so i guess this is the end of an era for me.
i've been tired for a long time, i kept trying to laugh it off, kept posting, kept pretending the constant little cuts weren't beginning to bleed through. apparently, if you put enough heart emojis around your exhaustion, people believe you're fine.
the hate is still ongoing, people telling me my writing sucks, people accusing me of using ai because english isn't my first language and my sentances occasionally sound too polished, too structured, too whatever-the-fuck they've decided writing is supposed to sound like that week.
i was drilled in school on how to write. subject, verb, objects sentances, punctuation used properly, patterns that became instict before i ever began posting fiction online. you can pry the em dash and every other supposed "sign" of artificial writing out of my cold, dead hands. i refuse to deliberately make my work worse just to prove that a human being wrote it.
then there's the crime of writing about two male characters who haven't met in canon.
apparently that makes me sick, disgusting, morally corput. somehow, imagining fictional men kissing has become a greater offence than sending an actual person abuse over fictional characters.
i'm tired of homophobes dressing themselves up as "concerned" fans. tired of people using the language of safety and morality when what they really mean is: "i don't like this, therefore nobody should be allowed to create it."
some of you genuinely seem to be experiencing fandom for the first time, and it shows.
fandom has always been built from possibility. characters who never met, relationships canon never considered, impossible timelines, au's, strange little ideas somebody loved enough to write into existence. we took the source material apart and rebuilt it with our bare hands because that was the entire pleasure of being here.
you were never required to like all of it.
you could scroll, block, mute a tag, curate your own space like every fandom generation before you learned to do.
somewhere along the way, though, that stopped being enough. now people mass-report creators, organise dogpiles, stalk blogs for evidence of wrongthink, and treat personal discomfort as a righteous reason to have somebody removed. the hostility feels painfully familiar to anyone who has watched the ugliest corners of k-pop stan culture spread: the purity policing, the obsessive loyalty tests, the belief that enjoying a character incorrectly makes you an enemy who deserves punishment.
fictional men are being treated like idols whose reputations must be protected from their own fans.
shipping has become another battlefield for parasocial ownership. people speak as though characters can be betrayed by fanfiction. they behave as though an unofficial pairing has somehow violated canon, the company, the fandom, and them personally. every preference becomes a declaration of war. every creator is expected to prove their allegiance.
and censorship rarely arrives wearing a little badge that says censorship.
sometimes it looks like harassment until somebody deletes their work, sometimes it looks like mass-reporting until an account disappears, sometimes it looks like a creator becoming so afraid of being misunderstood that they strip every dangerous, queer, strange, sexual, complicated thing out of their writing before anyone else can punish them for it.
that should frighten you.
once people accept that art deserves to be erased because it makes somebody uncomfortable, the acceptable category keeps shrinking. today itโs a ship you think is ugly. tomorrow itโs queer content. after that, anything sexual, morally complicated, violent, obsessive, messy, or difficult enough to require a reader with basic critical thinking skills.
the people demanding censorship always seem convinced the blade will stop exactly where they want it to.
preferences are normal, disgust is norma, disliking my work is completely normal. none of that gives anyone the right to harass me, fabricate accusations, report my account, or campaign to remove me because i indulged in something they personally found distasteful.
your discomfort is yours to manage.
i donโt even know why iโm bothering to write this shit. perhaps some part of me still believes fandom can remember what it was supposed to be. strange, excessive, self-indulgent, occasionally embarrassing, and free enough for people to create without first asking permission from a committee of strangers.
right now, though, iโm exhausted.
so iโm taking a break from this shit.
to the people who have been kind to me, who read my work in good faith, who understood that fictional characters remain fictional even after someone writes them kissing: thank you. genuinely.
anyone who wants to stay in contact can message me. iโll add you on discord or something.
everyone else can keep fighting their imaginary moral war without me.
