Fucking bold of you to assume ppl owe you for creating content for fandom. Maybe this is why you can't get anyone to interact with you ffs
*pinches bridge of nose tiredly and sighs*
In re: my tags on this post
Someone else came to me (a great deal more respectfully than you, Anon, I might add) and raised a similar concern. So I'll tell you what I told them:
There is a subtle, but important, difference between being owed and expecting reciprocation.
Bluntly put, if I had meant to say I feel owed, I would have fucking said it. But I didn't, did I? I said I expect reciprocation, because that's how relationships and communities work.
The cake metaphor in fandom is a useful way to think about this.
Artists and writers bake all these cakes for you. For free!!! All the time!!! It costs our time, our materials, our effort. And if we felt owed, we would put our cakes behind paywalls. We would demand you trade us a dozen cookies for each slice of our cake you take. Some of us would probably even harass you and demand you take 5 slices of cake and force them on friends.
But we don't do those things. We don't demand, because we don't believe you owe us anything for baking these cakes. We bake them because we want to, and we love doing it.
We don't demand, but we do ask. Some of us spend about as much time and effort marketing our own cakes as we did making them. We walk around the room asking if you'd like a slice, but we don't yell at you if you say "no thanks"; we just ask the next person. Most people say "no thanks" and that's fine, we never want to force you to eat cake you don't want or would hurt you.
Most people who do take a slice of cake just eat it and say nothing. It's encouraging on its own to see the cake stand empty, but here's the thing:
If nobody ever gives us feedback, we have no idea if you liked our cake or not. Did everyone who got a slice gobble it all up because it was so good, or did most of them take one bite and throw the rest in the trash? Of course, one or two people do come up to us and tell us how much they liked our cake, and that's wonderful.
But without regular feedback and engagement, the effort of making the cakes slowly ceases to be worth the return we get for making them.
This is what I mean when I say I expect reciprocation. This is how communities work; this is how relationships work. If one person is consistently putting forth more effort than the other in a relationship, that is unbalanced, unfair, and unsustainable. And eventually something's gotta give. Have you ever been in a friendship or a relationship where you felt like you were the only one to ever put forth effort, and it felt like the other person just refused to acknowledge you or the work you did? How many times did you look at the person and think Jesus, would a 'thank you' kill you??
That's how many of us feel these days.
The TL;DR is no, we are not owed. But as much as the capitalist brainrot has infected us all, fandoms are still communities, not content farms, and communities run on mutual acknowledgement, respect, action, and aid. You want the content? You have to engage with its creators. Full stop.