The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.
I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.
Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!
But let me tell you a story:
I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.
One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.
At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.
I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.
Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.
The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.
And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.
So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.
So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.
By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.
Evan here from Fight for the Future. I’m going to be really direct: we’re in a life or death fight, and we need your help.
GIVE TO FIGHT
Fascists are using technology to control us and take away our rights. But resistance movements are using tech to fight back––organizing protests, raising money, and documenting human rights abuses.
This year, we’ve staved off dangerous censorship legislation like KOSA. We brought national attention to creeping surveillance on college campuses. We provided direct support and digital security advice to anti-ICE organizers, LGBTQ resource centers, and Palestine activists.1
As a small, queer-women run collective of activists, artists, and technologists, we’ve built a reputation as one of the most ruthless and effective activist organizations in the United States. But it’s an uphill battle, and in the last several years we’ve lost several major funding sources due to our principled and fearless positions
We’re coming up on the end of the year, and we are dangerously behind the fundraising goals we need to meet our budget. The democratic backsliding of the Trump era is taking a real toll: many traditional nonprofit funders are pulling back from supporting the type of aggressive activism we’re famous for, because they’re afraid of putting a target on their backs. Many of the startups and small tech projects that used to support our work have been gobbled up or run out of business by Big Tech monopolies.
We’re never going to compromise our values or water down our messaging to appease big dollar donors. That’s why our work is so dependent on the community of people who care about these issues. People like you.
We’ve got big plans in the coming year: like building a coalition of parents opposed to online censorship, and launching a major new campaign around the use of AI in hospitals and schools.1 But that means we’re more and more dependent on small, individual donations from all of you.
Our history-making activism is only possible thanks to hundreds of people who chip in $5, $10 or $50 a month to support our work. Many people are struggling right now. We get that. So if you’re in a position to make a donation or become a monthly supporter, please do.
DONATE TO FIGHT
The movement to save democracy needs Fight for the Future, and we need you.Happy New Year y’all,
-Evan at FFTFFootnotes:
1. How We Fight For The Future in 2026: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/2026
The Architecture of Fear: Gatekeeping and Survival in Modern Fandom
There is a side effect of fandom gatekeeping I want to talk about, one I only just noticed, though looking back, it has been present in almost every fandom community I have ever been a part of. When I think of gatekeeping, I usually picture the classic, elitist archetype: the person standing at the door demanding you "name three albums" or prove your loyalty to a character before you’re allowed to speak. But there seems to be a much quieter, more insidious form of gatekeeping happening in niche spaces right now. It isn’t driven by supreme confidence or elitism. It’s driven by absolute terror.
It’s the phenomenon of fans ostracising others, not because they necessarily want to, but because they are terrified that if they don’t throw the stone, they will be the next ones kicked out of the castle. In highly insular, hyper-policed niche fandom spaces, guilt by association is the ultimate law. If a writer or artist steps out of line, maybe they write an unpopular dynamic, express a nuanced critique, or simply fall out of favour with the dominant clique, they become "hazardous terrain."
When someone is exiled from a tight-knit community, a strange panic sweeps through the remaining members. Suddenly, interacting with the exile’s work becomes a political risk. People begin to unfollow, untag, and distance themselves. The mechanism here isn’t genuine outrage; it’s a survival tactic. It’s a preemptive strike to signal compliance to the rest of the group. In a fandom panopticon, you have to be seen actively enforcing the borders, or the community will turn its crosshairs on you next. In this economy of fear, people will trade their closest friends, and their own artistic voice for the fleeting safety of the inner circle.
This desperation stems from a profound cultural shift: for many, fandom is no longer just a beloved hobby or a creative outlet, it has become their entire identity. When an interest expands until it swallows a person's whole personality, every choice, friendship, and moral stance is filtered through the lens of the community. In this state, a disagreement about a fictional character is no longer a lighthearted debate; it is felt as an existential threat to their very sense of self. When your standing in a digital circle is the bedrock of your self-worth, protecting that standing becomes the compass by which you make every single decision.
This environment inevitably breeds intense personality clashes, creating a volatile dynamic between two distinct types of fans: those who survive by performing, and those who simply show up as themselves. In a hyper-policed space, people who are genuinely unbothered, who speak openly, write without asking for permission, and refuse to filter their personalities through the committee, are deeply triggering to those who have built their entire online presence on calculated conformity. To someone who spends every day walking on eggshells to maintain their status, a person who is unapologetically themselves feels like an insult. They simply cannot handle someone who isn't afraid. The refusal to play the social survival game is misconstrued as arrogance, and so the authentic creator becomes an immediate target for hostility.
If the threat of exile is the stick, then performative validation is the carrot. Once a gatekept community establishes its hierarchy, an intricate economy of praise takes over. Have you ever noticed how, in certain circles, every single piece of work produced by the "approved" members is immediately met with giant, multi-paragraph essays of public adoration within hours of posting? On the surface, it looks like a beautiful, supportive community. But when you look closer, this excessive ego-stroking often functions as a loyalty ritual. Praising the right people is a transactional insurance policy. By inflating the egos of the dominant voices or the inner circle, smaller creators buy themselves a protective shield against the very gatekeeping they fear. The praise becomes less about the actual art and more about confirming allegiance. It creates a dizzying echo chamber where the tolerance for differing opinions drops to zero, because a circle that only nods together eventually freezes together.
This hierarchy is further complicated by a strange, modern form of divine right: the proximity flex. Within these insular spaces, a single interaction with the celebrity or creator, a liked comment on social media, a brief conversation at a stage door, or a selfie at a convention VIP meetup, is immediately converted into institutional power. The fans who achieve this treat the interaction not as a stroke of luck, but as anointment. They behave as though meeting the creator has granted them a deeper, more sacred understanding of the text than anyone else, granting them the ultimate authority to decide who is a "real" fan and who is a hazard to the community. It is a desperate attempt to grasp at certainty, using a five-second parasocial interaction as a shield to protect their own fragile standing in the pyramid.
And it’s getting worse. The very architecture of the modern internet is actively accelerating this behaviour, turning what used to be a hobby into a high-stakes game of social survival. We have gamified moral purity, adopting corporate and safety language to manufacture severe offences out of ordinary human interaction. In these spaces, an uncurated adult conversation—even one held naturally and consensually among peers—can instantly be reframed as a boundary violation or "harassment" if held outside the arbitrary lines drawn by the clique. They no longer say "that conversation makes us uncomfortable." They weaponize pseudo-legal terminology to turn a candid, adult moment into a moral crisis, raising the stakes from a matter of personal comfort to an unpardonable sin. By recasting creative differences and casual authenticity as existential threats to safety, the dominant clique grants itself the moral high ground to exile anyone who refuses to speak in corporate-approved scripts.
The most fascinating (and heartbreaking, as I’ve recently discovered) part of this dynamic is what happens to appreciation when someone actually does get pushed out of the circle. When you are on the outside looking in, the matrix glitches, and you see the architecture for exactly what it is. You might post a story on AO3 and notice a sudden, cold public silence from people who used to comment regularly.
Yet, quietly, your inbox or private messages might tell a completely different story. People will slide into your DMs to tell you they loved your work, that your writing is incredible, and that they are still reading. This is the ultimate proof of the system's hypocrisy. The quality of the work didn't drop; the audience’s permission to praise it publicly did. Public support has been made a political risk, forcing genuine appreciation underground, while the public comments sections of the "approved" circle become an over-inflated theatre of loyalty.
This stark divide happens because the modern internet doesn't actually reward individuality; it rewards categorization. Digital spaces have trained people to be hyper-vigilant compliance machines, neatly slotting others into predictable boxes; safe or hazardous, in-group or out-group. When you show up as a complex, uncurated human being who writes and speaks outside their rigid scripts, you break the unspoken contract of the panopticon: predictability. Your independence becomes a glitch in their system.
For the people stuck inside that anxious bubble, your authenticity is a terrifying mirror. Seeing you refuse to filter your work or bow to the self-appointed committee highlights their own conformity. It is a heavy psychological truth to carry, which is why it is infinitely easier for them to publicly freeze you out than to look in the mirror and admit they’ve traded their creative freedom for a transactional insurance policy. They want your art—their private messages prove it—but they lack the bravery to claim it in the light.
And if you are one of those people, sitting behind a screen, quietly enjoying someone’s work, but too terrified of the fallout to leave a public comment or hit like, you are forgiven. It is easy to judge compliance until you are the one facing the cold wind of exile. But it’s worth asking yourself what you are actually saving by staying quiet. Fandom isn't supposed to be an obstacle course of political manoeuvring or a constant test of allegiance. At its core, it is meant to be an open, accepting sanctuary, a place where people from completely different walks of life gather simply because they love the same world. You shouldn't have to navigate a minefield just to show appreciation where appreciation is due. Joy shouldn't require a permit from a committee.
Getting frozen out of a niche space hurts deeply. It’s a sudden loss of connection and friendship that can make you question your own talent and self-worth. But once you step back from the glass, there is an immense sense of relief. When you are inside that anxious bubble, there is a constant, subconscious pressure to walk on eggshells. When you’re in the thick of it, the walls are invisible. You genuinely believe you are choosing your tropes, your friendships, and your opinions freely, completely blind to the fact that your preferences are being subtly dictated by a consensus you're terrified to break. It’s only when you are forced outside that the glass becomes visible. You write to please the gatekeepers, you use the "correct" tropes, and you filter yourself through a committee of people who are terrified of their own shadows. Once you are out, they lose their power. They have already done the worst thing they could do, they excluded you and you survived it.
Which brings us to the most important part: continuing to create anyway.
When the public stats drop, the temptation is to pull back, delete your works, and stop sharing. But keeping your stories and art out there, regardless of the lack of public comments or likes, is a radical act of reclamation. Fandom belongs to the people who love the story, not the self-appointed committee policing the gates. When you keep creating purely out of your own love for the world, you change the energy of the space.
More than that, you create a beacon. Somewhere out there, sitting behind a screen, is another estranged fan. Someone else who felt the cold shoulder of the inner circle, who thinks they are completely alone, and who is quietly losing their joy for the source material.
When they find your work, unapologetic, persistent, and free from the clique's rules, it might mean more to them than you will ever know. It tells them that there is life outside the fortress.
The silence on your public dashboard isn't a reflection of your worth; it's a reflection of their fear. Go ahead and write the story anyway. Create the art anyway. The right people will find it, even if they have to read it in the dark.
Ok, hold up, because I just saw some of the same bullshit again and I need to say something here and now because of it. I was going to reply to the thing I saw but no, this needs a full-on wide-band broadcast at this point.
This one goes out to the lurkers, the mutuals who never speak, the internet visitors who are not mutuals but who return frequently and never interact or say anything, the hits on my Ao3 stories that never leave kudos or comments, the quiet ones who stop scrolling to look at something I said on Bluesky, or look at the art I incessantly reblog on Tumblr without saying anything, those who stay a long time or linger only briefly and then go, the ones no one ever sees, wearing their non-interaction like a cloak of invisibility.
I love you. You are welcome here. You are wanted.
You do not *ever* have to feel guilty or awkward or less-than about not making yourself visible to give me attention in exchange for what I write or reblog or babble on about.
You are wanted, as you are, right now. You do not owe anyone your interaction. You do not owe anyone performative engagement. You are allowed to just be. You are not selfishly taking something from me without giving in return. I am sharing this with you freely. Take as much or as little as you like. It's a gift. You are encouraged to exist in this space with me, even if I never know for sure if you're here with me right now in this moment or not.
I accept you. I care about you. I want you to feel loved, by me, because you are.
So much of the Internet has shifted to engagement farming, where the economy is human attention and the metrics by which that is measured are kudos and comments, likes and subscribes. I predate that. I come from a time where the instant gratification of attention did not happen. I am not sustaining myself moment to moment with an endless insatiable thirst for number of hearts go up with a vampiric lust for more internet points. I am more powerful than that. I am a storyteller. I know the old magic and I know how to use it.
This is not to say I do not love the hearts. Each comment from another human being on anything I've written is something I cherish intensely. I giggle when someone reblogs one of my stories. I kick my feet when a name or a nameless guest leaves me a note on another one of my things. I am not too good for evidence of human interaction. I do very much love when someone reaches out in any capacity and it does encourage me, and I do delight in it intensely.
But this post is not for those beloved humans, as cherished as they are.
This is for you, my precious, quiet ones.
When I say I gift my words to all humans with no strings, I mean it. I will not stop writing because some random threshold of [insert interaction metric here] was not reached. I will not withdraw from the world out of shame because I spoke and the mountains did not move to echo my thoughts back to me.
But, most importantly, I know you are out there, my quiet ones, my silent invisible readers - those who experience what I write when I post now and those who will not see my words for ten years from now, echoed in reblogs or bubbled up from internet searches, or perhaps excavated randomly from a buried file someone somewhere felt the need to save. I know you exist. I was you. Sometimes I still am. I have drawn strength and connection and felt love for words written by humans who will never know that they touched me, that I felt close to them in that moment of reading, that a circuit completed and became a live wire between us that was not remarked upon or ever acknowledged. That happened. I felt it. I know it exists.
I invite you to tea in the library of my mind, beloved invisible creatures. You are welcome and wanted. I close my eyes and am happy you are here. I delight in the knowledge that you are reading this, right now. My words extend my mind beyond space and time. This, too, is a connection. And it exists and is worthy whether you say something about it or not. And while I do very much love to hear from people, I also know what it is like to *need* to not be seen, to be invisible, to be safe and unknown and not exposed.
I love you. You are safe here. You are allowed to exist without being perceived. I am sitting with you now and I am blind to you but I know you are here and I welcome you nonetheless. You are wanted as you are, invisible quiet creatures who leave no trace. You are valued. You matter. You can go and return whenever you wish and I will still want you. I will still be happy that you exist as you are with no requirements for you to ever speak..
I accept you. I care about you. I trust you. I want you. I will protect you.
I know what I am doing and I do it with intent. With these words I speak magic. I invoke it here and now with my will. I weave this space into existence and, as I speak it, it becomes true. I conjure this place and I fix it in my mind, and because I will it so, it will always be here for you.
There is a fire crackling softly to itself in a fireplace. There are books and comfy chairs and blankets. There are cats who remain aloof but still enjoy being near. There a couch to nap on. There is nourishing food. There is tea. I am here beyond death, beyond time, beyond physical space, translated through whatever medium you are experiencing these words and I accept you with me, as you are, in this place. I have raised strong stone walls around us. No one else will enter. And while you are here you will be free of the incessent demands on all sides that insist you must leave a trace in order to prove your right to exist.
I have built this space in my mind for you and I gift you the key. You can come and go as you wish, always. I have made it so. And I will always be grateful that you have visited, even if I never know how many times you do, or if you told someone else about it, or what manner of joy or contentment you received from me at any point.
Know that you are wanted, always, and that you are loved, O Reader, Mine.
Beloved quiet invisible creatures, my stories are yours as much as they are anyone else's. This home in my mind where I share my words with you is yours forever because I will it so.
Kids used to have all these websites & spaces made specifically for them online (including virtual worlds such as Neopets and Club Penguin), now it’s like all they seemingly have are Roblox (which is currently in the midst of a controversy involving child safety concerns) and the same handful of social media apps
You usually hear people say “kids shouldn’t be on the internet” or “kids should stay out of adult spaces” but very rarely do you hear someone say “kids should have spaces made with them in mind”
Announcing the sixth annual Shining Hearth, a free online gathering of Elves, Fae, Sidhe, and adjacent folk! It will be held on March 27-29, 2026, the fourth weekend in March, on our Discord server. (If you are unfamiliar with Discord, we have a guide for newcomers here.) (PDF, 3.37 MB) As always, we plan to have workshops and discussions, games and watch parties, music, and of course plenty of time just to hang out and chat. You can get all the details and sign up for our newsletter on our website.
As with last year, we're starting out with an expanded schedule framework, hoping to have more offerings at times of the day that are more accessible to those attending from the eastern hemisphere. To do so we will need to have presenters willing to present at suitable times, staff to do presenter check-in duties and moderate chat, and streamers to host video watch parties or run games!
If you are a member of any otherkind spaces that are focused on those regions (or just have a high population of non-North-Americans) where you could assist with outreach, or have any other brainstorms, we welcome any suggestions and advice. If you're in Europe/Africa/Asia/Australia/wherever yourself, we encourage you to consider applying to present or be staff, or volunteering to stream a movie (or similar item) or host a game session.
Please note that the event and server are 18+ only. For more information about our policies, see the FAQ.
Important dates:
Presenter sign-ups: November 14, 2025 - January 16, 2025
General registration: January 1 - March 26, 2026
Staff sign-ups: January 31 - March 2, 2026
Schedule posted: mid-February 2026
The gathering: March 27-29, 2026
Feel free to ask any questions here or email staff (at) shininghearth.net. We hope to see ye elfae folk there!
