I'm going on hiatus again.
A few weeks ago, I took a break from tumblr for the first time. (Post about that here). I had enough things going on in my life then so that it seemed like I might just need the time to deal with them. Now that I'm not dealing with those things, I realize I have reason for wanting to take a longer-term break from tumblr. I don't know how long. Long enough so going back to tumblr doesn't feel like going back to a routine but creating a new one.
There are three reasons:
1: Tumblr is kind of a conservative website for conservatives who think that they're liberal. It has this very specific, very gross, quality that you normally see with older conservatives and centrists who were more progressive when they were young, except everyone here is that way at like twenty. I think it mostly comes down to how this is a website where PSAs and statements of common knowledge go further than people giving controversial opinions, as well as the fact that nobody here wants to openly disagree with anyone who isn't like, a terf, and the fact that nobody wants to label themselves with their actual ideology, and instead evokes generic ideas like good and evil and compassion. In short, I don't think you can create a culture that discourages disagreement and debate this much that isn't right wing. Like, reddit sucked but at least reddit had people who called themselves Anarchists or MLs instead of just repeating moral majority talking points. Part of what convinced me to leave is seeing two deeply reactionary posts (one misogynist and the other ablest) in a row getting reblogged by progressive people without any opposition. I will say it was better in 2023 when I joined compared to now, influxes of redditors and twitters didn't help long term. There's a reason why antiships have gone so far as a conservative censorship movement here while they're basically a joke everywhere else.
2: I'm kind of tired of the sort of fan culture that tumblr has. I keep seeing posts about things like Pokémon and Ninjago and FnaF that I outgrew at like twelve. Even among things that actually deserve to have adult fandoms there's a focus on what Adrew Hussie would call candy, basically fluff, that kind of reduces every character into out of character shipping fodder; it's a fandom culture built for kids' adventure media that ends up treating everything like kids' adventure media. I don't think liking only media made for children as an adult is healthy, like I don't think most of you are happy exclusively liking things you liked at ten, but you've absorbed the same narratives about adult media being gross and weird that you had at ten. There's a lot of people who crave adult media and don't realize it. And it sucks being an English major who wants to talk about Worm and Paradise Lost and Undertale on a website filled with people who have the same media opinions I did in middle school. And it's tied to the conservatism, there's a reason why comicsgate is the way it is, and the media culture here just feels like comicsgate with pronouns; people who'd rather have the comforting propaganda of the MCU and superman movies then be challenged by something like Watchmen or Parahumans. The only difference between how this fandom culture and how comicsgate interact with media is that here they'll consider superman woke for saving people rather than understanding that films sponsored by the United States Military are reactionary.
3: The type of creative thing I tend to do on tumblr is no longer what appeals to me. I spent three years doing worldbuilding heavy flash fiction, and really enjoyed doing it, it was right after I moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and right after I quit my first attempt at writing a novel. It was really fun for the first three or so years, and something I did almost every day mostly because it's something I wanted to do. I was full of ideas, and it felt easy to keep writing them. I haven't lost my passion for writing, but I've lost the passion for the type of writing that I can post here in the last few months. As I mentioned in my last hiatus announcement I'm working on a book now, and I'm putting time and energy into that book where I have no desire anymore to put it into my flash fiction. Maybe it's just the fact that I've written every piece of flash fiction that I've wanted to write, I could keep doing that, but it would just be going through the motions, and I'm not getting paid for this. And if I kept doing that it would probably take away time and energy that I would bring to the writing that I'm actually passionate about doing. It's not burnout, just a change of focus, but I fear it'll be burnout if it keeps going on like this. And I'm not interested in being on tumblr without posting my writing here, at least not with the other two points.
On a much lighter note: I'm writing a full-on book (or at least a first draft) and it's going really well, and I'm really excited about it, and despite a lot of this post being mad at tumblr a lot of it is fueled by how much I am enjoying this experience, and getting a type of joy from it that's been kind of drained from my flash fiction. The book is a leftist deconstruction of the superhero genre written as a series of in universe documents. I'm not sure when I'm ready to show it to the world, but here are so previews before I go:
Please reblog this btw, I do want to see these previews spread around because I think this is the type of story fans of my work will like.
I might return to tumblr someday. I just can't say how soon it'll be.
Here's my AO3, if Tumblr isn't unfucked I'm not coming back.
