Can I just say thank you for mamma bearing the younger writers from the hate. I didn't get someone to help with hate and it did affect my writing. So thank you for being a mama bear.
Thank you for thinking I've made a difference at all, that means so much to me, you have no idea. Because I was lucky! For whatever reason, no one came down on me hard when I first started writing (even though I was writing Freddie and even getting plenty of actual facts about him wrong, which usually is a major crime? lol I'll never know why they left me alone!) and then DoA became so unreasonably popular, and it was much easier to deal with the occasional jabs that did occur when I had all this support and appreciation. But I remember seeing it happen for the first time, I hadn't been in fandom long...
In autumn 2019, a fic was published. It was smut, it was poly!Queen and it had dom!Freddie. It wasn't, in all honesty, my cup of tea and I might have overlooked it, but I happened to notice that it was getting an unusual amount of comments. So I went to look what was going on there. And what was going on, was that an anon commenter had taken it upon themselves to tell the author - a first time fic-author - off for writing Freddie so OOC. I thought that was absolutely appalling behaviour. My 20 years of fandom experience had ingrained it in me that you just do not do that to people. Live and let live. Don’t like, don’t read - that was the motto I understood to apply to fanfic. And there, sure enough, was @tikiniki saying the very same thing I was thinking: “Who the hell do you think you are telling an author their characters are OOC and in such an accusatory way?” I jumped right in, lol, backing up Tikini, and we became very good friends soon after that. That fic, by the way, was taken down by the author the same day. I might have done the same, had I been "welcomed" into fandom like that.
Ever since then, whenever I've seen anon comment that way on others' work, I've often reached out to the author, especially if they're new, to explain what was happening or check that they were alright. Some of my best friendships in this fandom came about that way. It was the first thing @quirkysubject and I ever talked about.
So in a way, I have the obsessive, critical anons to thank, even, for a lot of the friends I have found in this fandom.
Anyway, I can't personally keep anyone from getting weird, plain rude or upsetting comments. But if anyone wants to talk about it, and have support, and know it's not just them and they haven't done anything to deserve it... I think a lot of us who have been through it are here for that support.
