Some Elliott Smith’s fans are a weird breed, I said some because obviously, it is a very diverse group and I would never generalize, but there are some mental cases. I’m not really surprised Iman got attacked by that woman on facebook the other day, she just pretended to have a problem with his punctuation! I have known these people for a while now, they will attack you on anything, and mostly personal things.
There are many places where fans can talk about Elliott Smith’s music and inevitably the question of his death comes up regularly. The most popular place of all (and also the official website) is sweetadeline (http://www.sweetadeline.net) which has a discussion forum (sweet addy).
First of all, very early in the process, in 2003-4, any question regarding his death got censored on the discussion board. Many threads got deleted or sent to another obscure place on the Internet, and despite the protestation of some people, nothing changed. The first thread mentioning important troubling facts related to the case (in particular the fact she removed the knife from his chest) was simply deleted. Jennifer Chiba is a name that still got threads eliminated recently, although I don’t know if it is still the case today because the board has changed lately. Inevitably, a discussion around the possibility of her involvement in Elliott’s death has triggered a lot of violent reactions, people disagreeing on everything, and has lead to the removal of the discussion. Over the years, the revelation that Chiba approached the moderators of the board and befriended them, made some fans furious: she was protected and some have even said she ‘had paid’ her new friends with rare Elliott Smith’s recordings. Who knows? But I know for sure she hangs out with them occasionally.
The official board is not the only place where censorship has occurred, it happened on blogcritics.org too in a discussion related to the exact same subject. And I really don’t know why the moderators acted like this.
But there are several categories among this fanatic species.
The first category lives in some kind of naive and sweet world where everybody is nice and they refuse to imagine someone can do something bad!! The moderators of sweetaddy may belong to this one. I want to scream to these people that it was an ugly story, there were two deep wounds made with an eight-inch blade, there was blood everywhere and they were fighting loudly! But no, these people will say to you something like ‘Elliott liked her and had a relationship with her so she must be a good person’. They are the lamenting kinds, they say that we should not talk about this because it is a painful topic that only aggravates the wound, and that we should ‘respect’ the family and only focus on his life and music. I couldn’t care less about their sobbing rants, they miss the point. I repeat for them, life can be ugly, Elliott lying in his blood was a harrowing and hideous scene, and they should stop watching the world through their pink Disney glasses.
The second category of these people comes to you using their patronizing tone, telling you should not form judgments about someone that you know nothing about, and goes on saying they are better than you because they don’t judge. They also repeat over and over that knowing what happened will not raise Elliott Smith from the dead, condemning your quest twice. They also accuse you to be selfish because of your desire to fit the story with your own idea of closure. I am not sure if these ones annoy me even more or not, but they twist the reality and usually are so mal-informed about the story it is a waste of time to talk to them.
The third category is the utterly arrogant ones, that will attack you on personal things just to destabilize you. These ones know it all, they are absolutely certain we will never know if Elliott died of murder or suicide, and declare that any certain conclusion reached will be based on conjecture and blind faith. So if you are trying to look for the truth they call you a loser or even a mental case with some kind of deep personal life problems. They even want you to apologize because you are such an awful person to dare to suggest horrible things like that! These ones may be the worst, they are just pompous idiots and life is too short.
The last category is the falsely compassionate ones: they have a member of their family who has committed suicide in similar (or not) circumstances, and so they project their own story on Elliott’s. And they too have the answers, it was a suicide because the same thing happened to them. They have all figured it out and have romanticized his death for their own use and fantasy to be more like him. I just want to throw the facts up in their faces but they won’t listen pretending these are just rumors and hearsays.
This is so unfair, Elliott does not deserve naïve, patronizing, arrogant and self-indulgent fans! But I know there are also kind, intelligent and concerned people among them and this is with them we want to do what we are trying to do here.