enneamage

[enneamage]

miwb… wow I haven’t heard that name in a long time. i miss the old critblr blogs, it’s sad how many in this space would so often delete upon retiring. Leave it up for future internet historians !!

Ever since curiouscat went down a tragic amount of lore was lost. I wonder how this whole scene will be remembered years down the line, I feel like it has/had enough grit to be remembered as a distinct and kinda edgy thing.

[enneamage]

hi enneamage,

i was enneawondering what got you into the critblr space. what drove you to come to tumblr? what drove you specifically to This space? also what got you into enneagram? you seem to have an interest in sociology and psychology (understatement?), is there any books you would recommend to begin? through what path did you take to learn all that you did? should i be asking questions about the admin of critblr blog to the critblr blog admin? is this grilling? is this an interrogation? lord knows.

thanks and kind regards,

enneanonymous

Anon you are being so cute right now jeez 

Looking back five years ago on this particular topic is kind of crazy for me now even though I’m still riding the wave of it because of how massively consequential lockdown was for the world and how explosive MCYT was within/because of lockdown. Since the story is book-ended by ‘normalcy’ on both sides it’s like a nesting-doll memory going that far deep into how I got here. 

The story is fairly short in terms of how I caught wind of the DSMP online moment: I was referred by a friend, who was referred by the tiktok algorithm. They sold me on it as a cultural moment and I came in to sightsee and also have something to keep up with in the face of long painful days of nothing. I saw some animatics, the potato war, some big lore clips, and I was in the door pretty easy from there. 

Fandom habits don’t tend to change that quickly, but people were using new words (duo names) and balancing C! fandom with CC! Fandom in new tense and interesting ways (<- more new language, useful language as well) so I committed to people-watching on top of content skimming. I was sniffing around the sub-pockets of the fandom and checking out the little offshots, especially the ones that people kept warning each other about. I never engaged with the transformative fandom stuff as much as I could have– I would look at art and check out what was going on in Ao3 tags broadly but I actually didn’t dig too far into the writing itself as much as what people were writing and how they were writing it. (I picked up the freak habit of opening ao3 work to the comments to see what people were saying about a fic rather than reading the thing itself around this time.) 

Main was pretty much inhospitable to people with open doubts, and I did lead with my doubt because of the sweetness/faith/fandom-forward approach that the space had was pretty obviously an optimistic revision of the people they were processing. (Which was necessary at the time in terms of supply and demand! It was civilizing even, because it did have an effect on how CCs acted. DSMP got popular on the back of people wanting something to believe in / invest in.) I knew too much about what to expect from different kinds of people for the frame that Main was applying/building to seem right, so I kept it all to myself until later/now. I remember while it was happening that I thought of lurking main and enjoying going along for the ride as one of the more fucked-up fandom experiences I’ve ever had internally, because it was about being willing to go along / letting myself temporarily ‘believe’ in a situation that I more or less knew would end in disaster for real people. I had never seen a situation comparable to it that played out well, so I had a lot of degrees of removal from mainstream fandom happenings emotionally. I remember thinking around this time that it was deeply ironic that one of the main fandom anthems was about the bittersweetness of an imminent breakup. I also thought I might control it by watching someone who seemed relatively normal and boy oh boy am I glad I never spoke my “this time I’m going to be as chill as possible” intention out loud to anyone because that did not hold. 

I stand hands to the sky and confess the blatantly obvious: I was a Wilbur main (in a casual way) for like… a few months before I caught wind that something was genuinely off, after which a bloodhound nose and increasing ties to the gossip scene focused my attention to near these parts. (Shoutout Charlie, I know we didn’t agree on the details but I would not be here if not for him because his anons brought up crit a few times in curious cat.) I started out as an anon on another blog (MIWB) and made a blog to post about a few things that I was pleasantly surprised other anons wanted me to elaborate on, so I mooched off the pre-existing crit audience #nepoblog. It actually took me a little bit before I figured out that crit was associated with active leaking and not just talking about leaks but by that time people liked me and the fear was dulled. I love my objectively dangerous friends (◕‿◕✿).

[enneamage]

How do you analyze people so well?

I feel like most of things flew above my head, until someone else points them out 🙂‍↕️. I just really want to get better at noticing things and analyzing others.

One of the problem i run into when i try to do that (mostly i try to analyze ccs), is that a lot of things could mean different things and how i, as a simple viewer, can know exactly what it is. Is it just a bit, a character that they’re playing or a glimpse of truth?

Love your blog ❤️

I feel like in the very beginning when I was watching CCs as a sprout I wasn’t that good at reading them and had to come into it over time, so for starters don’t worry if things don’t come to you super fast. A lot of people skills build up over time to give you more flexibility, and reading people is definitely one of them. I think that sooner or later most bloggers are cursed with intuitive knowledge about at least one CC, and you don’t always get to choose which one. Some people also just ‘give themselves away’ less so your scepticism against your own guesses are healthy on a one-off basis, you can always look for patterns over time. 

Over the course of this blog, my overall long-term focus was on a small number of CCs since those were the ones I could weigh in on. I could loosely grasp a few others based on what I knew about type, but the people that I think I was making unique observations for were kind of luck of the draw. I also constantly hedge my statements which can make it look like I’m more right than I am, I promise I ate dirt pretty often looking back. 

My bag of tricks is pretty open, my knowledge of how people act is supplemented a lot by being an enneagram gremlin and a pseudo-psych enthusiast as well, so that helped trickle down into translating a gut feeling into active analysis and vice-versa. I also endorse The Gut Feeling, but that one can’t be taught, although it can be refined over time. Maybe I can say to not be afraid to search up exactly what you’re wondering about instead of putting pressure on yourself to re-invent the wheel, in a general personality and behavior sense? It might not always be that easy to find but half of my insights are me going “oh, x reminds me of y” on some level. Maybe it’s the art of stockpiling info for when the time is right and intuition meets up with catching a glimpse of something.

[enneamage]

hey i hope your doing okay <3

All good in Mage territory, life tumbles me forward and I move with it. I'm chewing on a few non-internet people for my personal enrichment now that I'm holding on more loosely to the space. I got good news recently so I am riding that high for as long as I can 🎉!

[enneamage]

Do you think it’s good and possible for teenagers and adults to have a genuine and healthy friendships?

I was reminiscing those type of friendships between ccs. Some of them turned out fine (from outside perspective) and some aged horribly.

Idk it’s seems like a complicated thing, can’t quite decide what side am I on

This one is a hard one because the internet can be such a corrupting force on even the most benign interactions. Monetised internet / showbusiness internet even more so, when we’re talking CCs. I touched a bit on the conditions where adults can wander/slide/drop straight down on purpose into damaging places with younger people before, but this topic kind of expands out endlessly as you said. 

I think that having role models and older people in one’s life as a young person feels so good that it becomes something you’ve gotta be careful about, but those feelings don’t come from an inherently bad place. You want to know what being a person can be and now you’ve got someone to tell you, fuckin’ sweet. People are probably hard-wired to relate in this way. I also think that friend-mentoring also feels really good if you’re the right person for the job, but you’ve got to bring a functional sense of ethics to the table, in the way that you would ideally do anyway as a half-rolemodel. 

The dark secret is that young people who are full of energy/kindness/eagerness/vulnerability can be very gratifying to be around, and one needs to be disciplined enough to pass up on ‘an opportunity’ to engage with those traits in a way that only benefits the adult. The issue is partly that the people who want to be friends with minors the most are the ones that should be least trusted with that guideline, because it’s easy to make someone like that a dumping ground for psychic baggage and god knows what else. Emotionally isolated adults, which can easily be internet as well as IRL adults, may see minors as a very rare chance to experience things that they think they can’t with people their age. This goes downhill fast. 

‘Real’ friendships are broadly characterised by being mutual, but what people give and take from them are rarely perfect 50-50 mirrors, so you’ve just got to be aware of the connection being more 70-30 with guardrails in place. Trying to go 50-50 when the playing field and the players aren’t 50-50 doesn’t work– it especially doesn’t work when it’s 30-70 tipped in the adults ‘favor’ in terms of benefit, as the younger person becomes the vent sponge and the place that the adult leaches their emotional gratification from. 

I’m not a huge face person, I don’t think of myself as someone who 100% needs to know how someone sounds and acts to make ongoing judgement calls about what they’ve got going on, but this trait is not universal. Some people really need to look into someone’s face and get that hard, material bio-feedback about the person in front of them to remember the situation that they’re in, otherwise they’ll under-attend to cognitive empathy and fill in the blanks badly. I think online text friendships can move sideways when the adult isn’t constantly being given visual cues as to how not-adult their adult-typing friend is (in some cases.) 

Voice and video calls are in a grey area for different reasons, because of the isolation of the situation warping the context. If you’re at work with adults and minors, which is the classic mixed age environment, I think you can get something very friendly going, but the context civilises that a lot. I also think third-person accountability can be part of what keeps these friendships decent, keeping people from doing things that third parties wouldn’t find weird through the power of shame. Ideally people have functional senses of ethics that don’t need all that, as you would want from and for any human you can be friends with, but in breaking things down into their moving parts this makes a difference.

[enneamage]

i was wondering if you could expand on the 5w4 not rare in lurking spaces but is irl? it’s facinating to me. i also wonder if types are just unlabeled in spaces, or if ppl mistype themselves and that’s why some are popping up more often than others?

I guess I can’t come with hard data on this, but a big thing for Fives is the urge to hang back and study a situation before jumping into it. Niche lurking is kind of like a sifter, people all around the world can filter through to a certain 'space' if they have the taste for it, which will give you pretty different numbers over a location-based sample. Being Online can also be a way to be around people while staying within conditions that won't exaust the industrial-strength introversion-- unless they’re scrolling in public they may be reclusive in physical life to hang out in digital learning-space. It’s not hard to wrangle Fives in the wild if you have a keen eye, but big concentrations of Fives out for long periods of time are kind of rare in social gatherings (Except science-heavy nerd spaces? Maybe? But those might be hostile for different reasons, hard sciences aren’t actually the silver bullet people might think when looking for Fives.)

Fives do get some false positives because some of the worse literature/tests just makes them sound like “The Smart Ones” so anyone who has an introverted learning streak gets thrown in the basket if people don't double-check. I toot this horn when I can but basically every type has smart people who notice important things about the world, but unfortunately enneagram writing can lean fairly critical of people in general so you hear much less about the positives unless they’re stereotypical.

[enneamage]

Read Character and Neurosis. I think you would like it.

Purchased o7

[enneamage]

enneamage can you tell us your enneatype. enneathanks <3

5w4! Not rare in lurking spaces but harder to find IRL.

[enneamage]

ur awesome and well spoken mage. Thanks for the great analysis over the years xoxo

Thank you anon ;-; <3

[enneamage]

Okay so the sound of silence radiating from my own black-hole askbox output became too much for even me to handle. I must come clean, I never got into the habit of watching SUIT. I am now among the population of people who see the thumbnail in their for-you page and never click because I am busy as hell and also not feeling it. Is this a good change? Is it a sign of the times? I just don’t have the hour to burn anymore, and I wave the right to interpret or reinterpret what the brighton-based CCs have been up to now that my foothold is gone. I would have liked to be more intentional with the advancing stages of my soft-retirement, but distraction and inertia hit me with the one-two punch and I’m now probably less informed than the average lurker. 

I had a thing midway through this blog that was mostly in my head, and it was the idea that while most CCs probably couldn’t be ‘saved’ from their context, interested lurkers could probably benefit from some analysis inspired by when things go wrong for their own lives. People have been very nice to me when they’ve said that my posts are interesting and useful, and since things are getting more sparse I want to put out a non-final but still deeply sincere “thank you for reading my stuff,” as I found meaning at a very weird time in my life by being on here. People wanting to talk to me and hear from me meant and still means a lot, which is why my tiny little heart has been acting up as I realised that I won’t be able to keep my end of the conversation up anymore. I always surprise myself with how hard I take goodbyes, and this isn’t even a full one as I’m still floating around the door, but I know I want to make a closurepost while I have the time. 

Turning the spotlight on the people who followed me back then and now, keep your head above water and know that the line between an idol and a lurker can be arbitrary bits of luck and circumstance. There is no more or less substance to a ‘big personality’ than an audience member, and if you ever feel like you’re floating to the bottom of anonymity and can’t feel your hands and feet and reflection in a way that matters anymore, they will be waiting for you when you return.

[enneamage]

If enneagram is changeable over time what is Clingy's current type? Tubbo I think definitely hits the 8w9 mark now. I am currently loving Tom's silent power, the more this guy stays in touch with reality and outside his Brighton clique the more he will improve. He does not seem that 6 Insecurity by the way Jack and Harry talk to him every time.

Content wise, Tubbo is getting bold and Tom is getting out of his comfort zone (Tom's personality switch is much more smooth). How would you take into account the Depression diagnosis to calibrate his type?

Enneagram stuff is flexible within itself, but when it comes to core types it’s actually pretty solid, so they stay 9w8 and 6w7 respectively. The thing is, this is a good thing. If someone were to do a core type transplant somehow, they would inherit the problems of the other type and theoretically start from zero again instead of working from the self-knowledge and development that they got through the years working with their own nature. I like enneagram stuff because it’s more fluid in terms of disintegration and growth than MBTI (Which historically came off as pretty static to me but I could be wrong) but isn’t as free-for-all as stuff like trait measuring in the science-y way. 

If Tubbo is going after what he wants, being assertive and leading with his sense of justice, that's going to be the best of Three integration and getting the most out of his Eight wing. I hear less about him lately but that’s my own busy-ness talking so I’ll have to take people's words for what he’s up to. 

Tommy might be on a journey to relaxing into Nine integration? One day? Maybe? But it’s more likely that his Six anxiousness is still at the helm and he’s just putting new feelers out to try and feel trust again. He might even be fighting back some Three disintegration with how tempting it is to be over-deliberate with how he presents himself if it “gets him where he wants to go.” The depression is clearly complicating things but his relationship to his persona is in flux right now so it’s hard to know where he’s landing. I’m still not good at being optimistic about him turning to live showbusiness to ground himself, because that industry is patient zero when it comes to deception and brutality in entertainment and he has seen enough betrayal for one lifetime. Also, this just popped up on my Youtube feed and illustrates why he’ll always kind of be tied to the online space if he wants to keep working, it’s not just a transition period thing (unless he gets hit by lightning twice, so to speak). Since I’m more of a critic / Audience Agency guy than a creative I’ll go on record to say that audiences only existing just to reward when creators do a good job never sat right with me, you gotta be offering something they want if you want to benefit from their time and attention, so this is not an unfair hoop to keep in the air.

[enneamage]

any thoughts on tommy’s latest video/his square videos? he seems to like to wrap up every video with a happily ever after/i got through it/i’m fine now conclusion which fails to ring true because he’s obviously not

I think that he’s really trying to lean into the idea of entering a different era (and he will, not casting doubt on that), because the emotional toll of him thinking that he’ll stay stuck is too heavy. He keeps telling stories about finding a second chance in comedy and Real Life and finding that fulfilling, and while my criticisms about him being too out-of-touch right now to be a social-critic style comedian (even in the goofy way) still stand, he needs to cling onto hope for change because he’s going somewhere bad if he doesn’t. 

Being in nature and touching grass has often been good for him so his traveling was a smart move, the travel vlog vibes are sweet, he just needs to bring his people next time. I hope he does take time to figure things out but as you kind of pointed out there’s an element of trying to rush towards/away from Something that’s influencing his actions fairly heavily. 

Side note: To make literally anything regarding the state of the world right now about Tommy should probably be a punishable offense, but on the micro-scale I’m concerned that he’s going to say something onstage in that kind of blind way he makes vague stabs in an attempt to let off steam and hit an unimaginably raw nerve. The world of now is not the world of three months ago, I think he could get tangled up in something bad very quickly if he doesn’t adjust his approach to certain topics.

[enneamage]

Hi I’m new here, I’ve had fun reading through your analyses! Was wondering if you’d be willing to share a bit more insight on Techno and why you type him as a 9w8. I know you mentioned flow activities being more of a 9 thing, just curious if there’s any other info crumbs that lead you to that typing. I see a lot of people type him as a 5 due to how he was private and intellectual, but I know these aren’t specific to 5s

Nines in general can be hard to sift out from other types definitely, but with Five it’s extra sticky because of the ‘smart and thoughtful’ part. I try to do my part to separate out the association (in every way I can #oftenwrong) and one of the big ones I turn to is baseline agreeableness, which Fives tend to have less of. On average Fives are much more likely to lead with a ‘no’ or a denial if they don’t want to do something, while Nines tend to go along and get roped into things a bit more. Techno had boundaries, but was overall very agreeable to his friends and liked to go along with them when he could. 

Another thing is Three integration, where self-actualisation looked like putting a saddle on that flow-activity streak and taking it to the top with flare and intentionality. Techno being on that grind and putting his all into taking his unlikely shot (and credit for that shot) was a form of Three integration coming out, and I’m very glad he got to see the massive success that he did when things were at their peak. Fives don’t necessarily grow in that direction as much as they get more nervy with being engaged and wanting things in the irl world, since that's more what they feel cut off from. This gets a bit muddy with Techno’s Eight wing giving him a bit of that flavor, but it wasn’t his arc in the same way. 

Techno was honestly a vibes-call first and foremost, which is probably a frustrating answer but when you know what to look for it’s the most readily available thing about him. He walked a very interesting line of ultimately being very accepting and energetically undemanding, even when he was doing self-promo like crazy. Fives can also feel very self-contained in the name of keeping independence from their surroundings, but they often lack the capacity to merge and really sync up energetically with a wide range of different people like a Nine can without even thinking about it. Some Nines have a particular ‘welcoming without being imposing’ vibe, which a lot of people like. I think he had a distinct balance of these things that lands him in 9w8 territory.

[enneamage]

Re: Why is Dream so easy to hate anon. I agree but may I add on to something. Sorry for this but erm actually 🤓 he is a typical lolcow. Maybe not at the beginning, but from people's outside perspective he definitely is very susceptible to falling for responding to drama both publicly and constantly. And it's very hard to keep up with everything unless you're constantly online so it just looks like a bunch of nonsense to a casual audience. I often wonder if he would have developed this reputation if he just deleted twitter and fucked off like Fundy.

This is also true! If I didn't have an ear to the ground with crit I do not think I would be able to figure out what was going on every time there was a flare-up. Even if he doesn't go for it every time (because he does get shit more or less constantly depending where you look) it's hard to tell from the outside in because of his reputation.

[enneamage]

A story in two parts. Sometimes I’ll get an ask right before a discourse firestorm kicks off and the task of answering it quadruples in size just with time and context. This is very much one of those times. 

This is going to be about how people react to Dream rather than an essence-reading of him, partly because one of the main hooks that he brings into situations, intentionally or not, is interpretation. Piece of work that he may be, I do also believe that he is literally misunderstood a lot of the time (context and fact-keeping getting lost), and I’ve used up a lot of my usefulness on that front already. 

In light of recent events reminding me how things were when the brakes were off, I’ll say that I think that Dream’s refusal to stay down or to instinctively reach out when something is happening is a big pillar of why people retaliate so hard. Dream has consistently refused to be done away with, on a reflexive level. A lot of the social mechanisms that crowds have for shutting people up or making them leave have not worked with Dream, and between that and his natural aptitude for being attention-getting (even when he doesn’t mean to be) it seems to drive people to bigger and bigger extremes to try to nail the coffin shut. He does eventually back off, but often not when people prefer, and I think some of that erratic feeling gets under peoples skin.

The people who do more and get away with it tend to have a minimising way of going about things, the act of sweeping things under the rug and carrying on happens on a level that keeps things as bland and low-key as possible. This will depend on who the audience is as well, there’s certainly people who have audiences that don’t give a damn or don’t know about the details of certain events, which also creates that detachment. Youtube audiences tend to have to ‘pass through’ other social media forms for things like active pushback to really pick up steam, and Dream has/had a big ‘engaged’ following on the back of DSMP and his manhunt series, which ignited when the right information was put in front of them. People are also strongly primed to expect bad things from minecraft youtubers by now since this has been an ongoing pattern, so people less invested in him as a person and more as a symbol can take things as par for the course. 

You’re right to notice that the people who will throw anything at him without caring what they’re doing or saying aren’t really coming from an enlightened place. People making snitty grooming/assault jokes without caring about the subject matter tend to care more about getting a dunk in than protecting people, and that’s a part that tends to chafe me. I think that Dream has lolcow status on top of everything else, which is why things get so muddy when it's time to talk things out.

[enneamage]

any thoughts on the current situation? dream crash out is. Intense.

I’m holding off on saying anything right now because this feels like a situation that will change a little bit every five hours and I work too slow to jump the gun. I was working on a response to another ask before this started to uncork, so for now my hands are in the air and I’m going to wait until things have slowed down again before I can give any kind of summary.

In general: I have a bad feeling about this. We’ve been building up to it for a while but there’s something very ‘mutually assured destruction’ about the energy in the air right now.

[enneamage]

this is by no means a super thoughtful observation, but on here we don't really ..attach (lmao) to ccs who are not attachment types (369). imo attachment types dominate humanity anyways but there is a bigger convo to be had about why we prefer the attachment types *so* much, and why fandom of hexad type ccs doesn't "stick" as long or as successfully.

!!! Hello, 

I feel like part of what gets Nines and Sixes big attached lurker followings is Nines and Sixes are both also likely to be attached and invested lurkers, so they’ll settle down into being attentive to either their own type or start to follow each other as compliments. Considering what someone might assume Threes would default to fame-wise it can sometimes stand out to me that there aren’t as many in the public eye as we might think, and there’s a bit of tendency to relate to them more symbolically than as people-people (maybe a bit better at hiding in plain sight?) versus Sixes and Nines who get bug-in-a-jar’d a bit more. 

I have a theory that being exactly half-weird is kind of the sweet spot for investment. If someone was only entirely normcore and unremarkable there wouldn't be anything to double-take at, but if they were only completely strange they would be easy to dismiss. I think being half-strange, half familiar and half baffling, makes people want to solve the puzzle or fill in the blanks the most. When there’s just enough self-disclosure to get a sense of a person and then keep the snowball rolling from there, I think that’s also fertile ground. 

I do think there’s a notable difference between general casual fandom and the more proactive analytical people that pop up over here. Tumblr has always had a subset of people who take an iconoclastic edge to their interests and dig into things more deeply than they might be able to elsewhere, something something niche nerd website. When the meteor hit and the userbase drained out and then kinda trickled back in again some of this was probably lost (as well as just… time, pouring one out for the lost bloggers) this might have gotten buried, but spaces like this butterfly-effect it back out again.