Emperor Franzen Twitter account suspended

In the end, it wasn’t Darth Vader or even Oprah who brought down Emperor Franzen. It was just Twitter.

On Tuesday, the comic writer Andrew Shaffer announced that his Jonathan Franzen parody account, @EmperorFranzen, had been suspended.

[[UPDATE 3/18 5:30 p.m.: Shaffer writes, “Twitter confirmed the account was suspended for not meeting their parody guidelines. Apparently, a cloak and the word ‘Emperor’ weren’t enough to distinguish Emperor Franzen from the real Jonathan Franzen, which is kind of frightening when you think about it. They’ve offered to unsuspend it, as long as I change the name to something like @fakefranzen, to which I said, ‘Eh, forget about it.'"]]

Shaffer is best known for the pop-culture satires “Fifty Shames of Earl Grey” and “How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters.” Franzen is best known as the Great American Novelist.

Shaffer, who lives in Portland, Ore., started his @EmperorFranzen account in 2010, soon after Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine for a story about his new novel “Freedom.” “He was the biggest name in the business,” Shaffer says, “and I was a young upstart desperate for attention. I was actually a fan of his work, believe it or not.”

Franzen — as only Franzen can — had excited the twitterati into a fresh fit of rage with comments about social media. “There was a big Internet pile-on to bash him,” Shaffer remembers. “So I created the Emperor Franzen parody account to jokingly defend him. He was a mash-up of Jonathan Franzen and Emperor Palpatine from ‘Star Wars.'”

As the account attracted attention — and followers — it evolved. “At some point,” Shaffer says, “Emperor Franzen became its own thing — a parody not of Jonathan Franzen, but of holier-than-thou literary fiction writers in general, many of whom I personally know and love. I should have changed the name of the account, but never got around to it. There’s another Twitter parody now that does a much better job of poking fun at high-minded fiction writers than I ever could: @GuyInYourMFA.”

But Shaffer had his moments. Some of his favorite tweets as @EmperorFranzen are:

“Welcome to the Dark Side of Oprah’s Couch.”

“Commencement speech: Good morning, class of 2011. Now get off my lawn.”

“Just realized you are all real people. Thought Twitter was a video game and I was playing against the computer! LOL.”

Even if Twitter hadn’t suspended @EmperorFranzen, Shaffer sounds like he was ready to let the account go. “It seemed funny at the time,” he says. “Unfortunately, I was also fanning the flames of the Twitter pile-on, which I now regret after having witnessed several writers I know weather similar Twitter storms. . . . A couple of years ago at a book festival, one of his former publicists flat-out called me a troll. Whether or not that was how Franzen viewed the parody, I have no idea. I stopped tweeting from the account regularly around that time though.”

Shaffer has asked Twitter why @EmperorFranzen was suspended, but he hasn’t heard back yet. “No matter the reason, I don’t plan to ever don Emperor Franzen’s cloak again,” he says. “The joke had worn thin, and I’m not on Twitter as much as I used to be anyway. I shut the Internet off for most of the day while I’m writing. I’m just a pair of binoculars away from becoming a birding curmudgeon myself.”

Ah, freedom.