Monday, February 12, 2018

Trolls

No, not the cute Disney ones, or the bumbling idiots in the Hobbit: The ones who stalk you on line.



TeaAtTrianonBlog's writer is an author of historical fiction, and for years her blog has been trolled and her books have received sarcastic reviews including personal attacks from the same troll.

Now she is being threatened with a lawsuit for simply checking with the college if the professor has a history of violence against women.

this is not, alas, new (see Computerworld article from 2007) but is becoming epidemic.

most of the bloggers reporting this type of bullying/cyberstalking tend to be political, whereas Ms Vidal's books and blogs are not.

Her sin? being sympathetic to Marie Antoinette, who most modern historians point out does not deserve her bad press, and  being sympathetic to the religious beliefs of her characters.

But their main problem with her writings is she doesn't have oodles of college degrees.

Quell Horrors!

Well, living in the Philippines and having a limited budget, I have only read one of her books (on Scribd), which included the Cathars as background to the young heroine's struggles to find love.

It was a routine historical romance, meaning that it was a painless way to learn about history while enjoying a nice uncomplicated story about nice people (even the bad guys, or in this case, the religious fanatics including the Lady of the Manor and her ilk, were nice).

Historical romances and detective stories are dismissed by academians, but for the rest of us peons  who read romances or detective stories, well, we sort of enjoy the story, and if we learn about history too, well that is a good "side effect". Think Tony Hillerman, or Laura Rowland, or Ellis Peters, or SergeanneGolan, or Janet Evanovich (I added this since blue collar NJ seems to be a foreign culture to the elites).

The past is another country, and people think differently, but often there is a "modern" thinking character to bridge the gap, and they give help to understand what goes on in other cultures, and how those people interact.

And afterward, sometimes you actually dig into the history to find out more about that time and place.

So why are the trolls after her?

Because they can.

Sigh.







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