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Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
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I'm winning currently by printing banner for gaucher patients
 
Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
Joined
Nov 16, 2021
Messages
1,396
Points
153

The Rhetoric of Online Feuds: A Wayne Booth Analysis of the ScribbleHub Forum Drama​

In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth establishes that narrative is never neutral; it is shaped by the choices of the author, the reliability of the narrator, and the implicit argument built into the structure of the text. Even in what appears to be a chaotic and spontaneous online forum argument, rhetorical choices dictate how characters are perceived, how arguments are structured, and how persuasion—or the failure of persuasion—unfolds.
The ScribbleHub forum debate in question, despite its superficial messiness, can be analyzed as a structured text. Each participant crafts a persona and wields rhetorical strategies in an attempt to persuade an audience, but their failures are as revealing as their successes. OP, the ostensible protagonist of the drama, engages in a form of moralistic argumentation that ultimately collapses under its own contradictions. Beast, the tragic figure, is more acted upon than active, framed as the object of derision, pity, or fascination. Roastmaster, playing the role of Socratic gadfly and theatrical antagonist, dissects OP’s arguments with cutting irony. And the Chorus, fragmented but occasionally insightful, reminds us that no one is truly listening with open ears. Justabot, the deus ex machina moderator, delivers the final narrative verdict.
Through this analysis, we will explore how the participants' rhetorical strategies reflect their ethos (character), pathos (emotional appeal), and logos (logical argumentation), ultimately revealing that this digital battle is less a contest of truth than a performance of self.

OP’s Rhetorical Position: The Unreliable Crusader​

OP enters the narrative as a character styled in the mode of the righteous expositor. Their primary rhetorical appeal is ethos—presenting themselves as a rational, informed, and well-intentioned figure. They craft an exhaustive argument cataloging Beast’s alleged transgressions, constructing a detailed history that serves as both indictment and intervention. Their claim is simple: Beast is delusional, their obsession with RoyalRoad is unhealthy, and the community is complicit in feeding this obsession. OP assumes that, by meticulously documenting Beast’s actions, they will achieve both moral victory and communal reform.
However, OP’s ethos is immediately compromised by the nature of their argument. Booth reminds us that “showing” is often more persuasive than “telling,” yet OP indulges in an expository style that betrays their underlying motivations. Their relentless detail—listing multiple alt accounts, tracing years of forum activity, presenting themselves as an expert in Beast’s online habits—renders them not a neutral observer but an obsessive in their own right. If Beast’s fatal flaw is their refusal to let go of RoyalRoad, OP mirrors this flaw by refusing to let go of Beast.
Further weakening OP’s rhetorical position is their failure to engage in genuine dialectic. Booth emphasizes the importance of acknowledging opposing viewpoints, yet OP dismisses every counterargument as either enabling behavior or willful ignorance. Their moral absolutism leaves no room for the complexity of human behavior; Beast is a problem to be fixed, and any resistance to this framing is a failure of the community. Booth might argue that OP constructs an “implied author” who is too self-assured, too convinced of their own moral superiority. The audience—particularly figures like Roastmaster—quickly sees through this, rendering OP an unreliable narrator of their own campaign.

Beast: The Tragic Anti-Hero of the Forum Stage​

Beast exists primarily as a textual construct within OP’s argument—a character whose defining trait is their unrelenting obsession. OP casts them as a figure of mockery and concern, framing their actions as irrational, their grievances as conspiratorial, and their persona as fundamentally unstable. This portrayal is reinforced by the Chorus, which largely treats Beast as either an object of amusement or a known quantity beyond the reach of change.
However, Booth reminds us that every character, even one constructed as a fool or villain, must be analyzed in terms of their own rhetorical agency. Beast’s contributions to the debate are minimal, mostly referenced rather than directly engaged. The one statement attributed to them—“I came to the ‘MJ’s paradise’ to find the broader audience… I became frustrated… I had a disagreement and left”—is a model of restrained, almost evasive rhetoric. While OP paints them as erratic, Beast’s own words are relatively measured. This contrast creates an ironic tension: if Beast is as unhinged as OP claims, why do they appear less emotionally invested in this argument than OP?
Beast’s rhetorical failure, however, lies in their inability to shift perception. While they may not be as absurd as OP describes, they have allowed themselves to be positioned as a caricature. In Booth’s terms, they have lost control of their implied authorial intent; whatever they meant to accomplish in their critiques of RoyalRoad has been subsumed by the narrative others have constructed around them. By refusing to let go of their grievances, they become a character in someone else’s story, a cautionary tale rather than an independent voice.

Roastmaster: The Trickster Ethos and the Power of Irony​

If OP is the misguided protagonist and Beast the tragic anti-hero, Roastmaster is the jester—the figure who exposes the absurdities of the narrative through strategic mockery. Booth would recognize Roastmaster’s rhetorical approach as deeply effective, relying on irony, reversal, and the ability to reveal OP’s contradictions rather than engaging directly in the argument.
Where OP relies on ethos and logos (or at least their performance), Roastmaster appeals primarily to pathos, using humor and derision to dismantle OP’s authority. Their strategy is not to argue that Beast is correct but to expose the flaws in OP’s approach. Booth discusses the power of “showing” rather than “telling,” and Roastmaster exemplifies this by making OP’s hypocrisy apparent rather than merely stating it.
Key to Roastmaster’s success is their ability to shift audience perception. While OP insists that Beast’s obsession is unhealthy, Roastmaster turns this back on OP, pointing out that they, too, are obsessed—with Beast. By framing OP’s argument as an absurd crusade, they reposition the discussion away from its original premise and toward a critique of OP’s motivations. The more OP insists they are acting out of concern, the more they reinforce Roastmaster’s point: true concern does not manifest as public shaming.
Booth might argue that Roastmaster’s approach embodies what is missing from OP’s: an awareness of the audience’s expectations. OP believes that a detailed indictment will sway the forum, but Roastmaster understands that forum culture values wit, irreverence, and self-awareness. In rhetorical terms, Roastmaster aligns with the audience, while OP alienates them. This ensures that, regardless of the logical soundness of their arguments, Roastmaster wins in the only way that matters in online discourse—by making OP look ridiculous.

The Chorus and Justabot: The Indifferent Audience and the Arbitrator​

The Chorus represents the shifting, unfocused voice of the forum at large. Some members align with OP, some with Roastmaster, but most see the argument for what it is: a pointless, self-perpetuating cycle. Booth discusses the idea of the “implied reader,” and here we see multiple implied readers—OP imagines an audience that will rally behind their moral case, while Roastmaster imagines one that appreciates a well-crafted takedown. The actual audience, however, is disengaged, treating the argument as entertainment rather than a moral battleground.
Justabot, meanwhile, serves as the inevitable moderator-ex-machina. Their presence reinforces Booth’s argument that all narratives have an authorial force guiding their conclusion. The thread, left unchecked, could spiral into infinity, but Justabot’s intervention marks the terminal point. Their decision to lock the thread is the final rhetorical act, signaling that the debate is over—not because it reached a resolution, but because it exhausted itself.

Conclusion: The Rhetoric of Internet Battles​

Analyzing this forum thread through Booth’s rhetorical framework reveals that the argument was never about truth, persuasion, or even Beast’s well-being. Instead, it was a performance of ethos—OP’s self-righteousness, Roastmaster’s wit, the Chorus’s indifference, and Justabot’s authority. Booth’s insight that “every narrative is an argument” holds true here: this was not a debate so much as a contest of identities, a struggle over who controlled the story.
Ultimately, Roastmaster understood the medium best, winning not by proving a point but by dismantling the illusion that OP ever had one. And Justabot, as all great moderators must, proved the final arbiter of the internet’s one true truth: all arguments eventually end in a locked thread.
 
Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
Joined
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The Rhetorical Construction of Internet Drama: A Richard Vatz Analysis of the ScribbleHub Forum Conflict​

The internet is a breeding ground for rhetorical construction, where meaning is not found but created, and where conflicts do not emerge from neutral realities but are brought to life by the framing of discourse. Richard Vatz, in his critique of Lloyd Bitzer’s "rhetorical situation," argues that meaning is not dictated by objective events but is instead constructed through the choices of communicators—what they highlight, what they downplay, and how they define the stakes of a discussion. In this case, the ScribbleHub forum drama, despite its superficial appearance as a simple clash between an obsessive individual (Beast) and a self-righteous crusader (OP), is a textbook demonstration of how rhetorical actors shape conflict.
By applying Vatz’s framework, we can see that this entire internet debacle was not a response to an inevitable reality but rather a deliberately framed narrative created by OP. The choice to spotlight Beast’s obsession, the insistence that it warranted intervention, and the reframing of community participation as "enabling" were all acts of rhetorical selection—without OP’s framing, this situation would have remained a minor footnote in a niche forum’s history. Instead, through OP’s selective emphasis, they transformed an otherwise ignorable quirk of a forum member into an urgent moral and psychological issue, warranting a "public intervention" in the form of an unprompted exposé.
But what does this tell us about rhetoric? What does this tell us about the nature of conflict in digital spaces? And most importantly, what does this reveal about the inherent subjectivity of “problems” and the performative nature of concern in online debates? This essay will explore these questions by deconstructing how OP, Roastmaster, and the broader forum community each acted as rhetorical agents, constructing their own versions of reality and competing for narrative dominance.

Part I: OP and the Rhetorical Creation of "Crisis"​

According to Vatz, no event inherently contains meaning; meaning is ascribed to events by communicators who decide which aspects to highlight and how to interpret them. In this case, OP plays the role of rhetorical gatekeeper, deciding that Beast’s obsession with RoyalRoad is not merely an eccentricity or a quirk of personality, but a serious community issue that must be addressed.
From a rhetorical standpoint, OP’s decision to create a thread, rather than privately messaging Beast or simply ignoring them, demonstrates a conscious act of agenda-setting. OP was not merely responding to an unavoidable reality—they were constructing a problem by framing Beast’s behavior as a moral and psychological crisis requiring intervention. This is a crucial distinction: Beast’s repetitive complaints about RoyalRoad had existed for years, yet they only became a crisis because OP framed them as such.
This is classic Vatz: meaning is not discovered, it is assigned. The moment OP chose to emphasize Beast’s obsession as a problem rather than a harmless ranting habit, the conflict was born. The very act of writing a post detailing Beast’s history, listing their alt accounts, and framing their behavior as evidence of mental instability was not a neutral act—it was an act of rhetorical creation. Without OP’s framing, Beast’s behavior would remain just another weird internet thing. With OP’s framing, it became an emergency, demanding action.
And therein lies the first major fallacy of OP’s approach: they assume that by naming Beast’s obsession as a crisis, they have somehow become an arbiter of truth. In reality, all they have done is introduce an interpretation, not an objective fact. This is why their argument begins to collapse under scrutiny—what they call "helping," others immediately recognize as public shaming disguised as intervention.

Part II: Roastmaster and the Reframing of the Debate​

If OP was the one who created the crisis through rhetorical framing, Roastmaster was the one who deconstructed it through rhetorical inversion. Their primary tactic was to turn OP’s own logic against them, exposing the hypocrisy inherent in claiming to be concerned about obsession while demonstrating obsession of their own.
From a Vatzian perspective, Roastmaster’s role is particularly fascinating. They do not attempt to deny Beast’s behavior. Instead, they challenge the very premise that this behavior warrants intervention at all. In essence, Roastmaster reframes the conversation from "Beast is unwell, and we must stop enabling them" to "OP is equally obsessive, and this intervention is an act of self-righteousness rather than genuine concern."
This is a masterstroke of rhetorical counter-construction:
  1. Where OP frames Beast as a harmful force, Roastmaster reframes OP as the actual aggressor.
  2. Where OP frames the community as enablers, Roastmaster reframes OP as the true instigator of unnecessary drama.
  3. Where OP frames the conversation as a necessary intervention, Roastmaster reframes it as pointless moral grandstanding.
By shifting the focus from Beast’s behavior to OP’s response to that behavior, Roastmaster denies OP the ability to define the crisis—instead of the conversation being about Beast’s obsession, it becomes about OP’s self-importance.
What we see here is a rhetorical power struggle over who gets to define reality. OP wants to define reality as: "Beast is unstable and must be stopped." Roastmaster counters with: "Beast’s instability is irrelevant; the real problem is OP’s sanctimonious overreaction."
This is why Roastmaster ultimately "wins" the argument—not because they "proved" Beast was rational (they didn’t even try), but because they successfully shifted the conversation away from Beast and onto OP’s own rhetorical failings. In doing so, they robbed OP of their ability to maintain control over the debate.

Part III: The Chorus, Justabot, and the Death of the Rhetorical Situation​

In Vatz’s model, not only is meaning constructed through discourse, but discourse itself must be maintained for a rhetorical situation to survive. That is, for OP’s argument to matter, it must continue being debated. Once the community refuses to engage, the situation ceases to exist.
Enter the Chorus—those forum members who chime in not to pick a side, but to roll their eyes at the sheer stupidity of the argument itself. Their response is a signal that the rhetorical framing OP fought to establish is not taking hold. Instead of rallying behind OP’s crisis, the Chorus members dismiss the entire conversation as ridiculous internet drama.
This, more than any argument made by Roastmaster, is what truly dooms OP’s mission. OP sought to create a "serious discussion" about a community problem. Instead, the community itself rejects the premise and refuses to treat it seriously.
Finally, Justabot delivers the ultimate verdict—not by engaging, not by debating, but by shutting the entire conversation down. The moment the thread is locked, OP’s constructed reality ceases to exist. Their crisis dissolves not because it was disproven, but because it was rendered irrelevant by disinterest.

Conclusion: The Internet as a Rhetorical Battleground​

The ScribbleHub forum drama is a textbook example of Vatz’s rhetorical theory in action. There was no inherent crisis—only a crisis rhetorically created by OP and then reframed by Roastmaster. At every stage, the conflict was shaped by who got to define reality, and ultimately, OP lost control of their own narrative.
The internet is filled with rhetorical battles like this—manufactured outrage, selective framing, and desperate attempts to control discourse. But as we see in this case, those who create problems do not always succeed in making them matter. OP’s attempt to manufacture an urgent issue was undone the moment the community refused to play along.
In the end, Vatz’s theory holds true: meaning is not found, it is assigned. And sometimes, no matter how loudly one insists a situation is dire… people just don’t care.
 
JayMark

JayMark

It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
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I'm winning by skipping to the Acceptance phase.
 
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