She-Hulk writer: I received death threats after tweeting criticism of South Park

The Washington Post

On Feb. 13, Marvel writer Dana Schwartz tweeted what she thought was mild criticism of South Park. "In retrospect," she tweeted, "it seems impossible to overstate the cultural damage done by SOUTH PARK, the show that portrayed earnestness as the only sin and taught that mockery is the ultimate inoculation against all criticism." Schwartz was quickly received a barrage of criticism via tweets, e-mails, blog posts and even YouTube videos. "If you stand for anything online, someone will find a way to tear it — and you — down," Schwartz writes in The Washington Post, reflecting on the experience. "The trolls, the game-theorizers, the 'both sides are equally bad' cynicism that had spread from the 2016 election into today — all of it had a flavor too familiar to me, a TV and comic-book writer who spent her middle-school years watching Comedy Central too late at night: It was the ethos of South Park.” Schwartz adds that her opinion wasn't something that critics have written about before, but with less outrage. So, Schwartz adds, "when I tweeted some of this casually on my way to work, I wasn’t expecting the tsunami I unleashed. By my lunch break, massive alt-right accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers had sicced their sycophants on me, claiming that I was trying to "cancel South Park." By the time I got home from work, nearly half a dozen videos on YouTube had popped up like poisonous mushrooms, in which men raged that I was a fat, ugly social-justice warrior liberal snowflake who couldn’t take a joke. If you’ve never experienced online trolling, there’s not much I can do to describe for you what it’s like. In the abstract, it seems like it shouldn’t be able to hurt you. In reality, it’s hundreds of thousands of people calling you an idiot, a bitch and worse — tweeting at you faster than you can block them. You’ll receive emails, a good chunk of them death threats, nearly all the rest vicious anti-Semitic slurs. You’ll get notifications that strangers are trying to hack into your personal accounts. People will bombard your employer with complaints to get you fired from your job. All the while, you’re implicitly barred from publicly sharing what’s happening to you lest people criticize you for a) whining or b) making it all up for attention. I didn’t call for South Park to be canceled. I didn’t even say I hated the show! But the nuances of my point didn’t matter. Painting critics as prudish, finger-wagging scolds is the go-to defense mechanism for those who subscribed to the show’s fragile worldview. They have to be the brave victims, the enlightened underdogs under attack by the hectoring, anti-freedom censors."