âYouâre doing fandom wrongâ - different and competing needs
So. This whole âYou need to do fandom how I do itâ thing where people tell others they have to engage with fandom in a certain way. Be it âYou need to talk about your faouritesâ flaws and how toxic they are!â, be it âYouâre not allowed to ship XY!â, or be it âYouâre writing YZ character not like I see them and therefore your interpretation is wrong!â Or the infamous âYou need to tag how I do it / how I wish people did, and tagging in a way thatâs perfectly fine by AO3 rules but doesnât align with my personal needs makes you a selfish sack of shit without empathy!â Nobody likes very much to be told âYouâre doing it wrong,â obviously, and especially not when there is, in fact, nothing wrong about what theyâre doing. All they do is doing something differently from the people demanding âDo it my way!â Now, a lot of people havenât learnt or refuse to accept that âdifferentâ doesnât necessarily mean âwrongâ - or âlazyâ, âignorantâ, âbadâ, âevilâ, âimmoralâ etc., all the lovely judgments that get thrown around in fandom so readily.
What riles me up so much about this, other than that people generally donât like being told theyâre doing something wrongâŚ
âŚis the fact that as an autistic woman (who was diagnosed at the age of fucking 32!), Iâve been told and showed âYouâre doing it wrong!â ad nauseam. All my life. If you get âYouâre doing it wrongâ so many times, for years and years on end, thereâs a good chance it builds up into âYou are wrongâ, as in âThere is something wrong with who you are as a personâ.
Iâve been too loud, too quiet, too happy, too sad, too angry - too emotional in general, but also too emotionally detached and too cold, too blunt, too insensitive, too sensitive, too relentless, too driven, too focused, too lazy, too smart, too intellectual, too nerdy, too weird, the list goes on and on.
Sure Iâm not perfect, sure Iâve got flaws. Iâve grown over the years, as do we all, hopefully. But the thing is - Iâm not really all of the things above, those were just the perspective of others who couldnât deal with the fact that I wasnât like them and didnât do things like they did/were used to. They found it too difficult to accept that someone might be and do things differently. A lot of the time, they couldnât even handle leaving me be and not interacting with me - they absolutely had to tell me how wrong I was doing things, even if it served no practical purpose at all. They just needed it for themselves, apparently. Maybe to reassure themselves that they were âdoing it rightâ, since there exists only ârightâ and âwrongâ in their minds.
In fandom, itâs kind of the same, and itâs tiring and - dare I use the dreaded word - triggering as fuck. How about you stop telling me/people what we do wrong all the time? How about you look at yourself and ask yourself âWhy can I not abide that people are doing something differently than I would, which has absolutely no bearing on me as a person, because I can simply not look at their content, I can blacklist this, I can block them, I need not click on their story, ever?â Why can you not bear it for people to be different and do things differently than you? People have different needs, and groups of people arenât monoliths either. Even people with âthe sameâ minority characteristic can have different or even competing needs. If someone is autistic and needs constant movement or sound to stim, thatâs perfectly fine, but if I (also autistic) canât stand seeing/hearing it because itâs overwhelming to me and drives me absolutely up the walls, then my need is no less valid or important. If possible, we wouldnât be in the same room together. Sometimes, thereâs no way to bring two needs together. tl;dr: In fandom, a lot of people pride themselves on being so sensitive of social justice, yet they seem to completely blend out that people have different needs from each other and that sometimes, the only way of dealing with competing needs is, in fact, not interacting / being in a space together.Â
These people seem to think that you canât be allowed to want / need different things from fandom than what they deem right and appropriate, same as, for example, NTs seem to not get that neuridivergent people can want / need different things than them. Because that just canât be allowed. Itâs âwrongâ and âinappropriateâ and at worst âbad/evil/immoralâ, because itâs different. Thatâs all this whole discussion always circles around, and one of the biggest problems weâve always had, not only in fandom.
Iâm tired, and itâs really not like I said anything new. Thanks for listening to me on my soapbox.Â
