Being an active participant in fandom requires a certain level of self-regulating in order to be a healthy activity.Ā It requires the ability to sayĀ āNot for me,ā or āNot today,ā 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-regulateāincluding recognizing that often there is no hard line, no black and white answer, and we wonāt always come to the same conclusions.
It requires an understanding up front that eliminating all fanworks we donāt care for is not the end goal of these conversations.
Iāll give a personal example. There is a ship that deeply, viscerally upsets me in like 95% of its iterations. I can explain why I donāt like it if asked. Iāve written about why I donāt think itās handled well in canon.
And if I wanted toāif I wanted toāI could make a very convincing-sounding argument for why that ship is objectively bad and wrongĀ and no one should ship it.Ā Not because thatās objectively right, mind you, but because Iām good at arguing. I could slap that together in likeā¦ ten minutes, probably.
I donāt do that. If I vent about it on my own blog, itās as infrequently as I can manage, because I do my best to avoid the content that upsets me.Ā I donāt seek it out to get riled up about it. I donāt 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 donāt choose a high-profile writer for the content I donāt 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 yourselfĀ 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 canāt seem to stop, you may need to take some kind of further steps up to and including taking a break from fandom. Iām serious. Iāve taken breaks myself for that exact reason. Thereās no shame in it.Ā
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.
