HowToTellIfYouVeJustBeenTrolledByJoelStein
Humor

Flowchart Friday: Literary Troll Edition

Brenna Clarke Gray

Staff Writer

Part muppet and part college faculty member, Brenna Clarke Gray holds a PhD in Canadian Literature while simultaneously holding two cats named Chaucer and Swift. It's a juggling act. Raised in small-town Ontario, Brenna has since been transported by school to the Atlantic provinces and by work to the Vancouver area, where she now lives with her stylish cyclist/webgeek husband and the aforementioned cats. When not posing by day as a forserious academic, she can be found painting her nails and watching Degrassi (through the critical lens of awesomeness). She posts about graphic narratives at Graphixia, and occasionally she remembers to update her own blog, Not That Kind of Doctor. Blog: Not That Kind of Doctor Twitter: @brennacgray

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Did you get trolled yesterday? A lot of us in the YA world did when we read Joel Stein’s NYT piece about how YA books are super dumb and junk. The key giveaway that the piece was a troll of the YA community designed to drive page views came when Stein gleefully admitted that he didn’t actually have any first-hand experience with the genre he was deriding. Classic troll move. “I don’t read romances, but they’re for bored housewives. Obv.” Or, “I don’t watch animated movies, but Pixar is stupid.” See, you’re being trolled. When people actually want to engage in intelligent debate, they usually learn something about the thing they’re debating.

Are you unsure as to whether or not you got trolled? Here’s a flowchart to help. (Full disclosure: I totally got trolled.)