The long awaited Fandom Etiquette comic. It will also be in my pinned post for newcomers.

A lot of people who are new to social media and fandom scene weren’t really taught how to properly act and in our age of cancel culture/rage baiting and the rise of the AI, people lost all sense of respect for one another. So i’m here to share some basic fandom and internet etiquette i have learned over the many years i’ve been here :)

I’ll really appreciate if you could reblog this for other people!!! And add some of your wisdom, if you want to and have something that you think is worth sharing!

Another common courtesy for fandoms is that if you're on places like discord and your fandom are mixed with different age groups, best advice I can give is to not accept friends requests and privates DMs unless you actually truly know this person. That platform can be a risky place especially since you only have to be 13 to make an account. Not only does keep you safe from creeps who are way older than you and wanna take advantage of you, but it also keeps the kids safe.

[PT: What kinds of posts trigger moral & checking OCD (and psychosis)? /End PT]

So many people write and reblog posts that have very direct triggers towards folks with moral & checking OCD. Here are posts NOT to make/reblog.

To get the terminology out of the way - moral OCD is a condition in which a person becomes obsessed about doing something "morally wrong", and develops compulsive behaviors over it. Checking OCD is a condition in which a person becomes obsessed over checking over their own (or others) actions, as to avoid a perceived disaster, and develops compulsions around it.

Do NOT make/reblog posts with phrases such as:

"Reblog/donate/share or else you are letting me/someone I know die/suffer." "Reblog or else you're [insert bad thing]"/"Reblog if you're not [insert bad thing]"

^If it is an urgent donation post that you feel deserves to be shared, at the very least, add "tw reblog bait" and "tw OCD trigger."

"Reblog/like/comment/share or else [insert creature] will find you/stalk you/come into your house/etc" "[Insert thing] is coming to your location. You cannot stop it. It will be outside your window soon"/"[Insert thing] is in your walls."

^These ones can also trigger hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia in people with schizospec disorders/psychosis! It may seem like a "haha funny meme" to you, but to people with OCD or psychosis, they could fret heavily over this, and wonder if they are going to be in danger if they don't reblog/like/comment/share.

"It is illegal to be/have [insert thing here]." (Example: "It is illegal to be nonqueer during pride month", "it is illegal to have internalized ableism during disability pride month", etc.)

That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.

I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.

My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”

He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.

“Batman has a gadget for that” is a bit of a running gag, especially in the 1960s series. “Why the hell did he prepare for that?” you laugh. “He hasn’t faced a villain like this before.”

Bruce tries to sleep, he’s done his things for the night, but a persistent thought keeps nagging at him. What if we’re caught in some elaborate scheme that flattens us all into two-dimensional figures of ourselves? It keeps repeating, gaining in detail, Dick and Barbara forever trapped, Gotham crumbling around him while he cannot even scream. He gets up after a dozen repetitions. He never liked reruns.

Alfred wakes up to find Bruce awake in the Batcave, muttering about a three dimensional bat-restorer.

Some people are purposely ignorant.

Sometimes I will encounter those people IRL or online.

Not everyone has to agree with me or like me.

I don’t have to ruminate about their morality and opinions or mine.

I don’t have to justify being myself.

When used correctly and consistently, condoms are extremely effective at reducing the likelihood of STI transmission. Because some STIs are transmitted by coming into contact with sores, chancres, or warts that aren’t covered by condoms, further precautions should be considered. 

Human Papillomavirus (HPV), Herpes, and Syphilis are all transmitted through contact with a sore, chancre, or wart, and in some cases a condom might not cover all of the infected areas and won’t offer proper protection.

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

In „The Great Wave Off Katagawa“, while Mt. Fuji is in the background, the great wave in the foreground perfectly frames the mountain while the smaller wave actually replicates the form of Mt. Fuji. The framing of the mountain in particular is very interesting, in Japanese aesthetics/iconography the idea of framing a subject and/or implying it‘s existence/ obscuring it from the viewer is associated with royal or godly attributes, again enforcing the motif of Mt. Fuji and it‘s greatness.

In „Mt. Fuji at Sea“ a similar framing is used, and the silhouette of the wave takes on the form of the mountain turning into a seagull. Mt. Fuji is positioned as a connection between the sea, earth, and sky, again playing with the idea of godliness.

So the lesson here is also: You might have a motif that will follow you through your work for your entire life, and along the way, you will be able to find so many different ways of expressing your feelings towards that motif and you will get add to what you are trying to convey with each piece you create.

Also also in addition: Hokusai had a daughter who also became an artist and printmaker. We only know her under her artist name/ nickname of Katsushika Oi, she learned from her father and helped him with his works while also creating her own. Art historians have been able to recover this information in more recent years, and as many women of history her work was not acknowledged to the degree it deserved. But basically: Even if you can‘t fully realize your ideas to paper, your peers or even potential students might be able to help you, because art and human feeling are not just an individual endeavor.

"i didn't need no imaginary friends i had Screaming Joe right here !"

"I love this website I love it when people tell us what's wrong with them"

CHARACTER ADDED!

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

This is, in some ways, where groundedness and realism intersect--once the story has established that, for a certain thing, the internal logic of the world aligns with the logic of reality, readers will (reasonably) expect that to continue to be true.

One of the sort of notorious examples of this is horses in fantasy worlds--you can have horses that don't work like Earth horses, but once you establish in universe that they do work like real Earth horses, readers (or at least readers who know horses) will want a realistic portrayal of horses.