Hello my Beautiful Watchers. You know that thing video essayists do when they start their
presentation with something seemingly irrelevant to the title and you’re momentarily confused
but assume it's going to make sense later and it usually does?....
In 2011, 13 year old Rebecca Black performed in a music video titled “Friday.”
Due to a combination of cringy lyrics, excessive autotune and general low quality in everything
except production value, the video quickly went viral on YouTube and social media as
people delighted in mocking its awfulness and directed others to it so they could do
the same.
The 4th video I ever uploaded to YouTube was a meaningless sketch where I drank a lot of
Red Bull, danced to the Lord of the Rings remix song “They’re taking the hobbits
to Isengard” and occasionally cut to me reacting to and mocking Friday.
I jumped on the bandwagon, made fun of the popular bad thing, and moved on with my life.
8 years later I was mildly perplexed to hear that Rebecca black was performing again and
that she seemed to be finding an appreciative audience. Shortly later I watched a video
on the subject by Sarah Zee… Zed, Zed?... Zee? You know, I think I’ve been in America
for so long I’ve forgotten which one of these is right and which one would be a betrayal
of my countrymen to say…
Anyway Sarah laid out the details of the story behind Rebecca Black’s Friday. That this
young lady had been the victim of a predatory producer and company that made bad music videos,
and allowed the child performing the song to take all the social media backlash while
they collected all the ad revenue from it going viral.
And backlash there had been. Black had been forced to drop out of public school due to
the constant bullying she had received from being “the Friday girl.” For years and
years no one had let her move on from this one, slightly cringy thing she’d done as
a teenager, vastly changing the course of her young life.
I felt… like shit for my small but existent participation in the angry mob that tried
to tear this poor girl's life apart.
Fortunately, it does appear that Black has successfully put Friday mostly behind her
and reclaimed her voice, starting her own YouTube channel and producing her own songs
that she has taken on tour to, as I said, an appreciative audience. Her attitude on
social media seems to be one of new found empowerment.
So happy ending there but I was still heartbroken and ashamed at what I had done, thought, and
said, and swore an oath to never take part in bullying behaviour again no matter how
fun, trendy or tempting it is to do so. Enter The Eye Of Argon.
The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis originally appeared in the tenth issue of OSFAN, a science fiction
magazine in 1970. It is generally considered to be either the worst, or at least one of
the worst fantasy books ever written.
For the last couple of decades, live readings of this book have been a source of entertainment
at writing and literary themed conventions.
Performances have been organized to recreate passages and highlight just how silly they
look and sound.
Games have been invented to see if people can get through entire chapters without laughing
or can read the original text while resisting the urge to intentionally or automatically
correct for the spelling and grammatical errors.
And don’t get me wrong. The thesis of this video is not that the book is not bad. It
is just as bad as everyone says.
Theis falls into every last bad writing trope there is and invents some new ones of his
own. The story is a cliched adolescent fantasy about a mighty barbarian traveling fantasy
lands and using his bulging muscles to defeat his foes and bed comely wrenches.
Theis also continuously uses words in slightly the wrong context, rendering the sentence
nonsensical and suggesting that he was using a thesaurus to increase his vocabulary without
fully understanding the true meaning of the words he was choosing.
Everything is over-wordy and over-described, sequential sentences will contradict each
other, the story is at best a meandering ramble and there are indeed a lot of spelling and
grammatical errors in the original draft.
The book fell under my radar a little while ago after I realised that reviews of terrible
books tended to be very successful for me because y’all love to see me exasperated,
and The Eye of Argon tended to top every “so bad it's funny” book list I found online
making it a prime target.
I even went as far to order my own copy of the book, noting at the time that it was a
little strange that the author didn’t appear to have anything to do with distributing it.
My concerns began when I started doing my customary research into the book’s backstory
and immediately started getting Friday related alarm bells going off in my head.
Let me start at the beginning and hopefully you’ll see it too.
I should admit though, that the sources I’ve been drawing from and researching for this
video were a little bit sparse and I don’t think always fully verified themselves.
Because this was a pre-Internet event that's not super well known outside of literary circles,
I didn’t have a huge amount of coverage to work with and, let's face it I’m not
an investigative journalist, so despite my best efforts it’s possible that there are
some unintentional glaring factual errors in this video that I can only apologise for.
Theis was 16 years old when his novelette was published in OSFAN.
Three issues later they also published an interview with him where he talked about his
story.
Theis comes off as pretty chill and humble about the whole thing, acknowledging that
his book was pretty badly structured and in general wasn’t great due to his lack of
writing experience but he seemed really excited and proud that his first ever book was published
in any capacity.
Not long after that, a copy of his story found its way to science fiction author Thomas N.
Scortia who was so delighted by its awfulness he sent it to another author Chelsea Quinn
Yarbro who was also highly amused, keeping her copy for years so she could loan it out
to friends.
Her then husband Don Simpson eventually made a meticulous copy of the text which was later
digitized as home computers started becoming more common.
The text was eventually printed, then later reprinted in chapbook form by Hypatia Press,
who failed to credit Theis as the author.
The company admitted they had not consulted with Theis before any of these publishings
and had omitted his name in the vain hope that he would not become aware of it and try
to stop them.
As a result the book gained even more widespread notoriety as being the worst thing ever written,
but for awhile was assumed to either be a joke or an unclaimed anonymous work before
it was eventually reattributed to Theis. In 1984, Theis was interviewed on a Californian
radio talk show, and it became immediately apparent that the constant mockery of his
work has taken a pretty serious toll on him emotionally.
Now deeply embarrassed by his story, all passion for writing was gone for him and he claims
he intends to never to write anything else ever again.
He also mentions that he’s been struggling in his personal life due to constant bullying
he’d received from being “the Eye of Argon guy”. For years and years no one had let
him move on from this one, slightly cringy thing he had done as a teenager.
I would love to say that Theis’ story has an equally happy ending to Black’s, but
unfortunately as far as I can see he never did write anything ever again, and he never
will because he died in 2002 aged 48. Copies of The Eye of Argon continued to circulate
for a few more years until what had been its missing ending was discovered and the first
paperback copy of the complete story was published by John Betancourt of Wildside Press.
Various other copies popped up occasionally, claiming to be truer replications of the original
text with all its errors and hand drawn illustrations on the margins.
The fun and games at the book’s expense continue to this day at various events and
in the newly emerged booktube community. The comparison to Friday isn’t perfect as
the pre-Internet backlash that Jim Theis received was drip fed to him over decades while Rebecca
Black got hers all at once but you see how everyone's glee at both projects’ incompetence
came at a price for the creators. The thing that actually makes Theis’ story
slightly more horrifying to me was the utter lack of consent or agency granted to him in
regards to the distribution of his work. I also couldn’t find any evidence that suggested
he made any money from the various printings of his novelette.
Like I said the Eye of Argon is bad. But it’s not excessively so by today's standards. I
mean, I could go to Wattpad, Reddit or numerous fanfiction forums and find something on par
with this in less than five minutes. Some of Jenny Nicholson’s best videos are based
on her doing exactly that. It seems somewhat unfair to me that this was
deemed the worst fantasy book ever considering the author doesn't appear to have ever had
any intention of turning it into a book. I want to make it clear that this is not a
call out video for anyone who has taken part in this decades long mockery of The Eye of
Argon. Part of the reason I made my Friday related confession at the start was to show
I am not the sinless one throwing the first stone here.
So bad it's good media brings genuine joy to people and in other circumstances that
is a wonderful thing.
The problem is we sometimes forget that the people who make these things are human beings
and the fun that we have at their expense can have drastic negative effects on them.
The fact that this was the work of a minor makes it even more tragic to me. I see The
Eye of Argon as a rare pre-Internet example of something that's becoming increasingly
common now, where doing something cringy as a child or teen can end up haunting you forever.
Would Theis have gone on to become a great writer? I mean, who knows, but I don’t see
The Eye of Argon as evidence that that’s impossible.
Some authors have natural talent, some are late bloomers and some get better slowly over
time with lots of hard work and practice until they can put out some pretty solid work that
people enjoy.
The fact that he actually started, finished and submitted his story to a magazine puts
him ahead of thousands of other wannabe authors of any age in my books.
Honestly though I think that’s almost irrelevant because the 17 year old that was interviewed
sounded like writing was making him happy and the adult that we heard from later sounded
like he’d love nothing more than the impossible dream of the whole thing just going away.
People took that youthful eagerness for the craft away from him with their laughter and
that just kind of sucks.
Sometimes we get lucky with our so bad it's funny media and we’re gifted a Tommy Wiseau,
who is so disconnected from reality they take all the negativity in stride and use it to
their advantage, or someone like EL James who is so arrogant about their horrible, damaging
work that you don’t feel like you have to worry about trashing it.
But sometimes… People get hurt and you don’t find out about it until much too late. You
can end up with situations like Theis’ or like when the actor who played Jar Jar Binks
was almost driven to suicide from all the backlash against him.
You could make the argument that in this case there's no more harm that can be done. The
author is no longer with us so there’s no more feelings to hurt, no more dreams to squash.
Why not have some fun with his book?
And while that’s not a completely illogical line of thought, thanks to my opening ramble
you now know about my oath of no intentional bullying ever again so I am going to have
to sit this one out.
So yeah The Eye of Argon, a pretty terrible short story written by a first time teenage
author that ended up spiralling well out of his control and spreading around the world
bringing mirth and merriment to thousands but crushing the dreams of its creator.
I dearly hope that Theis found satisfaction and happiness in his life in some avenue that
wasn’t writing and well here's hoping one day I find a book equally as bad with a less
depressing backstory so we can all enjoy it guilt free.
Thank you for joining me my Beautiful Watchers. Do remember that unlike certain unlucky authors,
I WOULD like my work to become widespread and the best way for you to help with that
is to leave an algorithm pleasing like, comment and mention of my awesomeness on the social
medias.
If you’re new to my channel and enjoyed this party pooping ramble do consider giving
that subscribe button the old clickeroo, I hope you all have a most pleasant day and
I will see you soon.
It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday~
Much love and appreciation to my patrons of honor: Shelby Hotz and Sam Cucinotta.
Hello again my Beautiful Watchers. I just wanted to take this opportunity to give you
a quick reminder that there’s a wonderful website called Patreon that’s been allowing
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right now you are thinking, my goodness The Dom, I can’t do that, the Llama King will
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IS EVERYTHING! Fear not, it would still be a huge help to me if you were to give that
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most pleasant day and I will see you in the next episode.
-terrible books tend to be very successful because y’all love to see me exaserbated.
Exasperated.
And let’s face it, I’m not an investigative
journ--in in-ves-ti-give-in vest-invest-ti... Ooh boy, okay. Mm hmm. Hmm.
Just noticed there’s a Ghostbusters uh, poster back there. The friend that I’m visiting
at the moment has excellent taste in movies.
That magazine might be pronounced O-S-Fan, but, I dunno, can’t seem to find anything
about it.
So bad- is my hair okay? My hair’s always okay, I’m beautiful.
-becoming increasingly common now :alarm goes off: Oh my tea is ready.