*Takes deep breath*
I miss the days before social media where fans were mainly assholes to each other because there was no reliable way outside of conventions and other public facing events to talk to creators.
At least we weren't causing creators to burn out or retreat from public life nearly as often when, if someone didn't like where the story was going, all we could do to vent our frustration was to scream at each other over fan forums and in chat rooms. Yeah, people still got hurt, things got out of control, but we weren't ruining the life of people who just wanted to tell stories. To want to tell a story is the most human instinct we have; the thing that really sets us apart from the rank beasts of the Earth, it shouldn't be a minefield where the people who ( supposedly) like your show need to be constantly and personally appeased by the creator lest they turn on them.
The echo chambers within echo chambers social media perpetuates by existing have literally ruined lives and put voice actors, creators, and artists into therapy and creative burnout.
As much as I try to remind myself that the average Very Engaged Fan is less than half my age and lacks the life experience and ability to emotionally regulate, it doesn't fly anymore.
I spent my time in fandom growing up at the height of the ingrained mysogny epidemic of the late 90's/early 00's where liking a female character or a hetero ship in certain fandoms would get you *mercilessly* bullied. It was a time where it felt like, if you weren't a slash shipper, or a shipper at all, finding like minded people was a Sisyphusian undertaking. And if you liked a female character who "got in the way" of a really popular slash ship, the shippers made sure you knew that there was nothing for you there. Non-shippers and het shippers were in a similar boat in certain fandoms where all they had was each other, and we clung to every Gen/ non-shipping fic like a squirrel to the last acorn on earth.
At least back then, yeah, creators would get annoyed/angry fan letters or the occasional heckler at a convention but there wasn't this fucked up social expectation that they spend time on social media, eyes on the swivel for Drama because of how it has the habit to snowball and come rolling down the hill like an avalanche of delusional vitriol headed right for them.
I lived through the dumpster fire that was the Netflix Voltron fandom and I've never seen anything close to how bad TADC fandom is. Imagine being told by your fans that the characters you've made the main point of view characters are wrong. Not that the characters have a "bad take" on something but that they aren't "really" the main characters.
The way some fans have the apparent ability to re-write the show as they're watching it terrifies me because it's the first time I've ever seen someone ask the question "are we watching the same show" and the answer is apparently no, we very much aren't.
And that's not even getting into the entitlement problem. Like, I know it gets talked about to death but it's actually starting to scare me how creators clearly aren't seen as people with feelings and instead puppets that should dance for their fans because "without the fans, creators are nothing." And AI is making it worse. For all the backlash it gets in fandom spaces, there are people out there, (usually the ones to huff and pout because the creator didn't do the thing they thought they should do with their story,) can make their own personally tailored version of canon and live there in an echo chamber of one. Or even if they don't engage with it on the level of creation, they sure do live in a version of canon that only exists in their head and resent actual canon and the people who enjoy the show as it is. Mix that with piss poor reading comprehension, whether complex themes can be comfortably transmuted into the most reductive readings imaginable and it creates this environment so toxic, is it any *wonder* creators and others in the space burn out at the rate they do?
I dunno man, I just miss when the worst stray a creator would catch would be a sour grapes 'well I'm gonna stop watching/reading, how about that?!' as if the person saying it was their only fan and the creator needed them there to remain popular, and it was easy to ignore. Now all it takes is one fan to whip up a hate storm because younger fans don't know how to just, not engage with something that upsets them. They have to declare that it upsets them, then spend the rest of their time in the fandom being miserable and making everyone else miserable.
Isn't fandom supposed to be for people who *like* something?




























