I Like To Collect Headlines That Read Like A Time Traveler’s Last Desperate Gambit At Fixing Reality

I still foolishly dabble in Twitter to see what some of my fellow animation enthusiasts are saying, and one particular SpongeBob tweet annoyed me so much that I’m not even gonna talk about it on that app. It was quoting a segment of the Season 12 episode Shell Games, a fairly standard and innocuous episode, and saying that the plot is an insult to Stephen Hillenburg’s legacy. That was the final straw for me. I can no longer trust the people who aren’t diehard SpongeBob geniuses with Stephen Hillenburg’s name. Especially when they’re blue checkmarks who can benefit from the clout SpongeBob fans will give them.

What was so insulting about Shell Games? Them revealing Patrick’s rock was actually a turtle shell, for one episode, out of nearly 600. I swear, you have less of a reason to be upset over The Principal and the Pauper, and even that’s been an overreaction. I’m not gonna say Shell Games is one of my all time favourites, but I think it’s got enough character with the turtles to make it memorable.

But the gall of that user to transparently have no idea what the show is like now, and still feel the need to stuff the late creator’s name into their opinion to feel better about it. It isn’t 2019 anymore, when Kamp Koral had just been announced and no one had the concrete information on Stephen’s awareness of it. Even back then, my stance on post-Hillenburg SpongeBob stuff has always been “I may not like a lot of it, but I salute the people who he knew continuing to work on it.” How is that such a hard stance to take? Can’t these blue checkmark people have empathy for working class animation teams?

I miss 2015-2018 when the SpongeBob community was more stable. When a Post-Sequel episode aired that the fandom didn’t like, we didn’t jump to “Stephen didn’t want this! Legacy tarnished!”, we discussed what we didn’t like about it and hoped the next episode would be better. A lot of fans still do that, but certainly not the normal people who haven’t even watched the show since they were kids. Fair enough, but if that’s the case, don’t act like an expert out of nowhere. If you were a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, and every single thing made for the past 94 years has had people going “Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t want this! Legacy tarnished!”, you’d understand my antipathy.

Never mind the irony of all this - Stephen Hillenburg was alive when Shell Games was produced. It was the 4th-to-last episode to enter production before he stopped coming in to the studio. Community notes sorted that out quickly. And let me say, you don’t have to like every episode he personally contributed to or oversaw. But come on, why am I expecting nuanced thinking from someone giving Elon Musk their money?

Twitter’s never been a great website, but now, it feels like all the worst people have cracked the code. Only the loudest and angriest voices get the attention, which gets more dangerous the more sensitive the topic is. And then, even if you agree with the sentiment, you will despise the personalities of the very people you’re agreeing with. It’s a platform that encourages all the worst human behaviours. Whenever I so much as make a joke on there, I feel like I’m walking on eggshells. It’ll hurt to see less from accounts I really respect, but I’ll offload it for a little while, because it’s not been good for my mood.

And I’m really sorry that this is yet another long angsty blogpost so soon. It’s been those times for me, and I hope you got some sort of useful lesson from what I’ve typed out.

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