really interesting to me that in response to zar saying he was stepping back from the fandom and would prefer his works remain inaccessible, i’ve seen three/four responses:
omg this is awful for me (usually with a comment about how they were reading something and hadn’t finished it)
i totally understand zar’s decision, this is really unfortunate that he felt this way
i’m so confused, what did the fandom DO to him
people explicitly going against what was in his post that said he was making his works inaccessible by sharing links to it via google drive. after he’d taken them down.
I’ll give the folks with the number three response the benefit of the doubt that not all of them are on tumblr/twitter/marauderstok etc all the time, but…
Y’all really can’t play the “who did this?? what did they do??” card when you’re holding the smoking gun of your “here’s a link to all of Zar’s works saved on google docs” post.
I’ve spoken about this time and again, but authors aren’t machines who exist to produce works for readers—they’re human beings! They have lives! They have other things to worry about! And when fandom becomes Too Much in one way or another, plenty of them will leave because it’s not worth the trouble.
So if you’re devastated that zar “burned down the library of alexandria,” by deleting his works…consider what might have gotten him there?
Consider that he didn’t say “i’m bored of writing” in his post, but instead “its kind of really miserable here, and im having personal issues with it”
Consider! That Authors Deserve to be Treated Respectfully
and maybe don’t go peddling PDFs/Google Docs of their works if they’ve explicitly asked for that not to occur, for fuck’s sake
It’s also really disheartening to see that the majority of the response has largely been “my favorite fics are gone!” instead of “holy shit, one of the bigger authors in this fandom at present has been driven to delete their works.”
A real life person feeling so miserable about engaging with a community that they once found camaraderie and friendship in that they decide to remove themself and all of their works? from it?
A bit worse, respectfully.
I don’t know how many times we as authors have to say that some aspects of this community are shitty, or have to acknowledge that there are absolutely social politics at play in a fucking fandom space that’s meant to be stress-relieving.
How many ways do we need to say that we hate seeing people going directly against the things we’ve asked—putting fics on goodreads/storygraph/amazon, sending our works to Lulus for printing, redistributing our works in PDFs after we’ve taken them down—for the general community of readers to understand that we’re tired of this?
Actions have consequences, and while the direct impact of something like this happening is that a bunch of people are (already) posting about how sad they are that these fics are gone, or being angry with Zar for making a choice he felt was best for him…
The bigger picture? The one that the commodification of fics makes it hard to see?
You are slowly but surely excising authors from this community—whether by being the purity police, harassing authors, making their lives miserable on social media—and one day, you’ll find yourself saying “why aren’t there any good writers anymore?” (which…folks are already saying!)
It won’t be because they don’t/didn’t exist. It’ll be because they heard the screams and turned tail before they had to face whatever vitriol their peers were enduring.
