I’ll just say this — I wasn’t referencing the similar setting of Raya and Avatar (tbc).

Raya more than anything reminded me of a few YA fantasies from the last few years (namely, Children of Blood and Bone and Blood Heir), which are not only not based in Asian folklore (Nigerian and Russian/Chinese respectively) but the authors were openly inspired by TLA. And considering we have basically an entire generation of (American) writers who are heavily influenced by TLA, my thought was hmm, this is a trend, wonder if there will be a name for this. I wasn’t thinking of the specific inspo for TLA and Raya, and that was careless.

I can see where if you squint I was implying all asian-inspired properties are the same, especially if you were already privy to those conversations where I had not seen them. But the basic framework of TLA is becoming popular in fantasy fiction outside of Asian-inspired stuff.

And that is what I was referring to, and it is truly exhausting to just be constantly blindsided by these really uncharitable interpretations of whatever offhand thought I’m having, especially considering these are properties with all-white creative heads.

And you know what, you’re right. Someone once joked I don’t tweet like someone with 300k + followers, and they were right too. I don’t get the luxury of a throwaway tweet, and I’ll keep that in mind going forward.

oh and one other thing — saying a thing is structurally similar to another thing is not a dig. why do people immediately get defensive and think it’s a dig? no story is truly original. there was a lot I didn’t like about Raya, but its similarity to A:TLA wasn’t it ya crazies”

Eight hours later, by 2AM GMT, Ellis had deactivated her Twitter account and would not return until April 15th when she uploaded her one-hundred-minute-long video Mask Off to YouTube.

Today we explore the swirling mess of responses to Ellis’ clarification tweets and the reactions to Ellis deactivating her account. As usual we’re going to use a mixture of me tinkering around with data in R, and you taking my word for what I’m going to say about the 6,277 tweets that belong to this phase because, as much as it pains me to disclose this, I read every single one of them.

A Recap

Lindsay Ellis tweets this in the early hours of the 26th. Initially no one notices, since her tweets about Soul are far more unpopular, but it gradually attracts a wider audience, most of whom are critical, including some big names. Go read the first part if you haven’t, it’s good

Table Setting For The Clarification Thread

About 15 minutes prior to posting her clarification about the Raya tweets, she responded to some fairly mild criticism from her writer/editor Angelina Christina

And this clap-back at a fan expressing some disappointment

Both sets of tweets generated criticism almost immediately. People were not happy about Ellis insisting that Avatar: The Last Airbender was the progenitor of the tropes in the tweet that she felt were present in Raya. And also that ‘Russian/Chinese’ folklore doesn’t count as Asian according to the tweet.

The second tweet, which is bad in a more straightforward way received criticism for simpler reasons

But all this pales in comparison next to the Clarification Thread

The Clarification Thread

I think it’s safe to say that the Clarification Thread made this whole Lindsay Ellis cancellation drama the significant historical event that it is today. People are probably more likely to remember Ellis’ response to the criticism she had been receiving than the reason she was getting criticized in the first place. As I said in Part 1, Ellis’ response is stunningly dismissive of the criticism she had been receiving, a not insignificant amount of why some people were unhappy with the original tweets coming from Southeast Asian people. Ellis’ response completely dismisses the points that her critics were making, and accuses them of being unfair to her. All in all, these tweets were the equivalent of trying to put out a fire by pouring kerosene on it.

Criticism skyrocketed in the half-hour period when Ellis was tweeting the thread. From the first of the clarification tweets up until Ellis deactivated, eight hours later, she received a total of 1,726 critical tweets. Most of these were either replies to or quote tweets of tweets in the clarification thread, meaning that Ellis would have received a notification for every one of those tweets. As for what people were saying? These are the most popular phrases and words that appeared in critical tweets in that time period.

Many of the tweets focused on the way Ellis worded her arguments. People specifically did not appreciate criticisms of the Raya tweet being labelled as “uncharitable interpretations”.

Several people were also deeply critical of Ellis’ use of the word “squint”, both as an unfortunate verb to use when being accused of anti-Asian racism as well as the argument that Ellis’ critics are reaching with their criticism.

By now the issue was well and truly in the public eye and people outside of Ellis’ circle of people who usually engaged with her tweets were replying to her, quote-tweeting parts of this thread and tweeting about her. The criticism was slowly starting to lose steam, but by 27th March 2AM GMT, people noticed that Ellis had deactivated her account.

The Fallout Of The Deactivation

Although Ellis’ deactivation did not lead to a massive spike of tweets like the Clarification Thread did, it sustained the drama enough for ‘Lindsay Ellis’ to trend on Twittter for the next few days, generating almost 6000 tweets on the 27th and 28th alone. The reactions to Ellis’ deactivation were intially a combination of amusement and jubilation

But support for Ellis began pickup up as soon as people noticed that her account was deactivated. By the end of the day, the tide had turned. By 5:30PM GMT support for Ellis overtook criticism of her decisively for the first time. After this point, if someone was tweeting about the issue, they were more likely to be in support of Ellis than critical of her. By the 1st of April, the issue had more or less died down, with not more than three or four tweets every half hour where on the 27th and 28th there would regularly be more than 50.

The Battle Lines Are Drawn

So now, there were two sizeable opposing camps in the issue. There was support for Ellis prior to her deactivation as well. Even though there was a huge spike in criticism towards Ellis following her clarification thread, there was also a smaller spike in support for her. But on the whole, the support for Ellis before her deactivation had been much more sporadic in nature.

In the first phase, this made any statistical analysis of what Ellis-supportive tweets were saying fruitless, because there just wasn’t enough of anything to be statistically significant. But in this phase, since there are enough supportive tweets of Ellis we can calculate the likelihood of each camp using certain words or phrases and see which words/phrases are most likely to be used by each side.

Red Team: Linday Ellis Cancellers

The criticism of Ellis had a narrative:

• Ellis was calling Raya a rip-off of Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA)
• Ellis was only comparing these two works in the first place because of their Asian influences
• It is racist to compare two works solely on the basis of cultural influences, especially when the work she holds up as superior was created by white people
• Ellis has a pattern of making racially insensitive remarks and handling the resulting criticism (which mainly comes from POC) well
• She would rather deactivate her account than apologise for being racist.
• Ellis is falling into the same pattern that many white people, especially white women do when faced with accusations of racism, in which they recenter themselves as the victim, and the non-white accusers as the aggressors.

The perception among her critics was that if the original tweets were racially insensitive, Ellis’ response to being called out for that was definitely racist.

People began bringing up instances of Ellis’ part transgressions, although if you look at the frequently-used phrases and most likely words and phrases, they don’t show up all that much

(The account behind the famous ‘choose your fighter — lindsay ellis bad takes edition’ tweet which had screenshots of the Raya tweet and infamous Harriet Tubman slaveowner fanfiction tweet has deactivated during the time of writing or it’d go here)

People also began incidentally mentioning Jenny Nicholson, a video essayist in the same circle of YouTubers as Ellis who had previously been in a race row of her own but had no direct connection to the Raya incident.

Between the tweets directed at Ellis towards the way she handled the criticism, and the jubilation at her deactivation, it’s evident that people were very angry at Ellis. Many of her critics argued that the way the issue had played out so far fell into a pattern that many POC were familiar with. Ellis’ supporters’ argument that people were just waiting for Ellis to make a mistake like this isn’t inaccurate since many people seemed to bear a lot of residual anger for the way that Ellis had handled past issues like this.

However by April, criticism of Ellis had mostly died down, as the narrative slowly shifted over to Ellis’ supporters

Blue Team: Lindsay Ellis Simps

Pre-deactivation, the support for Ellis did not really have a narrative like this. Ellis’ supporters primarily attacked the authenticity of Raya and The Last Dragon’s Southeast Asian influences, arguing that since Raya is a Disney movie, it was not made with a primarily Southeast Asian audience in mind and is fundamentally as inauthentic as ATLA

Post Ellis’ thread and clarification however, using Ellis’ own words and the triumphant reaction to her deactivation, a counter-narrative emerged: Ellis was comparing Raya to ATLA solely on the basis of story-structure; Asian culture had nothing to do with it

• Ellis’ tweets were misinterpreted on purpose by people who were waiting to pounce on any mistake (as evidence of this, many people cited Honest Trailers making the same observation as Ellis and facing no criticism)
• A Twitter mob of white people speaking over POC joined in the dogpile on Ellis, speaking over them
• This was happening over an inconsequential tweet
• Lindsay Ellis has been cancelled and chased off Twitter by “these people” which generally meant a mob of woke leftists eating their own.

One of reasons for support for Ellis increasing on the 27th and 28th was that many prominent YouTubers and Twitter personalities tweeted in unambiguous support of her and what they thought of her critics. These users had a larger platform than most of Ellis’ critics and their tweets and opinions were seen by more people.

It’s interesting that “these people” is the most probable phrase for Ellis supporters. By and large, “these people” i.e. Ellis’ critics were being perceived as overly-eager leftists cannibalisng their own instead of focusing on more important issues.

Many people argued that the original tweet was misinterpreted and Ellis’ critics were getting up in arms for nothing

Also amusingly ‘Jenny Nicholson’ crops up among Ellis’ supporters. Capitalized. Ellis’ supporters are more likely to capitalize Jenny Nicholson’s name indicating respect, I guess? Her name also shows up higher on the supporters’ side than the critics’ side probably because of a mention of her in Contrapoints’ tweet listed above which would have had more reach than the people trying to cancel Jenny Nicholson (which I’m just going to assume they are because I am not going down my fifth tangentially-related rabbit-hole for this project to answer a question that literally nobody has asked)

What Happened Next

By the 31st of March, most people had moved on. Some people still expressed amusement at Ellis’ perceived thin-skinnedness and others said they missed her and that it was a shame that she was no longer on Twitter. On the 12th of April, someone tweeted this

which highlights the (in my opinion anyway) hyperbolic tone that Ellis supportive tweets were about to take. Because on April 15th 2021, Ellis made her comeback to Twitter, to Youtube and single-handedly brought the Raya Cancellation Drama back from the dead.