Here are my additions to OPâs post. This is heavily based on what I have witnessed. Feel free to add personal experience or anything I may have missed.
Encouraging harassment campaigns of a fan writer/fanartist you hate, resulting in said fan writer/fanartist leaving the internet for the sake of their own safety and mental health. Or it gets so bad that they get ran off the internet.
Falsely accusing fans of crimes over fiction (which is illegal by the way).
Prioritizing fictional characters over real life people (treating fictional characters like real people and treating real people like they are fictional characters).
Moral grandstanding over fiction someone personally hates. Which is made ironic when the original media itself has content just as dark as the dark fanart and fanfiction, itâs worse than those, or the person who is making a moral grandstanding over fiction is into other forms of media that is worse in terms of dark content. For instance, and I know I said this a lot, but that one time people were attacking the girl who made The Coffin of Andy and Leyley and one person said that Silent Hill is the better horror game to play because it doesnât have the gross disgusting incest. Silent Hill DOES have that, and much worse.
People who started harassment campaigns and were straight up cyber bullying barely being held accountable for their actions.
Equating crimes like pedophilia to attraction to certain fictional characters, insulting victims of CSA or have had CSEM made of them in the process. If you think that illegal activity is happening, why havenât you called the police then? Oh right, because the police cannot take action on a fanfiction you think is disgusting. If you STILL somehow dinât get why thatâs bad, itâs the equivalent of those dumb news reporters equating playing a game like Manhunt to real life murder, which trivializes the criminalâs crime, and insults victims of murder and the victimsâ families. The police and the judge cannot take action on a fanfiction or fanart the same way they cannot take action against a video game. In fact, you can get fined and/or jailed for making a false report.
On the same topic of victims, people straight up invalidating the victims that use FICTION as a coping mechanism and tell them to âget a better one,â all while treating them like trash. Why? Art and writing are recommended by therapists as a healthy way of coping, because the person is not hurting themselves or others. Would you much rather they go out and hurt real people? Because that is practically what youâre implying.
The hypocrisy is everywhere to the point where it feels like itâs staged or itâs just awful rage bait. Because ainât no way you can strongly hate something that you label as degenerate, and yet⌠you make or interact with content that is just as degenerate or worse. Double standards are a thing too, because itâs okay when fictional children get put in dangerous situations where they could be killed or injured badly, but itâs never okay to age them up (even if it isnât for smut purposes). Also funnily enough, none of those types of people that make fandom miserable are that bold enough to target big name companies that create dark content too.
Overall, just toxic miserable people making other people miserable. It goes further beyond making fun of people in the worst side of fandom. And then people wonder why fandom is not as fun as it used to be.
To end this on a somewhat uplifting note, the fandoms I am currently in are nice people and I have not had any problems, mainly because a few of these fandoms Iâm in are not as popular as the others Iâve been in. Iâm not gonna specify which fandoms because I donât want this part of my rant fueled reblog response to age badly. Just always remember to filter certain tags, block people you dinât like, and just donât be an ass in a fandom space.
Eh, sometimes I wish it was that easy.
