ykw in regard to your post about the hp fandom, i strongly believe asking people to stop making art/writing fanfics or thats sort of stuff is weird cause like i ain't giving jk rowling money by writing a fred weasley fanfic nor does she get any royalty when i draw ron weasley and post it on my pinterest/instagram. if hp is a person's source of comfort and they're not actively putting money in her pocket, LET THEM ENJOY IT? if it saved them from a hard point in thier lives, let them enjoy it? download the hp movies and watch them, engage with the fandom and do what you want? js my take on it...
i understand this take, and i hope you do not take this in bad faith, but i do think there is a logical disconnect here.
fandom is engagement with the media. while your own personal engagement may be void of financial support-- you may pirate the movies, thrift the books, avoid any sort of financial support whatsoever (which, to be honest, i do not believe is possible fully, even outside of the ways i am about to describe)-- fandom as a whole is not.
when you engage with something and give it attention, you are perpetuating it. you are giving it longevity. marketers do not care that you are engaging with fandom in what you believe to be an ethical way. they do not care that your fanfiction depicts a character as trans or queer in a 'fuck you' to jk rowling; they do not care that you make it explicitly known in your ao3 comments that you don't support her.
there are two types of people investing money into this franchise. there is the consumer, the layperson who buys a book from a bookstore or purchases a video game or watches a tv show. and then there are investors. these are the people who say, "hey, it's going to make us a profit if we put out more content regarding this. we should have a brand deal with x company so they can make harry potter themed cookies. we should have a new skin in a random mobile game that people can purchase to make their character wear a house robe."
and those people are working off the data that they have-- and that data is that people, by and large, are still interested in harry potter. this is proven both because people keep buying the stuff they're selling, consuming it-- and so you may think, "i'm not doing that, so my hands are clean".
but this data is also influenced by the fact that people are still engaging with the media. articles are still being written about it. conventions and fan meet ups are still happening, even if not directly financially affiliated.
and, at this moment and day and age, it is naive to think that these investors are unaware of the impact of a fandom. they may not be reading ao3 fic or trawling tumblr for tags, but they know what a fandom is. they know what fanfiction is-- we have published authors who have profitable careers that explicitly are advertising themselves as originating on ao3, namedropping their own usernames. celebrities are talking about shipping. fandom is no longer some secret thing that we self-publish and pass around in book clubs so we don't piss off the original creator-- original creators are now lauding fandoms, commending them for existing, encouraging them. there is an entire wikipedia page devoted to the harry potter fandom. and rowling herself gets off on it-- she's happy there's a fandom. it empowers her. it keeps her ego growing, keeps her feeling relevant, keeps her talking. and as she talks, she grows in influence, and she attracts more people like her, and she actively contributes to the growing fire that is violent transphobia in her country and beyond.
you are participating in the reason that these people, including her, still believe this franchise is viable. and while you, yourself, may not 'contribute', people around you do. there are people who quietly think "well, my watching of this show isn't going to make or break this franchise". there are people who think "if i share my streaming account with five other people, it's like only one of us is watching it, so it doesn't count". and there are enough of them that straddle the line that it still makes a difference.
also-- you are giving a safe space to those who don't care, who do still actively participate in contributing financially. you're giving them a common ground with you. and you also share a common ground with people who explicitly support her-- the people who have been in my notes since that post got traction actively slandering trans women with their whole chest in the most vile and horrid ways.
i, for one, like to make it explicitly clear that i have zero common ground with those people. we have nothing other than our humanity in common, and they have pushed theirs aside, and while i will recognise and respect them for that commonality, i will not give them any more inches than that.
i also believe that there is no way to escape financial contribution when you are in a fandom solely because your data online is sold, too. your search history is turned for profit. this plays into what i talked about above, but is another level that goes further-- any interaction is a monetary one in this day and age, whether or not something is coming directly from your pocket or not.
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