The name was, however, not intentional
Jun. 20th, 2020 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabinetzinI'm going to explain to you how a movie from 1999 led directly to the 2012 parade at Dragon Con, a thing even the other people in the parade are not necessarily aware of.
I love ARGs. I don't care if people think they're cheesy or that they're cheap marketing ploys. I love the sense of adventure, I love the idea of working with other people and becoming a part of something, I love how clever they are. I've done a number of them. Of the most famous ones, I didn't do I Love Bees, which I just missed because it wasn't aimed at me, or the Dharma Initiative, because it was pretty clear with that one what it was for and I wasn't interested. The best ones have always been the DC ones. Getting a call on my landline from Harvey Dent was a fucking mindfuck, though I didn't actually get to do the uncovering the Joker's face thing because IIRC I was at work and it got solved before I got home. The one for… Arkham Origins, I wanna say? was so claustrophobic and personal that it was genuinely frightening. I even did the Smallville ARG, which a lot of hardcore Smallville fans don't even know existed.
(The worst media one, if you're wondering, was the one for Prometheus, which they seemed to kinda forget about halfway through. What really killed the immersion, though, was that, yes, you have to mark it as coming from your company, no, your logo doesn't have to be half an inch tall.)
They're becoming increasingly rare and increasingly expensive as meatspace experiences, but I was lucky enough to visit the Jejune Institute in 2011 and be granted with the knowledge of Divine Nonchalance, on a date that will N E V E R be topped, even though we didn't end up together.
Basically what I'm saying to you is I love ARGs.
The first one I ever did was before ARG was even a term that people knew. It wasn't the first ARG done by a media company, but it was early on enough that the rules of What Is An ARG weren't set, leading some people to consider it an attempt at a hoax and not an ARG at all. I don't find this to be a very compelling argument, though I do see where it comes from and how you would argue it. I mean I think the best argument against it being a hoax is… it didn't work. It wasn't intended to work that way. It was always meant to create an immersive experience that felt real in order to enhance a media project, and that's what a media ARG hopes to provide.
But the point is that we're talking about The Blair Witch Project. If you're not familiar, there were a number of things released in the runup to the movie in order to make the movie seem real. It was the first movie that the internet ever made popular, and these things went what we could consider viral, though it was before that was a thing. The biggest parts of the marketing were the Blair Witch website, which was quite extensive, and a mockumentary that appeared on Sci-Fi.
I ate that shit up with a spoon. I spent hours on the website, even though I hate scary books and I hate scary movies and basically I just hate being scared. I think I have seen the mockumentary, but I was 13 when this happened and Dad is an inveterate TV hog so I could have just as easily not been allowed to watch it.
Now I want to make something clear:
I knew it was a fuckin movie.
Even at 13 I hadn't been born yesterday. None of it passed my smell test, and I had the whole rest of the internet to go and ask Jeeves if the Blair Witch was a real legend or not. (This mostly just ended with me learning about the Bell Witch, which is way scarier and, while also not real, realer.) And also, just in general, monster witches who live in the woods and murder people aren't real. This is why it fails as an attempt at a hoax, because it's so patently not real. The argument for it being a hoax relies on there not being enough metainformation to indicate that it's fictional, but my man, my buddy, my dude, evil forest witches aren't real and they don't kill people in the woods.
But, this was something that became special to me. I wanted to be scared. I wanted to be able to step into this thing that I was so frightened of but had immersed myself in. I wanted, basically, the ARG payoff. I wanted to see the end of the game.
Then I went to see the movie with my fuckin parents who didn't take it seriously and laughed through it, and I did what I have only ever done twice and moved my fat ass across the theater to get away from them. If you're wondering if I've forgiven them, the movie came out 21 years ago next month, and this is still the tone with which I describe the incident. When I am in my 60's and coming to terms with letting go of the pain my parents inadvertently caused me in trying to do the right thing, it will end with "But they could have fuckin showed me some respect when we went to see The Blair Witch Project."
So life went on. That was the start of me getting into ARGs, as detailed above. Blair Witch was the first experience like that where I really felt the energy of that, where you were finding out something that felt in a certain way like forbidden knowledge or a thing you were only sharing with people in the know. After this came the Jejune Institute, and the Dark Knight ARG, and even Prometheus, and it became a thing that I just really liked.
And now, in our story, it's 2012, and The Avengers is about to come out. I and several others find out in advance of the film that Phil Coulson is going to die, and we are wrecked. I straight up cried in front of the spaghetti sauce in the Green Hills Whole Foods because I was so fucked up about it. Thank god I did find out before the movie, because it was the only thing that let me get through the second half of the film.
I don't even really remember why we felt like we needed to do something. It was just that we were so fuckin sad. The two biggest misconceptions about the Coulson Lives Project were that we were all male (this persisted even after we released voice clips) and that we were some kind of petition campaign. We never petitioned anyone for anything. We never wrote to Marvel. The closest we ever got is when I asked Clark Gregg if he could get me into the signing at SDCC because I couldn't get a ticket (he did, because he is a very nice man). We assumed that it was over, and we were just trying to find an outlet for our grief. You can have any opinion you want about it, but I know that I (Glyph) and Stiletto were just going through a rough time, and we had an attachment to this character that was helping us through that, and then he got killed off, and we were devastated.
We didn't even choose the term Coulson Lives; we were actually the Coulson Lives Project because someone else already had coulsonlives on tumblr, but it was supposed to be in the vein of Frodo Lives. It was that same notion, because Frodo was never coming back. His story was finished and he'd gone to Valinor. People didn't say Frodo Lives because they were trying to get Lord of the Rings 2 (or rather, 4). It was about hope and also proving that you were in on knowledge that the mundanes didn't have.
I should say that some people did think we were ripping off I Believe in Sherlock. We weren't, for the reasons above, though we of course knew about them and recognize they got here first; clearly we wanted different things and had different expectations, because Sherlock wasn't over. The MCU also wasn't over, but it wasn't about this minor character who was basically just another guy in a suit that we had attached meaning to. Sherlock is the name of the show.
So when we were kind of setting this up and deciding what we wanted to be, being an ARG was a natural fit. We weren't trying to make anybody do anything. We weren't trying to convince Marvel they'd made a mistake. We just really wanted Coulson not to be dead, and if the way we could do that is to create a pocket reality within a fictional one where he wasn't dead and just needed to be woken up, we were gonna do it. In the OOC guide to the Coulson Lives Project, it reads:
And that's what it was about. We started an ARG because we were sad. Then everything went apeshit and eventually Marvel coopted our slogan, but that's, like, so much more story.
So that's how a barely teenage kid staring at a creepy website in 1999 turned out to be a grad student who was out of her mind with grief and accidentally started a whole thing, up to and including marching with a banner in a parade (currently under my bed) and meeting Clark Gregg wearing a wedding dress (long story). Because The Blair Witch Project became the Coulson Lives Project, and, I guess, here we fuckin are.
I love ARGs. I don't care if people think they're cheesy or that they're cheap marketing ploys. I love the sense of adventure, I love the idea of working with other people and becoming a part of something, I love how clever they are. I've done a number of them. Of the most famous ones, I didn't do I Love Bees, which I just missed because it wasn't aimed at me, or the Dharma Initiative, because it was pretty clear with that one what it was for and I wasn't interested. The best ones have always been the DC ones. Getting a call on my landline from Harvey Dent was a fucking mindfuck, though I didn't actually get to do the uncovering the Joker's face thing because IIRC I was at work and it got solved before I got home. The one for… Arkham Origins, I wanna say? was so claustrophobic and personal that it was genuinely frightening. I even did the Smallville ARG, which a lot of hardcore Smallville fans don't even know existed.
(The worst media one, if you're wondering, was the one for Prometheus, which they seemed to kinda forget about halfway through. What really killed the immersion, though, was that, yes, you have to mark it as coming from your company, no, your logo doesn't have to be half an inch tall.)
They're becoming increasingly rare and increasingly expensive as meatspace experiences, but I was lucky enough to visit the Jejune Institute in 2011 and be granted with the knowledge of Divine Nonchalance, on a date that will N E V E R be topped, even though we didn't end up together.
Basically what I'm saying to you is I love ARGs.
The first one I ever did was before ARG was even a term that people knew. It wasn't the first ARG done by a media company, but it was early on enough that the rules of What Is An ARG weren't set, leading some people to consider it an attempt at a hoax and not an ARG at all. I don't find this to be a very compelling argument, though I do see where it comes from and how you would argue it. I mean I think the best argument against it being a hoax is… it didn't work. It wasn't intended to work that way. It was always meant to create an immersive experience that felt real in order to enhance a media project, and that's what a media ARG hopes to provide.
But the point is that we're talking about The Blair Witch Project. If you're not familiar, there were a number of things released in the runup to the movie in order to make the movie seem real. It was the first movie that the internet ever made popular, and these things went what we could consider viral, though it was before that was a thing. The biggest parts of the marketing were the Blair Witch website, which was quite extensive, and a mockumentary that appeared on Sci-Fi.
I ate that shit up with a spoon. I spent hours on the website, even though I hate scary books and I hate scary movies and basically I just hate being scared. I think I have seen the mockumentary, but I was 13 when this happened and Dad is an inveterate TV hog so I could have just as easily not been allowed to watch it.
Now I want to make something clear:
I knew it was a fuckin movie.
Even at 13 I hadn't been born yesterday. None of it passed my smell test, and I had the whole rest of the internet to go and ask Jeeves if the Blair Witch was a real legend or not. (This mostly just ended with me learning about the Bell Witch, which is way scarier and, while also not real, realer.) And also, just in general, monster witches who live in the woods and murder people aren't real. This is why it fails as an attempt at a hoax, because it's so patently not real. The argument for it being a hoax relies on there not being enough metainformation to indicate that it's fictional, but my man, my buddy, my dude, evil forest witches aren't real and they don't kill people in the woods.
But, this was something that became special to me. I wanted to be scared. I wanted to be able to step into this thing that I was so frightened of but had immersed myself in. I wanted, basically, the ARG payoff. I wanted to see the end of the game.
Then I went to see the movie with my fuckin parents who didn't take it seriously and laughed through it, and I did what I have only ever done twice and moved my fat ass across the theater to get away from them. If you're wondering if I've forgiven them, the movie came out 21 years ago next month, and this is still the tone with which I describe the incident. When I am in my 60's and coming to terms with letting go of the pain my parents inadvertently caused me in trying to do the right thing, it will end with "But they could have fuckin showed me some respect when we went to see The Blair Witch Project."
So life went on. That was the start of me getting into ARGs, as detailed above. Blair Witch was the first experience like that where I really felt the energy of that, where you were finding out something that felt in a certain way like forbidden knowledge or a thing you were only sharing with people in the know. After this came the Jejune Institute, and the Dark Knight ARG, and even Prometheus, and it became a thing that I just really liked.
And now, in our story, it's 2012, and The Avengers is about to come out. I and several others find out in advance of the film that Phil Coulson is going to die, and we are wrecked. I straight up cried in front of the spaghetti sauce in the Green Hills Whole Foods because I was so fucked up about it. Thank god I did find out before the movie, because it was the only thing that let me get through the second half of the film.
I don't even really remember why we felt like we needed to do something. It was just that we were so fuckin sad. The two biggest misconceptions about the Coulson Lives Project were that we were all male (this persisted even after we released voice clips) and that we were some kind of petition campaign. We never petitioned anyone for anything. We never wrote to Marvel. The closest we ever got is when I asked Clark Gregg if he could get me into the signing at SDCC because I couldn't get a ticket (he did, because he is a very nice man). We assumed that it was over, and we were just trying to find an outlet for our grief. You can have any opinion you want about it, but I know that I (Glyph) and Stiletto were just going through a rough time, and we had an attachment to this character that was helping us through that, and then he got killed off, and we were devastated.
We didn't even choose the term Coulson Lives; we were actually the Coulson Lives Project because someone else already had coulsonlives on tumblr, but it was supposed to be in the vein of Frodo Lives. It was that same notion, because Frodo was never coming back. His story was finished and he'd gone to Valinor. People didn't say Frodo Lives because they were trying to get Lord of the Rings 2 (or rather, 4). It was about hope and also proving that you were in on knowledge that the mundanes didn't have.
I should say that some people did think we were ripping off I Believe in Sherlock. We weren't, for the reasons above, though we of course knew about them and recognize they got here first; clearly we wanted different things and had different expectations, because Sherlock wasn't over. The MCU also wasn't over, but it wasn't about this minor character who was basically just another guy in a suit that we had attached meaning to. Sherlock is the name of the show.
So when we were kind of setting this up and deciding what we wanted to be, being an ARG was a natural fit. We weren't trying to make anybody do anything. We weren't trying to convince Marvel they'd made a mistake. We just really wanted Coulson not to be dead, and if the way we could do that is to create a pocket reality within a fictional one where he wasn't dead and just needed to be woken up, we were gonna do it. In the OOC guide to the Coulson Lives Project, it reads:
We began it out of grief and sadness over the loss of our favorite character, and we cling dearly to denial, our core value.
And that's what it was about. We started an ARG because we were sad. Then everything went apeshit and eventually Marvel coopted our slogan, but that's, like, so much more story.
So that's how a barely teenage kid staring at a creepy website in 1999 turned out to be a grad student who was out of her mind with grief and accidentally started a whole thing, up to and including marching with a banner in a parade (currently under my bed) and meeting Clark Gregg wearing a wedding dress (long story). Because The Blair Witch Project became the Coulson Lives Project, and, I guess, here we fuckin are.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-21 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-23 10:57 pm (UTC)