Mabel and Methodology

     For an upcoming research project on social media phenomena, I’m planning on discussing the internet’s hatred of the character Mabel Pines, from Alex Hirsch’s/Disney’s Gravity Falls. I plan on linking this topic to the way that the internet makes preteen girls feel bad, constantly bashing boy bands or Twilight or shopping for clothes, and how that pushes young girls into the “not like the other girls” boat, which now, they’re also shamed for. There’s no winning, and I feel that the internet’s treatment of Mabel is a kind of encapsulates this strange hatred—even a fictional 12-year-old girl from a kids’ show isn’t safe from this phenomenon. In this post, I’ll be discussing the methodology for data-gathering I’m currently planning on. This is a work in progress, so my methodology will likely undergo some changes and see some additions before the final product.

     First of all, I plan on analyzing two YouTube videos and the comment sections below them. The videos are “Mabel is Terrible” (parts one and two) by the YouTuber, “CC West.” The first one has over a million views, and 11,404 comments. The second has 191,717 views, and 1,439 comments. I plan on categorizing the comments into “Part 1—Mabel is bad (simple),’ ‘Part 1—Mabel is bad (complex),” “Part 1--Mabel is good (simple),” and “Part 1—Mabel is good (complex)”, and then repeating those categories for the second part.  The categories labeled “simple” will be where brief comments go, and “complex” will be for longer comments that either try to add something to the argument or make an argument of their own. I don’t plan on categorizing every comment, but I might put 10 examples or so into each category. I may not be able to find that many “Mabel is good” arguments, however. I haven’t found any yet.

     Secondly, I plan on searching Mabel’s tags on Instagram, and looking for any debate about her character that I can find. The Gravity Falls fandom is kind of in shambles now, since it ended several years ago, so the amount of posts to find is somewhat finite. However, I will try to find a maximum of five “Mabel is good” posts and another five “Mabel is bad” posts and will discuss the arguments that ensue in their comment sections. From what I’ve found so far, these arguments are usually very small, so I don’t currently feel the need to categorize them.

     Third, I plan on using Twitter, and some select Reddit posts (such as this gem) to delve into the way that people hate teenage girls. For Twitter, I’ll be searching word combinations such as “girls are annoying,” just “girls,” and literally just typing in “I hate girls”’ has yielded a surprising amount of genuine posts about “just hating it when girls do (insert random thing here.)”  Also, I’ll be searching for trends associated with girls around that age, such as BTS, K-pop, vsco, and so on. I’ll be categorizing all Twitter posts that I use into “Not like the other girls” and “Not a girl in any way but hates them.” People like this man and all of the men he retweets are great (by which I mean infuriating on a moral level) examples to work with. Reddit, I’ll probably only use a few for. Finding Reddit posts that trash girls is fairly easy with so much as a Google search.

I’ll then take a brief break from analyzing separate data to point out common threads between people’s hatred of Mabel and hatred of young girls.

     Then, I’ll get into the “not like the other girls” discussion. I’ll be using the subreddit “r/notliketheothergirls” for this one. This subreddit not only offers examples of girls striving to prove that they aren’t what the internet tells them that they are, but also of people shaming them even then, in the posts and comments. I’ll probably be selecting three to five of these to analyze.