The fall of Twitter, the rise of Goncharov

When I tell you I fully leapt out of bed to make this post...

Hi folks, long time no weird. After an unsuccessful attempt to reinstate the regularity of this newsletter earlier this year, I’ve just not had the time nor energy to give it the love it deserves. But that’s okay, sometimes we need to put our passion projects aside for a moment to before they can regain their momentum. And sometimes we need to urgently resurrect them to talk about how an incredible collective moment of spontaneous yes, and…¹ improv can rapidly turn one bizarre image into “the greatest mafia movie (n)ever made.”

neosatsuma on Tumblr

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Welcome home

Tumblr has recently been running a series of sponsored posts featuring the tagline “Welcome home”. This is directly in reference to the momentous collapse of Twitter we are currently witnessing in real-time, and the implication that many are or will jump ship for Tumblr.

As self-aware marketing accounts go Tumblr’s isn’t the worst

I was an avid Tumblr user back in the early to mid 2010s (even amassing a small amount of the completely useless accolade that was ‘Tumblr fame’), but had all but left it behind by the end of the decade. However sometime last year or so I decided to dive back in, creating a new account just to follow a bunch of meme blogs.²

I’m so glad I did this, and it really has paid off today, as my dashboard³ is delightfully full of Goncharov (1973).

vulpes-aestatis on Tumblr

For context, the type of humour that does well on Tumblr is often incredibly esoteric and potentially impenetrable to ‘outsiders’. Particularly amongst veteran users, who have witnessed so many bizarre occurrences in the the site’s history that there has become a real sense of solidarity in the chaos.⁴ The site thrives on in-jokes, and appears to present a remarkably strong sense of cohesion and community considering there is little infrastructure to actually support it⁵.

If you understand this you’re probably one of the veterans I’m referring to. If you don’t, count yourself lucky that you can hear the phrase ‘ball pit’ without experiencing war flashbacks.

It’s this ability for large numbers of Tumblr users to spontaneously come together and unquestionably revel in the ridiculous that enables incredible moments like this to emerge.

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It started out with a boot

Legend has it, this was the exchange that started it all.

Supposedly, the post above has been circulating for some time. For those unfamiliar with Tumblr, the main functionality the site is built around is that of reblogging - that’s right, instead of screenshotting or just downright copying the posts of others, Tumblr enables users to directly reshare content from other blogs onto their own. In this case, user zootycoon shared the image, and loseremo followed the common practice of adding a screenshot to draw attention to a comment (from abandonedambition).⁶

Whilst a few posts were made about this non-existent movie in the time between the original boot post and now, it was not until user beelzeebub shared this poster on the 19th of November that the legend of Goncharov was set on its current tragectory.

Apparently beelzeebub often makes fake film posters, and certainly didn’t predict the impact this one would have

I opened Tumblr this morning to almost nothing but Goncharov content. In the span of less than two days, the site has been flooded with clips, gifs, screenshots, fan art, discussions of the plot’s symbolism, entire in-depth essays of critical analysis, and even music from the film’s soundtrack. All, of course, collectively invented by users. It’s even reached off-site, with film reviews seen on Letterboxd and fan fictions on AO3.

Edited to add: I forgot to mention, it has also gone so far as to result in the disabling of editing on the Wikipedia page for Martin Scorsese.

Amongst the many posts demonstrating a widespread and unwavering commitment to the bit, there are occasional posts from users expressing their confusion at waking up to a new apparently site-wide fandom for a geographically inconsistent 1970s mafia film. The instances of this I have seen say a lot for the generally considerate nature of Tumblr users, who are happy to provide an explanation or otherwise point towards one.

It was in fact this considerate nature that inspired me to write this post, as alongside indulging in the surreal absurdity of the joke, many are sharing and heeding reminders to tag posts with #unreality - a tag used to enable users who could be negatively impacted by distortions of reality to easily filter them from their feed.

Whilst my intention with this edition of Unreality was simply to draw your attention to this bizarre and amusing occurrence, such that you might be inspired to dive in and check out some #goncharov content yourself, I feel it has also gone somewhere towards demonstrating the stark difference in the cultures of Twitter and Tumblr.

Tumblr really does seem to be untouched by a lot of the growth-minded algorithmic horrors of other social sites, which perhaps is part of what enables its mostly hospitable userbase. Unfortunately, Tumblr also notoriously fails at making any money.

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I would like to thank Tumblr user hussyknee for providing much of the background information I used to help write this newsletter and generally make sense of this entire phenomenon. I hope you have enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed excitedly unpicking it this morning and then attempting to sum it up in the space of one email newsletter.

I’ll see ya when I see ya.

Edie x

1. The premise of ‘yes, and…’ in improvisational comedy simply means that one accepts what has been said and builds upon it (rather than questioning it) so as to keep the narrative moving forwards

2. I was actually inspired to do this by the YouTuber Ready to Glare, who spoke about how they curated a Tumblr feed of just aesthetically pleasing content so as to have an outlet for mindless scrolling that lacked the toxicity of other social media

3. Dashboard = the Tumblr term for your content feed, which unlike any other major social network is made up entirely of posts from people you actually follow, and is still presented in reverse chronological order

4. I won’t go into any depth here, as it’s truly a huge area of internet history in itself, but if you are interested to learn more I’d recommend Strange Æons on YouTube who does a great job of covering some of these utterly bizarre moments

5. No one’s followers / following list or count is visible, for example, and the search functionality is notoriously unreliable

6. Comments and tags aren’t visible on a Tumblr post unless you click to view them, and so additions to a post can be missed if they’re added in either of these spaces