#fandom popularity

[breannasfluff]

Popularity in Fandom Spaces

I've noticed a couple trends in relation to popularity over the few years across multiple fandom spaces.

Being "popular" while verbally eschewing popularity is something I've noticed becoming an art form. There's a specific level of self-effacing and humbling to be put on before accepting more compliments. Often hand-in-hand with humble-bragging.

Along with that is the cold-shoulder popularity brings. Where you've reached an arbitrary status where you mainly interact with the people who keep building your compliments and ignore those who are new or "lesser". You must be this tall to ride -> You must support me this much to be part of my inner circle.

Social media has likely played a huge part into this. It's so much easier now to have "proof" of popularity in online spaces. And we all like getting recognition for hard work and compliments. If you spend hours working on writing or art, of course you want to hear it!

But I've also seen that popularity suck the joy out of hobbies for new people who are excluded. Especially if there's an unspoken expectation to fawn over the 'right' people to be part of the club.

If you don't click with someone, that's cool. But at least try to be kind. Don't exclude them or make them feel stupid for not knowing something. Fandom should be open to everyone, not an exclusive club.

[brainwormcity]

Discord is so depressing. Nothing like posting something in a channel only to have someone immediately bury your art or your comment without so much as a second glance. If you're not beloved, nothing you say matters. Fandom is supposed to be a community but 9 times out of 10, it's a popularity contest and discord makes it abundantly clear.

[philosopherking1887]

I just want to tell you that I adore your stories. In fact, you are one of my favorite authors because your stories have depth and thought in them. I personally imagined a philosopher Loki before I read your writing, and I was overjoyed when I finally discovered you. Don't get discouraged by the lack of kudos or review, because they don't necessarily mean anything about the quality of writing - some very popular stories are awful, yet some obscure ones are brilliant.

Oh my goodness, that’s such a lovely thing to say!! (I felt a bit weird about answering publicly, because it sort of seems like bragging, but it would be churlish not to acknowledge a comment like this, and it’s anonymous so I can’t answer privately, so… good excuse to share the nice thing someone said about me, I guess :-P )

I do have a tendency to get discouraged by the low response rate. We all say to ourselves that popularity doesn’t necessarily correspond with quality, but people will still filter by number of kudos, and whenever I see fic rec lists on here, it’s generally the same already popular authors. And most of them are good, and deservedly popular! I went looking through the Loki/Thor tag on AO3 to see if I could find any undeservedly obscure authors and fics, and what I saw seemed to fall into two categories: the popular stuff I was already keeping up with, and a few fics with <100 kudos that I skimmed and found to be badly written and derivative. It does make me wonder sometimes whether my perception of my own work is skewed or even self-deceived. If I’m seeing work by popular authors rack up over 100 kudos in a couple of days, but it takes a year or more for one of my fics to inch its way up there… maybe it just isn’t good. And then you see posts going around that say things like “If you’re not getting the response you want, you should consider the fact that 90% of the fic out there is crap, so yours probably is too. And maybe you have a few devoted fans, but either they’re your mom or they have bad taste.”

Anyway... it’s still reassuring to see that there are some people who really like my work, and apparently for substantive reasons. It makes me hope that my writing is an unusual or acquired taste, like really dark chocolate (try Trader Joe’s 85% cacao; it almost tastes spicy, even though there’s no pepper in it) or sour beer (look for Flemish red or gueuze, which is lambic without fruit flavors), rather than just being bad. (Not like retsina, though. That shit is just nasty.)

[philosopherking1887]

stabbedinthenameofscience replied to your post “Just bitching about stuff. Again.”

I just feel like I am getting somewhere on fanfiction.net and I've been posting over there since 2010. My AO3 account is significantly newer, as is my Wattpad account and it certainly feels like, especially with Wattpad, that self promotion is critical in gaining a readership. I tend to post links to all three in social media and post in the profiles of each how to find me on the others. Readers from ff.net looking to flee that platform have followed me over.

So no, the tumblr promotion is not out of line. It is very much like what self published authors have to do to gain readership. If you don't have the weight of a publisher or corporate publicity engine behind you, the only way to accelerate readers to your work is to find where they are and offer your work to them.

OK, that’s good to know. Maybe part of my problem (again) is that a lot of the people I follow on Tumblr are already big names, and they don’t have to do a lot of self-promotion: a lot of other people will reblog, a lot of people are probably subscribed to them and will get notifications from AO3 anyway, and of course they don’t have to try to explain to people why they might be interested in the first place...