A SHORT ESSAY ON FANDOM ETIQUETTE
As a seasoned fandom enjoyer, witnessing the shift of mentality towards fanworks is saddening me.
Don't know with the rest, but we have this understanding that fandom can be cringe and unhinged, but we don't care. Actually, we embrace it. The point of fanworks is to cater to the possibilities outside canon, and to have space for the visions of 'what ifs' and 'why nots'.
And yes, not everything is everyone's cup of tea, and everyone—even the fanfic authors and fanartists—understand that when creating their MASSIVE pieces for FREE.
So it saddens me that people COMPLAIN about unlikely tropes and OOCs, posting about THEIR icks, and shaming teenage authors and artists who were just beginning to understand their place in the world of expression. They might not be your cup of tea, but please understand that you weren't sitting there paying these artists to give you your desires on a silver platter (unless you paid for commission). They did this for FREE. This was their passion project. They will grow as artists, but you have to actually give them the safe space to grow. If you fill the fandom with judgements, with restrictions, with capitalistic mindset of 'serving the majority of the consumers', then you are killing art. You are one of the perpetrators of the death of the remaining public spaces on the internet.
You can say, "but I'm only expressing my ick towards this certain work". Then please understand that artists are the biggest overthinkers with the lowest self-esteem. They see a post of your judgements and start second-guessing their own works, even when you weren't specifically targetting them. You are scaring the creators out of the fandom. This is rapidly not becoming a safe space anymore.
We already have a battle against GenAI, and as much as we celebrate real artists, we are still losing against the capitalistic mindset of 'sanitize it to my taste or I will not buy it'. Do that to big corporations, not to us.
Please, take this behavior somewhere else.
Look, I've loved fictional and historical characters like they were my own children. I've seen the craziest OOC and demeaning tags of them. Did I attack the artist? No. I scrolled away.
I've seen the most disturbing rarepair. What did I do? Walked away, because I ain't reading that, I ain't touching that with a 10-foot pole.
We are forgetting basic fandom etiquettes, all because y'all grew up in the era of algorithms, where big tech giants cater to your flimsy emotions to juice more of your short attentions. You attack the most innocent passionate things because you only have hate left for areas outside your comfort zones.
Because we're letting these types of hate thrive in fandoms, now people think they can complain for the smallest harmless things like self-inserts, character explorations, AUs, etc. What is left to create? Do you want me to rewrite the canon instead? What's the point of that? Where is the passion in that?
"But how can they learn without critisms?"
Critism is supposed to help the receiver get better with their art. Better writing, better grammar maybe, better shading, coloring, linearting, etc. But please say these kindly. They are not workers you can bully into your specifications.
Every time you complain and consider it critism, ask if your words are serving your comfort zone more than it is serving their growth.
As a fan, you leave the spaces that you think does not cater your fan desires, PEACEFULLY. Do not attack the spaces that do not serve you. They are simply not for you.
jbbartram-illu
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
kianamaiart
izzy806
