//I'm supposed to be trying to get back to sleep but I have a lot of thoughts about this watching the community grow and change. It's strange to say I was here before stakes tags and before published advice guides and before resource blogs and dedicated rotomblr ask games. I've watched and been a part of many of these things, and I know you have been here for a lot of this too so this isn't news to you hah. That said, I see a lot of those changes in my interactions over time.
When I started this blog I was in college and without a job, I could dedicate a large portion of my time to being in front of a computer and send asks in between essay writing or studying. With a full time job that has me on my feet all day and a house with subpar internet that sort of availability isn't possible anymore at least for me. I imagine similar life changes have happened for a lot of folks. And sometimes the motivation to do these larger scale things after constantly upping the stakes can tire people out. People move on.
Even before that though the decline in interactions was noticeable from the other end too. I used to regularly receive asks from anons with their own plot lines, asking Casi questions about raising fighting types (a concept that otherwise rarely comes up. I tend to forget Hisuian Sneasels are actually fighting types primarily, poison types secondarily) and their journey finding and raising a sliterwing. As far as I know plotlines like this didnt link back to an existing account, it was folks playing around with these ideas and seeing where they could go. Now if I get an ask from an anon that isn't ask game related it's someone putting their feelers out for a blog they're in the process of making—its an advertisement of sorts. Once it was actually a literal advertisement. I didn't post that one. That isn't a bad thing necessarily but it's a tangible shift in the thinking behind these asks. People are interacting because it benefits them or because a blog specifically asked people to interact through ask games and sometimes outright saying "this is an arc you can interact with. please send questions," rather than because they want to poke and prod at a specific character to see how they react to things.
And during that time I got a lot of presumptuous asks too. Ones that roped me into things I did not want to participate in, ones that crossed boundaries I didn't even realize I needed to set because this sort of community wasn't like other role-playing communities I had been a part of. For example, I didn't know I needed to tell people to not literally take Casi's advice on how to take care of real animals based on when she's talking about poisonous punching cat weasels. And there's an instinctual snarky response a lot of us adopted for reacting to asks that didn't align with our canon. Muses react skeptically to legendaries, they push back against contradictory headcanons on how certain pokemon or people behave. I do wonder if that culture of "presumptuous anons" and the snarky ways we reply to them gave the impression things were closed off and unfriendly to new users tho.
I do sometimes ask myself when I'm deleting my only disconnected ask in weeks where someone is shouting about ultra beast-human hybrids (this is not a real ask btw, no one is being put on blast here) if I'm part of my own interaction problem. If I wasn't so picky about my canon maybe things would pick back up again. Not sure if that's actually the case. Even as someone who doesn't check numbers often there was a very clear point in my activity where notes and follower counts stagnated when previously the growth was pretty absurd. I grew rapidly then just have been coasting off that for a while. Establishing new blogs after that became much harder. Back when I started you really could get popular of an ask game and a few memes that break containment. Especially when I'd go out of my way to send asks to whoever reblogged my ask game for the first few hundred notes.
A lot of the people here end up disliking each other for some reason or another too. That isn't even any sort of moral judgement, that's just life! You meet a lot of people that all have ideas of how this community can be run and inevitably you don't get along with everyone. The ways you write don't mesh, you write stuff they're sensitive to, or maybe you just have bad experiences with them. Once you start icing a few people out then you ice out people who interact with them and that snowballs into cliques. I recall at one point actually striving somewhat for finding that "canon bubble" of people who more or less had similar ideas for the pokemon universe and certain events so that we could write under that shared canon, but what that really is is finding a clique of writing buddies. Then you only wanna write with them because it's easier, there's comparatively less to negotiate with a regular rp partner over a complete stranger. Then they leave the community or leave behind particular muse(s) and suddenly that bubble pops and you sorta start over again. That can be hard to figure out after a period of time of interacting primarily with familiar people. It can be daunting on both sides. Your followers might not realize these are open calls for interactions, and you aren't sure how to begin to ask for that openness again.
Idk I'm tired and hope this doesn't come across as whiny. I'm more musing about how tangible that climate shift in the community really is. I don't even think I necessarily want the way things were to come back, but things have changed and people have noticed that.
