Hey I just read @moonlitceleste ‘s Guide to Maribat, which I think is a really important read if you haven’t seen it already. But it brings up a question for me.
How many other writers/Maribat fans have received direct hate during either the First or Second waves? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is all explained in Moonlit’s post, which is linked above.)
For those of you who don’t know, I joined the Maribat community early in January 2020 as a writer, with my fic The Heroes’ Game (find it on AO3 😉) but I had read a lot of fics beforehand.
I will admit, I wasn’t originally a Maribat supporter— but I wasn’t an anti either. I’ve always abided by the “Don’t like, move on with your life,” rule, and a lot of the first Maribat fics I saw were salt fics I ran into while looking for general Batfam stuff. I was actually a comic fan before ML, and in fact Maribat is the only reason I got into ML at all. But that’s beside the point. The salt rubbed me the wrong way, so I just ignored it and move on— but I’m also a huge supporter of the “wait a while, the fandom might get better,” way of thinking. So a few months later, I ran into the first Maribat story I liked— and was subsequently hooked.
That brings me to my point— if I joined the fandom in Jan 2020, that puts me in the prime position to receive backlash from Wave 2. Especially since you guys are amazing, and got me past 500 kudos in 7 days. A week, and my story had gained a lot of attention. And then I started this tumblr, which (guys why are 1k of you following me this is weird but I love you all) obviously added to the avenues people could use to confront me about their anti-Maribat woes.
I haven’t gotten a single Anti rant. The most discourse I’ve had to deal with is the Lila anon popping up exactly once, and then disappearing forever. And I’m not sayin this to brag, I’m legit confused. Is there something we did differently that made them see me as not being a viable target? Because if we can figure that out, then hell. We can give tips to try and lessen the sort of shit we have to go through later, if/when another wave of hate hits. If I did something that made people not wanna mess with me (hilarious, because I’m fucking intimidating as a dandelion) then we should share that with everyone who makes Maribat content in the hopes that it wheedles down the amount of bullshit people say to us.
Obviously this isn’t a foolproof plan, and nothing I do/say can make things go down to zero. But I legit didn’t know Wave Two was a thing until I read Moonlit’s post, despite being prime target material for the time, and I only knew Wave One was a thing because it was like looking at the extremist side of someone with vaguely similar opinions as myself.
So. How many of you felt backlash from Wave 2 (or 1) and what can we do to brainstorm solutions/preventions for if there is a Wave 3?
