(no subject)
Welcome to Night Vale fandom is an excellent example of why I am never getting involved in fandom ever again.
1. Enormous monolithic interpretation of a character which becomes fandom and is accepted by the majority; this is almost invariably boring. Can also be attributed to a ship, or a headcanon about a specific event.
2. People who do not agree with that interpretation become increasingly more bitchy, snide, stroppy, and unpleasant about it.
3. Some of these people will deal with their disappointment by playing in their own corner and creating their own fanworks for people to discover: others will be combatitive and ill-tempered.
4. Social Justice in fandom.
5. People who express their affection for something by criticising it and dissecting it until there is nothing left to enjoy.
6. People who express their affection for something by harassing other people for their enjoyment of it: ref. fans of white-blonde Cecil allegedly attacking fans of PoC Cecil, and the stuff that shows up on my friends' tumblrs which consists of fans of PoC Cecil snarling about the predominance of white Cecil, posting graphs about how horrible the whole thing is, and literally no one pushing for Actually Monstrous Cecil. In other fandoms this includes behaving as if people are pissing in your face if someone does/does not prefer the female characters or if people do/do not prefer the PoC characters or if people do/do not slash things.
I enjoy writing queer characters, female characters, and have a specific character type I enjoy playing with which is effectively Idris Elba Playing Someone Who Is By Nature Cheerful But Has Been Ground Down By Events And Is Usually Gay. I'm trying to work out how, in the nanobots thing, I can make a specific character a trans dude without the protagonist feeling the need to mention it, as no one feels the need to mention the protagonist being mixed-race - because it's like 5000 years in the future and literally no one cares about things like race and trans/cis-ness etc. (I'm also wondering if it would be seen as NEGATIVE STEREOTYPING if I make said dude an ambiguously evil/antagonist by necessity character in the end, or whether people can cope with the idea that him being trans has sod all to do with the decisions he makes as a politician which aren't actually "evil" they just affect the protagonist in a way he views as "evil" even though they SAVE HIS LIFE - petulant and ungrateful protagonists being another one of my favourites).
The problem with enjoying all this is that while there are people who will presumably enjoy that and aren't shouty fucktards on the internet who put people off investigating anything they enjoy, and people who will not give a damn either way about the race and sexuality and gender identity of my characters because they're into the story and the personality of those characters, and people who just won't like anything I write because my writing is fucking terrible (God bless those people for their honesty and ubiquity and thus saving me from being liked by the kind of people who form fandoms like Night Vale)...
... I worry that because I enjoy writing those characters I'm going to be subject to the kind of people who make those posts. And I'm going to have to listen to them either nitpicking my work apart because it doesn't contain 33.579 lesbians or watching them use my writing as a stick to beat someone else's with because LOOK THIS PERSON WROTE SOMEONE ASEXUAL WHY CAN'T YOU and I don't want people being made to resent my shit because the people who like it are so vile.
Basically what I'm saying is that the more I see of fandom now that I'm not in one, the less I want my writing to have one.
1. Enormous monolithic interpretation of a character which becomes fandom and is accepted by the majority; this is almost invariably boring. Can also be attributed to a ship, or a headcanon about a specific event.
2. People who do not agree with that interpretation become increasingly more bitchy, snide, stroppy, and unpleasant about it.
3. Some of these people will deal with their disappointment by playing in their own corner and creating their own fanworks for people to discover: others will be combatitive and ill-tempered.
4. Social Justice in fandom.
5. People who express their affection for something by criticising it and dissecting it until there is nothing left to enjoy.
6. People who express their affection for something by harassing other people for their enjoyment of it: ref. fans of white-blonde Cecil allegedly attacking fans of PoC Cecil, and the stuff that shows up on my friends' tumblrs which consists of fans of PoC Cecil snarling about the predominance of white Cecil, posting graphs about how horrible the whole thing is, and literally no one pushing for Actually Monstrous Cecil. In other fandoms this includes behaving as if people are pissing in your face if someone does/does not prefer the female characters or if people do/do not prefer the PoC characters or if people do/do not slash things.
I enjoy writing queer characters, female characters, and have a specific character type I enjoy playing with which is effectively Idris Elba Playing Someone Who Is By Nature Cheerful But Has Been Ground Down By Events And Is Usually Gay. I'm trying to work out how, in the nanobots thing, I can make a specific character a trans dude without the protagonist feeling the need to mention it, as no one feels the need to mention the protagonist being mixed-race - because it's like 5000 years in the future and literally no one cares about things like race and trans/cis-ness etc. (I'm also wondering if it would be seen as NEGATIVE STEREOTYPING if I make said dude an ambiguously evil/antagonist by necessity character in the end, or whether people can cope with the idea that him being trans has sod all to do with the decisions he makes as a politician which aren't actually "evil" they just affect the protagonist in a way he views as "evil" even though they SAVE HIS LIFE - petulant and ungrateful protagonists being another one of my favourites).
The problem with enjoying all this is that while there are people who will presumably enjoy that and aren't shouty fucktards on the internet who put people off investigating anything they enjoy, and people who will not give a damn either way about the race and sexuality and gender identity of my characters because they're into the story and the personality of those characters, and people who just won't like anything I write because my writing is fucking terrible (God bless those people for their honesty and ubiquity and thus saving me from being liked by the kind of people who form fandoms like Night Vale)...
... I worry that because I enjoy writing those characters I'm going to be subject to the kind of people who make those posts. And I'm going to have to listen to them either nitpicking my work apart because it doesn't contain 33.579 lesbians or watching them use my writing as a stick to beat someone else's with because LOOK THIS PERSON WROTE SOMEONE ASEXUAL WHY CAN'T YOU and I don't want people being made to resent my shit because the people who like it are so vile.
Basically what I'm saying is that the more I see of fandom now that I'm not in one, the less I want my writing to have one.