Now, on a serious note-

I don’t ordinarily engage with detractors – oh, I’ll respond occasionally when I feel they’ve gotten something factually wrong (that being my bailiwick), or if I think of something adequately dismissive to write (the secret is eight words or less – that way it doesn’t look like you put too much effort into it).

A recent comment on my much-maligned open letter to the filmmakers responsible for the film Inside deserves some response, I believe – not because it’s an especially controversial or interesting, but because I think the commenter let us know more than they’d intended. What I learned left me worried… but we’ll get to that after I’ve shared the comment with you.

Here’s the notification, as I received it:

DIEfatangryblogger has left a new comment on your post "An Open Letter to the Makers of Inside":

Hey just wanted to stop by and say you're a douchebag. Oh, and i hope you choke on your dad's cock.

As you can see, the main thrust of the message isn’t particularly unfair or fresh – I am, in fact, a douchebag, a fact to which anyone who’s ever listened to an episode of theAvod can freely attest.

It’s all of the surrounding information that I find so disconcerting. Let’s start with the name that our commenter has chosen for themselves. ‘DIEfatangryblogger’ – if we separate that out into the sentence that it’s obviously meant to be, we get DIE Fat Angry Blogger. Which, naturally, lets us know that this commenter is a woman of German descent, or possibly a native German-speaker herself.

So look at how this woman chooses to identify herself – not only is she a ‘fat angry blogger’, she’s ‘THE fat angry blogger’ – as if those two negative characteristics are the primary ways in which she self-identifies. Now, it’s possible that she’s merely being hyperbolic, and isn’t either as obese or hateful as her name would suggest, but I don’t think so – and there’s evidence in her second sentence that I feel proves the case.

‘Oh, and i hope you choke on your dad's cock.’

Please note that Blogger’s comment feature does not autocorrect typography. So when DFAB was typing out her comment, she knew enough about proper formatting to capitalize the first letter in each sentence. Yet she doesn’t capitalize the word ‘I’, as is the convention. This lower-case ‘i’ suggests serious issues with self-esteem, perhaps going so far as to imply the desire to extinguish the self.

Between the name and this unintentional(?) revelation, it’s clear that DFAB doesn’t like herself very much – so where does this self-loathing come from? I could go on to theorize here about the kind of background that must exist for a person to so cavalierly bring up imagery of child molestation, but I'm going to refrain from doing that. Instead, I want to offer a suggestion to DFAB - whatever it is in your background that's driving you to such depths of self-loathing and obesity, deal with it. Quickly.

You've made your cry for help, and it's been heard. Now take that next step and get the treatment you so obviously need.