this is a really interesting question to me but also kind of hard to answer? mostly because i’m not sure what you mean by “group consensus,” because i don’t necessarily feel like there is one. we don’t have as much of a hive mind as it sometimes seems, that is something i think we kind of cultivate in an attempt to make AS seem more like a coherent publication and less of a shared blog of like ~10 people, which is not how i like people to perceive us. there are a lot of things we disagree on, and those disagreements are part of what make up the content that ends up happening. we all talk about every new writer and every new article, even when it’s our own, and sometimes we reject ourselves or reject each other or heavily rewrite each other or yeah, we don’t agree. and it’s okay, and i think we’re better off for it. i don’t think there’s any repercussions for criticism; if there were, our magazine would suck and we would have failed long before now.
bottom line we are actually all pretty different, and that’s part of what makes us good. i don’t like Freedom as much as riese did; sarah doesn’t like tequila as much as i do; neither laneia nor i like glee. i am bored by entertainment/lifestyle news and i’m sure plenty of people are bored by news/politics. i guess the point is that ‘you do you’ is not just a thing we say, but words we live by! god that’s precious. but true!