Tag: fandom

alltootay:

I love fandom but the whole thing can get so… toxic. there’s always the sense of unspoken competition to have the most followers, buy the most merch, go to the most concerts, to get noticed by and/or meet your fave at least once, and it leaves so many people feeling like they aren’t enough just because things don’t work out for them the same way that they do for others. it’s okay to be sad or jealous or disappointed. but regardless of whether you can go to concerts and get noticed or not, you’re not any less of a fan. your worth is not defined by what you have, and it’s certainly not defined by others.

bonehandledknife:

anneapocalypse:

Being an active participant in fandom requires a certain level of self-regulating in order to be a healthy activity. It requires the ability to say “Not for me,” or “Not today,” and walk away.

We can have conversations about patterns we see in fanworks. We can discuss how we portray characters and relationships, how to effectively convey what we want to in writing, how to sensitively approach representations of marginalized characters. But having those conversations productively requires that we approach each other in good faith, and it requires the ability to self-regulate–including recognizing that often there is no hard line, no black and white answer, and we won’t always come to the same conclusions.

It requires an understanding up front that eliminating all fanworks we don’t care for is not the end goal of these conversations.

I’ll give a personal example. There is a ship that deeply, viscerally upsets me in like 95% of its iterations. I can explain why I don’t like it if asked. I’ve written about why I don’t think it’s handled well in canon.

And if I wanted to–if I wanted to–I could make a very convincing-sounding argument for why that ship is objectively bad and wrong and no one should ship it. Not because that’s objectively right, mind you, but because I’m good at arguing. I could slap that together in like… ten minutes, probably.

I don’t do that. If I vent about it on my own blog, it’s as infrequently as I can manage, because I do my best to avoid the content that upsets me. I don’t seek it out to get riled up about it. I don’t seek out content that upsets me, read it in its entirety, and then leave angry comments and send my friends to harass the author. I don’t choose a high-profile writer for the content I don’t like and engage in a targeted campaign of harassment against them all while claiming to be addressing a general problem.

If you are deliberately seeking out content that you know will upset you and reading it anyway and then feeling that you need to take those bad feelings out on the creator, you are not taking care of yourself. You are not engaging in healthy behavior or productive coping mechanisms. You are not keeping yourself safe, and you are not helping to make fandom safer for others. You are not engaging in good faith.

If you find that you do this and you can’t seem to stop, you may need to take some kind of further steps up to and including taking a break from fandom. I’m serious. I’ve taken breaks myself for that exact reason. There’s no shame in it. 

Please monitor your own ability to self-regulate. Please actively evaluate whether or not you are engaging in healthy and productive behavior, for yourself and for others.

If you are deliberately seeking out content that you know will upset you and reading it anyway and then feeling that you need to take those bad feelings out on the creator, you are not taking care of yourself. 

elletromil:

Seriously, stop trying to call people out and police what they like because “that tiny bit i thought was problematic”. Newsflash, nobody’s perfect, no one is going to be entirely fair.

Allow people to like and not like whatever they want. If they attack you for liking or not liking something, then okay, defend yourself if you feel up to it. But if you are going tobe the one attacking them, no matter how “nice” the wording of your attack is because they are not of the same opinion as you are, that’s not the right way to do it.

People, you need to start learning to ignore some stuff. It’s okay to have some trusted friends to complain about stuff, but dear lord, be mindful of the stuff you do put on in the fandom.

Everybody’s human and nobody’s perfect. Get over it. The world doesn’t revolve around you. And if you don’t like what you see on tumblr, the unfollow and block buttons are there for a reason.

femservice:

Here is the secret to fandom:

Give zero fucks about what anyone else is doing.

Seriously.  I mean it.  Because inevitably you will love something that no one else loves.  Or you will love something that everyone loves and people will shit all over it because it’s “so trite and unimaginative and done.” Or you will love something that no one else has ever heard of.  Or you will love something dark and edgy and or obscure and people will roll their eyes and say, “What, do you want people to think you’re dark and edgy and obscure?”

Alternatively, you will not love the thing that everyone else loves, and you will wonder what precisely is wrong with you that the sight of that thing is aggravating the shit out of you now when the whole world sings its praises as one.

People will irritate you.  They’ll irritate you with headcanons that make no sense and misinterpretations of canon.  They will make the same jokes 500 times.  They will overwhelm your corner of fandom with something you either are tired of hearing about or don’t care about.  They will post art that isn’t theirs.  You will meet people who think you are the greatest person ever and bombard you with messages  only to wander off when they find someone new or shinier; you will meet people whom you admire and who do not really seem to notice you exist. 

So give zero fucks about it.  Seriously.  Like what you like, blacklist what you need to blacklist, and ignore everything else.  Be friends, play nice, enjoy it.  And in the meantime, just do you.  Like what you like, love what you love, and to hell with all the rest of it.