There's been a recent surge of people following this blog and I feel the need to make it known that this blog is pretty much(and has been for a while) dead and I won't be doing anything with it in the future. It is very likely it will be getting privated sometime in the future.
Since this is going to be the last post I make here I thought I might as well be self indulgent and express why I've given up running this account. I am still somewhat into cotl but have purposely limited interactions with wider fandom to a very few set of trusted individuals. Apart from trauma factoring into this decision (I've had a lot of negative interactions with people that I met through this fandom ) and lack of general interest in what is popular (I'm not that much into narilamb) , it is specifically how parasocial this fandom is in combination with the constant romanticization of cults in fanwork that really soiled my experience for good .
I do not know if that's the case for every big fandom , but Tumblr cotl is full of individuals with a very unhealthy and objectifying attachment to artists. Not only does this attitude destroy the prospect of community (which is how fandom is supposed to function in the first place; as a community for fans of the same IP to come together and discuss) , it alienates both regular folks and popular creators. If you have a big following in this fandom you are constantly exposed to individuals that not only treat you uncomfortably familiar , your work is commodified. You become a content machine to feed people that do not respect you and unfortunately there are many cases where if a known fandom artist speaks against that they pretty much get cyberbullied by their own audience. On the other hand , if you are a person who cannot churn out art regularly of specific quality that satisfies very specific tastes/tropes , it is virtually impossible to connect with people. And given how weird and parasocial so many people in this fandom are , it makes you feel like there's something specifically wrong with you (I've witnessed so many people who's confidence in art and in themselves dwindled because they joined fandom ).
The most unexpected thing about fandom is just , the amount of folks willingly removing every theme that is integral to cotl's mythos and themes. It's pretty much an instance of severe blorbification where the characters are perceived as living beings with agency instead of tools to tell a story. It is genuinely concerning that the average depiction of a lamb is of someone that is forgiving and kind and thus their abuse and manipulation is severely downplayed or downright erased . The worst of it all is that the moment you do try to talk about this specific trend , people get extremely dismissive if not aggressive. This attitude is extremely disrespectful not just to cult survivors in general , but affects cult survivors in the fandom the most . I've never come across a fandom space that is so vehemently allergic to the source of the original game
