#willow venting

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So tumblr just shadowbans me for zero reason and making it impossible to contact support? Okay, between that shit and and the crap twitter just pulled I guess I'm done with social media.

You want anything off this blog be sure to grab it now because I'll be deleting in a few days. See you on discord you all.

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People: Omg Baldur' Gate 3 have poly romance options.

Me:

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I seriously need to just disengage from fandom and drop out of my discords. I'm clearly too autistic to ever be welcome.

Frankly I should just nuke the discord account entirely. Make one new one and join the two I have with friends and just delete my current one. I'm in none of the MMO guilds anymore and as for fandom... well, it's really clear that this is a space I do not belong in and I'm tired of trying.

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For a moment I forgot how much this site hates disabled people who doesn't fit its cutesy, quirky mold of disability. Thanks for reminding me that the world is chronically hostile to us and just wants us dead.

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Something that the "write for yourself" crowd either isn't aware of or deliberately ignores is that writing doesn't inherently come with sharing. Authors could easily take them at their word and write for themselves, and leave their fics on their harddrive/in their notenook/wherever they write because it doesn't need to be on a public site for the creators themselves to have access to it. But then the rest of the fandom would cry bloody murder over being deprived of their entertainment because what they actually mean when they say "write for yourself" isn't "write for your personal enjoyment" it's "do the work (that I benefit from) and don't complain."

A-fucking-men Anon.

I'll tell you and everyone else a little story. I didn't post all that much last year, but I actually wrote quite a lot but 95% of it either happened in discords where I wrote for the people there, or sits in my fandom folders. They're in a perfectly fine condition for me, but they need some polishing to be released into the wider world - for one thing I'm ESL so the grammar needs an overhaul for a start - and I'll be honest with you all, I don't really feel like doing it most of the time. It's a whole lot of work for largely no return at all.

Because you're so absolutely right. "Write for yourself" never meant "write for your own enjoyment" because once the writing is done there's a whole lot of editing happening before that is fit to be posted, at least for most of us. And that job? That's never something we do just for us, it's tedious, annoying, and very time consuming.

And I'm seeing more and more writers feel like I do and post less or just stop, and I know of more than one new writer who don't feel like posting their things in public at all because they know they won't get any response. So their writing is also in private and it's an open question if any of them will ever post anything publicly. Even before I saw the numbers on that post with almost 75% of fic on AO3 having 5 or fewer reader comments I knew numbers was bad and couldn't in good conscience tell them that things would be fine.

Now that I have seen them I'll be honest with you all. I think fandom is on a self-destruct course. It simply isn't a sustainable system to expect writers to keep posting things when the overwhelming probability is that it will get 0 attention.

As someone put it in the comments of that post, fan works - fic, art, gifs, ect - are gifts, gifts we give to fandom. But for how long are people willing to keep giving gifts when the ones receiving them can't be bothered to spend even two seconds saying thank you? It's a battle fo attrition, and until fandom gets its head out of its ass and loses the mindset of "we don't owe authors anything!" then it cannot be reversed. The question is if fandom is willing to lose that mindset before the battle is completely lost.

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Unpopular opinion, but fuck the term survivor!

That word was never for traumatized people's benefit. It exists solely so society can abdicate any and all responsibility.

From the responsibility of not preventing the trauma from happening in the first place.

From the responsibility of not letting it happen again.

From its responsibility to help us heal.

But it's worse than that.

It exists so it can blame us for our wounds. So it can tell us that we're failing when we're not beacons of hope, if we don't tell them that everything will be alright. So it can put the burden of the harm it let happen solely on us and if we dare complain about that it can dismiss us as bad people who aren't worthy of the support it wouldn't be granting us anyway because we're supposed to be "strong".

So fuck 'survivor', fuck strength and resilience. And fuck 'hopeful portrayals' and 'that person is too traumatized, it couldn't be that bad'.

Fuck denying that we're broken, scarred, and have sharp edges.

Fuck denying that we're fragile and should be treated with care.

Fuck denying that we need support and that no it is not our responsibility to heal so that our bleeding wounds don't make society feel uncomfortable with what it let happen. Fuck pretending it didn't change us on a fundamental level, that we're not who we were and never will be again.

Don't you ever dare call me a survivor, I didn't survive shit. And fuck you for pretending that I did.

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I have to say that few things can make we drop a piece of media as fast as having a disabled character's disability be the reason they're killed.

Inb4 "But it's realistic!" crowd arrives.

You know what? I. Do. Not. Care.

I watch and read fiction because I want to escape reality, not because I want to be reminded how expendable we're considered. That our disabilities not just passively causes our deaths constantly with ableds shrugging it off as "business as usual", but that we're actively killed because of them and our killers are let go scot free because our lives are considered worth nothing in the eyes of society.

And to every creator out there who has done that, I wish you the kind of life you want us to have. Which is to say, none.

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Just a reminder that 'sapiosexual' is an ableist term and if you use it you're being ableist.