Addendum to the cover memo/Clarification (Spoiler alert!)

First, the timestamps on these posts appear to have been shifted two hours ahead. I don't know why that is (I probably forgot to change my time zone in my haste). Rest assured that this project was in a final, completed state by the 11:59 am deadline. I swear.

Speaking of the timestamps, these posts were done in reverse order precisely so that they would display "right-side-up" on-screen, as blogs are presented in anti-chronological order. (That much worked; however, I shifted the final post back in time a year, in hopes it would be hidden unless I explicitly linked to it, which I did in the penultimate post. No luck though, it still shows up.)

I also (intentionally) left out the stated purpose of my project from my cover memo/E-mail. So, as a warning, DO NOT read the rest of this post if you don't want to blow the conclusion.

Ok, ready?

This composition, in essence, challenges the value of rhetoric--something which we haven't done much of in this course. It does so by comparing my blog (which, as I'll explain anon, is as unpopular as Hanson's second album despite its use of many rhetorical devices) to my fan fiction (which is exponentially more popular, despite a near-total lack of rhetoric). Along the way I delineate a few potential reasons for this disparity in popularity--and possible junctures where my rhetoric was useless or greatly diminished in effect.

Ok, no more spoilers, and no more preambulary stuff. Here goes...

Introduction: The Kairos of Blogs & The Desire for Recognition

Everybody’s got a story to tell. Whether it’s a visit to the grandparents’ and listening to the hoary old “back in my day, we walked 25 miles to school…on a dirt road…covered in snow…through howling wind…in the middle of an air raid” story, or something more substantial like an autobiography, we’re all familiar with the clarion call to somehow at once validate our existences and, seemingly infinitely more important, make others care about our trials and tribulations. Such is the appeal of the weblog. Untold millions of Internet-savvy computer users have access to a burgeoning variety of blogging sites, and the subclasses of such blogs are nearly as numerous. Animal blogs! Personal blogs! Business blogs! Political blogs! Sex blogs! No topic, it seems, is too obscure or taboo to warrant its own personal blog ring.

How This Project Came To Be

I, for one, have been afflicted with such a chip upon my shoulder. The world, by God, should care about me and what I do! In my own shortsighted estimation at least, writing is one of my strong suits, and hence it’s only logical that I’d relish the opportunity to eloquently post onto a blog that others might read, comment on, and ultimately relieve that gnawing anxiety at the back of my mind that I'll never amount to much.

Blog posts are well and good, but even a “through-and-through academic” like yours truly (according to one Prof. D. Payne) needs a creative outlet once in awhile. Luckily, the Internet offers budding fiction authors like myself many forums where such material may be shared with a like-minded community.

The Skippable Section: Background Info

Seriously. If you’re already familiar with World of Warcraft and/or Shaman King, or you just don’t care, skip this. You have my blessing.

In 1994, California-based Blizzard Entertainment released a real-time strategy game called Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Taking place upon the island-continent of Azeroth, it proved extremely popular and spawned a number of sequels and expansion packs. Ten years later, the third such iteration (Warcraft III) had been out for over two years, and rumors of something totally new began appearing in gamer magazines…World of Warcraft (WoW), released just before Christmas 2004, was a project totally unlike previous forays into the Warcraft universe. While the previous games had been solo affairs, WoW was designated a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, which is pretty much what it sounds like—thousands of players concurrently playing in one dynamic landscape, grouping together or fighting against each other, competing to finish the same quests and kill the same monsters. Not a new idea (viz. 1997’s Ultima Online and 1999’s EverQuest) but WoW, with over 9 million active subscribers at the time of this writing, is far and away the most popular of its genre, and clearly has gotten something right.

Halfway around the world, unconventional artist Hiroyuki Takei began work on a manga (Japanese comic) titled Shaman King. Proving immensely popular with its school-age target demographic upon its debut in 1999, readership gradually fell off. By 2004 the series had been canceled in Japan after spanning 32 volumes, but its popularity resurged when the work was translated and released to an American audience. Currently, thirteen volumes of the U.S. translation have been released to generally positive reviews, but an impatient American fan base has already taken it upon itself to pen and publish fan fiction—peripherally related works that use the likenesses and personalities of Shaman King characters.

Through The Eyes of a WoW Addict: A Top-Down View of WoW’s Rhetoric…

In a nutshell, any game which takes in subscription fees as its main source of profit (including WoW) instills within its players a desire to keep forking over those fees on a monthly basis. Most of this is accomplished through rudimentary pathos. A store copy of WoW currently retails for $20 and, after the first month, requires $15 a month to continue playing. During that first “free” month, a typical player will make swift progress “leveling up” (becoming more powerful). Then, once the month is over and the subscription fee rears its ugly head, the player will typically recall the fun he had, and how quickly he progressed. The game creates pressure upon the continuing player to keep playing in a number of ways, which I can sum up (fortunately, for the sake of brevity), with a few pictures and captions (click on any picture in this blog to enlarge it):

(Left: A low-level character with typical “newbie” gear. Center: A high-level character with “end-game” gear. A semi-serious player will take upwards of a year and a half to obtain such gear, but you can’t deny it looks better than the “newbie” stuff, huh? New players will see these guys running around and want to continue playing to be just like them! Sounds corny, but it’s truer than you think. Right: The more powerful pieces of equipment in the game have level requirements, which further pressure the player into continuing his subscription. (Level 70, the requirement for the item shown above, will typically take a year of casual play from a first-timer.)

…And the “Down” Part: My WoW Blog and its (Failed?) Rhetoric

I’d like to believe that all the WoW players out there are too busy killing stuff in-game to be bothered reading my blog, but self-delusion will only get me so far, and besides, it makes for crappy Digital Media Presentations. The simple fact of the matter is, my World of Warcraft blog was unpopular, and it’s anyone’s guess why. Blogger.com has all sorts of widgets and addons and whatnot, and over the course of the project I experimented with a number of them, but to no avail.

From the get-go, I tried to create an ethos for myself that (I thought) matched with that of the average WoW player: laid-back, yet passionate about the game; somewhat vulgar, yet still erudite (but not stiffly academic); and self-deprecating but not spineless. The most readily visible spot from which I could project this invented ethos was the “About Me” addon in the right-hand column of the blog (just below the Blog Archive widget). As you can see, I’ve readily made concessions to my geekiness in an attempt to connect with my perceived target demographic: “show you my bag of dice” is a reference to pen-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, which are normally portrayed as parents’-basement nerd circle jerks where twenty-sided dice and Coke-bottle glasses commingle—but I digress. I also (ironically enough) call attention to myself as a “humble college student” (a large slice of the WoW community is pursuing post-secondary degrees), the appeal to ethos there being self-evident. My admission to being “ultra-addicted” to the game was intended to connect with the more serious players out there. There’s nothing wrong with playing WoW a little too much, I tried to say. Look at me—I play ten, twelve hours a week and I write a (cough cough) highly popular blog! Well, clicking on the “View My Complete Profile” link reveals that since my blog’s inception in mid-October, I’ve garnered a jaw-dropping 18 hits, which at the time of this writing works out to just over 0.3 a day. Quite a fan base I’ve managed to win over with my invented ethos…

Down to Brass Tacks: My Inauspicious Start

At the bottom of the page, you’ll find a poll, yet another of Blogger.com’s fun diversions. Mine features humorous, self-deprecating vote options and also, as you probably have already noticed, a distinct lack of, well, actual votes. In my first post, I attempted via ethos to appeal to the reader, and, via pathos, to keep them coming back for more. Its first paragraph is a condensed mission statement; I differentiate my blog from other, more “serious” WoW blogs in hopes of appealing to those who feel ostracized by the hard-core gamer communities that tend to denigrate “noobs,” or less serious players. Then I try to allure the reader pathetically, by promising I’ll cover some tidbits from the darker, taboo, unspoken side of WoW: the cheaters, the exploiters, the hackers. Then, as a sort of justification for believing myself qualified to write about all things WoW, I provide links to each of my higher-level characters for online viewing. In a way, this is analogous to the new practitioner who conspicuously hangs his credentials on the wall, and it’s a three-pronged attack. In terms of ethos, I portray myself as a competent, experienced WoW player worthy of keeping a blog about the game. Pathetically, it appeals to the reader’s anxiety that I may be masquerading as a WoW fanatic. Logically, it presents undeniable empirical proof that I have sloughed my way to Level 70 not on one, nor on two, but on three separate characters.

If only those appeals had worked…

Down the Rabbit Hole: My Inauspicious Continuation

Unfortunately, it’s much the same story for the remainder of the posts. In retrospect, I probably got off on the wrong foot by beginning with a four-parter on gold farming, or the (quasi-illegal) practice of outsourcing WoW players to third-world countries and selling their in-game gold and items in the U.S. for real money. It’s a topic that’s notoriously polarizing in the gaming community, and by denouncing it in my early posts, I might have alienated a good portion of my potential audience. It also doesn’t lend itself very handily to rhetorical appeals; I wasn’t, after all, trying to convince my readers of my opinion, I was just presenting the facts. I hit another rhetorical sour note a week later with this post, wherein I launch into a tirade against, in effect, a majority of the WoWverse. Not the best of ways to garner readers, I imagine.

In my opinion, I did have my moments. In particular, my piece on in-game relationships (and its follow-up) is probably the finest writing of the entire blog. I set the stage with an anecdote that most WoW players are familiar with—the dancing, scantily clad female Night Elf character accepting gold from male passers-by—and used that setup to segue into in-game romance. To lend the discourse some credence (via ethos), I hint that I am speaking from personal experience. Lest the lighthearted blog grow too serious, I insert touches of humor (pathos). For example,

9 Million Players and Not One Comment…

I’m not going to lie; it’s a huge disappointment to have put considerable effort into a blog, only to have it completely neglected by the readers. Certainly I could have done a few posts differently, but nobody commented at all—I would have welcomed criticism, even, but none arrived and none seems forthcoming. Nonetheless, as I summed up above, I still took away from the ordeal a few rhetorical strategies from the wreck. If nothing else, I laughed out loud reading back what I had written. Just imagine, if a few WoW fans had read them, they might have found them mildly humorous as well!

I Can Succeed Elsewhere: Fact or (Fan) Fiction?

While there are many sites online that harbor fan fiction, I settled on FanFiction.net (FF.net) to fulfill my writing itch. Both sites focus upon the posting of original writing, the reading of such work, and the leaving of feedback, but that’s where the similarities end. As you can see by visiting the main page, it’s a far cry from Blogger’s slick appearance. Moreover, as a site that caters to fiction authors, there aren’t many opportunities to appeal to the readers with rhetoric (entertainment writing, i.e., fiction, has no desire, no need, to “convince” the reader of anything, after all). Be that as it may, I am afforded, with my FF.net account, an “About the Author” page (from which, also, all of my published work can be accessed). Once again, I loaded up on details of invented ethos: I am, by virtue of that opening sentence, an avid WoW player (but you already knew that) and a Battlefield 2 player as well—humanizing details that signify my occasional departure from that lonely ivory tower. Lest the reader of my little bio conclude I’m all play and no work, though, I beef up my résumé by mentioning not only my pursuit of an English degree (self-deprecatingly, naturally) but also a watershed moment from my high school days. I can upload, and in fact have, an image of myself (a postage-stamp-sized one, sadly).

Function Over Form?

To be frank (you’ve no doubt noticed it yourself, if you visited my About the Author space), FF.net is a pretty butt-ugly site. Nonetheless, I found much more success with my writing there than I did at Blogger.com. It keeps almost anal-retentive stats of each piece written. (None of these stats are viewable by anyone but the author, with the exception of reviews which can be read by anyone.) For instance, here is the breakdown of everything I’ve written, as of 8 pm HST, December 11, 2007:


I can even see the breakdown of hits and reviews by chapter of each individual title I’ve published. In the case of A Shower of Kisses, my most popular work to date by raw hit total, the breakdown by chapter looks like this:

Finally, there’s the author’s stats page, which keeps track of who has placed you on their Favorite Author list, as well as how many times your About page has been accessed:

Chew on Those Numbers for a Bit...

…Ok, that’s long enough. Now, take another minute to compare these numbers with the ones I generated with my flashy, polished, reasonably-well-articulated, reasonably rhetorical Blogger site. To refresh your memory, here are the Blogger numbers. Over roughly 60 days I garnered:

*0 subscriptions;
*0 post comments; and
*18 profile views (remember, about 0.3 per day); along with
*A smattering of hits, most of which were either me, or an unattended toddler who stumbled upon it and absentmindedly hit the Refresh button several times.

Comparatively, on FanFiction.net, I (admittedly over a period roughly double that of my Blogger account) managed to attract:

*19 subscriptions (6 people on the “Author Alert List” which covers anything I write, plus 13 total from individual works);
*78 comments; and
*483 profile views (roughly 3.7 per day, or 12 times the Blogger rate); along with
*A mind-boggling 13,817 combined hits for all works (excluding the About the Author page)—approximately 100 per day.

WHY?!

Now, I’ve already confessed the rhetorical shortcomings of FF.net—its ugliness, and the lack of persuasive language inherent to the craft of fiction writing. More importantly, since both it and my blog were written by the same person, we can rule out the factor of a superior hand writing one set of the entries (and thereby attracting a wider clientele). Also remember that while WoW has a ludicrous 9 million active subscribers at present, Shaman King, the subject of all of my fan fiction pieces, has, in English-speaking countries at least, a fan base of (generously) a couple hundred thousand. By all reckoning, taking into account not only sheer numbers but also mass appeal and, not unimportantly, the presence and magnitude of rhetorical appeals, the WoW blog should have proven more popular by a landslide.

However, the numbers do not lie. All that remains is the salient question, why?

Quasi-Pathetic Appeal (aka: Sex, Sex, Sex)

A trend that’s emerged in my stats tracking is this: Generally, the racier the content, the more hits it receives, the more times it is Favorited, and the greater the likelihood it will be commented upon. To demonstrate this point, scroll back up to the above screenshots and take note of the single-chapter story Stone, Water, Twig. It’s managed a mere 94 hits and 2 comments, despite the fact it’s the second-oldest piece there (the first chapter of A Shower of Kisses is older, by maybe a day, yet has 25 times as many hits). The next most popular piece is the aforementioned A Shower of Kisses, which has received roughly 452 hits per chapter (nearly five times as many as Stone). More popular still is When Worlds Collide, a four-chapter affair (stats not pictured) that’s been accessed 2699 times, or a shade under 700 per chapter. But by an almost egregious margin, Nothing Quite Like the First Time appears to be the readers’ favorite, decisively winning with 1825 hits.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Works on FF.net are self-rated on a scale akin to that used to restrict motion pictures. I gave Stone, Water, Twig, my least popular work, a “K+” (equivalent to a PG) for mild language and non-graphic injuries. Most of the chapters in A Shower of Kisses, the next most viewed work, were given a “T” (PG-13) for romantic themes (as the title suggests) and/or coarse language. The last chapter of When Worlds Collide received an “M” (R) for strong sexuality. (Yeah, I know, you all think of me as some stiff intellectual, but I can write smut just as well as the rest of ‘em.) Nothing Quite Like the First Time, as the title implies, concerns a certain, uh, “pregnant” topic, ahem, and so received an “MA” (NC-17) for explicit sexual content. (Yep, I’m blushing just trying to remember what I wrote.)

Surely you don’t need to be Leibniz to point out the relationship between sexual content and popularity here. Don’t lie, I know you clicked the link as soon as you read “explicit sexual content.” (Oh wait, was that just me?) The point is, while sex can be an appeal to pathos, I certainly never intended it to act as one here—the X-rated stories were simply brain droppings from my repressed, twisted mind, and not part of any kind of agenda.

Here’s the Rest of the Story

The story so far: WoW is insanely popular and more addicting than ammonia-soaked crack, owing to the pathos-based attack it unleashes upon its players (outlined briefly above). Fan fiction, meanwhile, appeals only to a specialized audience. It’s a bit confounding, then, that my reasonably well executed, visually slick, rhetoric-laden WoW blog was not just beaten, but outright dominated in popularity by a visually-equivalent-to-a-Botox-less-Susan-Sarandon, rhetorically deficient fan fiction account. I’m left consoling my bruised ego and trying to make sense of it all. Ultimately just a handful of conclusions occur to me:

*Fan fiction is more popular than I thought.
*My blog really blows (or conversely, my fan fiction is just that much better written).
*Rhetoric is not a magic bullet.

Regarding the first contention, sure, it’s a possibility. Maybe there are, oh, say, half a million Shaman King fans who, by some bizarre coincidence (and much to the delight of beleaguered English teachers nationwide) all write and read fan fiction. Assuming even that far-fetched scenario is true, need I remind you that there are (to beat, flog, flail, and pulverize the dead horse) NINE MILLION active WoW accounts and counting?! Nine $%^&ing million, for @#$%^&* sake. I trust the point needs no further elucidation…

As for the second, well, you’ve seen the blog. It may not be, to use the vernacular, pimped out, nor is it festooned with, in the street parlance, bling. (“Festooned with bling,” there’s a descriptor I bet you’d never thought you’d read.) It is, however—and if you’re not a WoW player, you’ll just have to take my assertions at face value—at times insightful, occasionally humorous, and above all, rhetorical. The fan fiction is at about the same level. It isn’t Shakespeare, but on the other hand it’s free of mechanical and spelling errors (obviously; I nveer mkae misteaks) and usually tells a fairly compelling story.

So we arrive at the inexorable truth, then…

Major Premise

People can be persuaded, but not forced, to change their opinions. There is no “magic bullet.”

More rhetoricians than can be listed here—from Plato and Aristotle to Bitzer and beyond—have expounded means by which rhetoric can persuade more effectively. That such discourse is necessary betrays the salient fact that rhetoric has never been, nor will it ever be, an absolute art. It cajoles and coaxes—it does not, it cannot, coerce.

Minor Premise

Rhetoric is one such means of persuasion.

It is, in addition, probably the foremost, and arguably the only, means of persuasion extant in scholarly discourse. Even in the non-academic world, most means of persuasion can be contextualized rhetorically (e.g., the “quasi-pathetic” appeal of sexuality detailed above).

Conclusion

Rhetoric is not a “magic bullet.”

There, like a footstep that fells a house of cards, is the deconstruction of my delusion that my slick rhetorical appeals in my blog could win me a few readers. Perhaps the “quasi-pathetic” appeal of sex—or even that of being able to read a few original stories based on a relatively obscure manga series—brought me my dedicated FF.net fans, and no rhetoric was necessary. Maybe the few visitors to my WoW blog, upon visiting, realized they wanted to play the game more than they wanted to read about it, and promptly left, forgetting about its existence in the process; no amount of rhetoric could have compelled them to pull up my site again. Tangentially, the pathetic appeals inherent in WoW itself are probably only effective insofar as the players still find the game a fun outlet; not even the best-designed game can maintain a dedicated fan base if it isn’t, all rhetoric aside, fun. I don’t know. What I do know is, rhetoric is of paramount importance for any discipline that might require persuasion—but it cannot work miracles; it cannot be used as a remedy for other, more fundamental deficiencies. I hope I’ve demonstrated that sufficiently here.

Appendix I: Credits/Legal Info

All screenshots were taken by the author and edited in Adobe® Photoshop® CS3. Adobe and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems, Inc.

All external links will lead to one of the following sites, or a subdirectory thereof:
FanFiction.net
Blogger.com
Wikipedia (English)

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans © 1994 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos © 2002 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. World of Warcraft © 2004 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Warcraft®, World of Warcraft™, and all related characters and indicia are ™ and © Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

Shaman King™ by Hiroyuki Takei, and all related characters and indicia, are the intellectual property of Viz Media in the U.S. and other territories, and of other entities elsewhere. © 1999-2007 Viz Media.

Quotations from this blog should be unedited (give or take a spelling correction or a word or two in brackets) and should include a direct link to the quoted content. (From the Creative Commons license)

Appendix II: Further Reading and (sniff) Goodbye!

Following the embedded links I’ve provided in the blog above will provide you with a veritable feast of supplementary information. If you are so inclined, go ahead and enrich your mind! If you are at all interested in reading the Shaman King fan fiction I’ve mentioned so often in the body of this work, please check out my cast of characters here! I promise they’re not as bad as I made them out to be! In any event, all good things must come to an end, but I've prepared a special WoW tribute to English 307. (Not Photoshopped exceptionally well, but hey, deadlines are deadlines.) Catch you all on the flip side!

Dramatis Personae: Shaman King Characters in a Nutshell

Yoh Asakura (麻倉 葉 Asakura You) is a 15-year-old shaman—a medium through which spirits can physically interact with the living world. Trained since infancy (against his will) to effectively channel the power of such spirits, Yoh yearns for the power of the Shaman King so that he may someday achieve the slacker’s ultimate dream of the effortless life. Until then, however, Yoh must face the wrath of the throng who would also vie for the title, not to mention the smarting slaps of…

Anna Kyoyama (恐山 アンナ Kyouyama Anna), Yoh’s 16-year-old fiancée, and a powerful shaman in her own right. Their betrothal was arranged by Yoh’s family in order to preserve the famous Asakura shaman bloodline. She lost her family—and, for a time during her childhood, her own free will—to a malicious demon, and as a result is afraid to get too close to anybody, lest she lose them like her parents. She has thus adopted a perpetually cold demeanor and austere style of dress. Despite this, she cares deep down for those close to her, although she’d sooner die than admit it…

Horohoro (ホロホロ) and Tao Ren (道 レン) are teenage shamans—one an Ainu from Hokkaido, the other from China—who initially opposed Yoh, but grew to respect his happy-go-lucky, laid-back attitude and easy personality. Ryu (木刀の竜 Bokutou no Ryuu, “Wooden Sword Ryu”) is a recent high school graduate, reformed bad seed, and perpetual wanderer who admires Yoh and taps into his latent shamanic power to help with his dream of finding his “happy place”. Manta (小山田 まん太 Oyamada Manta), Yoh’s first true friend, is by far the shortest tenth-grader you’ll ever see—but his heart is big enough to make up for it. Tamao is in training from Yoh’s father; she and Yoh grew up together, but since he moved away for high school, they rarely meet, and certainly she’s never admitted having a crush on him…

Amidamaru (阿弥陀丸) is Yoh’s spirit ally, a samurai who was betrayed by his own feudal lord 600 years ago. Like any samurai worth his salt, Amidamaru is fiercely loyal to Yoh, although the latter regards him as a friend and equal rather than a subservient bodyguard. Only 23 at the time of his death, Amidamaru nonetheless possesses great insight, an asset that Yoh liberally uses when he’s in need of advice.