Holy cow. I would never have expected this:
I can't imagine it as a corporate entity, especially one owned by a network. And yet, I don't know them, but I can't help but be happy for Television Without Pity founders Glark and Sars and Wing Chun. It's hard not to think of this as a coup for them.
I'm essentially a TWoP refugee. I fled for time management reasons - I started to do my House episode reviews, and that takes up about as much time as I want to allot to dissecting television - but also partly because I started to feel like my involvement in the discussions was affecting my enjoyment of the show.
I'd never even heard of the site before I started looking for intelligent online discussion about House in those days when no one else seemed to be watching. I'd never heard of slash, or shipping, or fanfic. I'd always said I couldn't see the appeal of chat rooms, and by that I meant things that looked like TWoP.
And when I turned to the Internet to talk about this great new show no one I knew was watching that I just had to talk about, places like the official FOX boards proved me right. I was ready to give up on finding intelligent life out there when I stumbled across this strange new world of TWoP, and it filled that gap nicely. People write in complete sentences and everything. They have fun, smart discussions. I credit TWoP with helping me hone my writing voice, or at least have more confidence in it. I've met some wonderful and crazy people who have become real-life friends because of my time there.
Then instead of one single discussion thread, House became one of the shows TWoP officially covered, with recaps and multi-thread forums. We'd been begging for it all along, and I was giddy at the wish fulfilled, until I realized it was just too much for me. Too many threads to keep track of, too many people with less sense of community, too many discussions that went sideways and backwards and upside down. I lurked in a couple of threads for a while longer, now barely do that. I still can't see the appeal of slash, or shipping, or fanfic.
This is sounding like an elegy for TWoP, which isn't what I mean. I actually have faith it will preserve the snark, and maybe grow into something even bigger and better despite its connection to one network. But it's definitely a changing of a guard, so I wanted to acknowledge what it's meant to me, even if that meaning has changed to mostly a memory.
