slow rush (still smashing those devils one by one)

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

Last Witch Hat Monday I drew Biblically Accurate Brushbuddy, this Monday I bring you Biblically Accurate Brushbully!!!

I can't wait to see this angry void noodle animated in a future episode one day!

#witchhatatelier #Δ帽子 #WHA The other half

Painting process

wave goodbye on your way out,

kiss hello when you arrive

bring with you a cool, clean, rinsing wave.

However... as a fandom creator (writer and artist), I sometimes feel like too much pressure is concentrated on creators. I don't know if this is a frustration others share? Not only should we keep making things, but somehow we also end up becoming these central fandom figures who can feel pressured into responding to comments (or else we're called arrogant or ungrateful), making friends (or else we're rude for ignoring well-meaning people who reach out), and being the drivers and pillars of that community (running events, responding to memes, etc. – and everything falls silent if we stop). It's a lot of work!! I don't always have the time and energy to make things for fun and then also engage in all the ways people might sometimes feel entitled to because they enjoy my works.

I really wish that more "non-creating" fans in the community would discover their fandom power!! and not just rely on the visible "producing" creators to be the only people worth engaging with. It takes nothing more than passion to write a meta-post about a character or a plot point, or to create an ask game, or to DM someone else who you see posting funny tags – not just the creator! Maybe your followers have other tips for evening out the balance a little more?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, anon. This is an observation I've seen in many parts of life, not just fandom.

A lot of people feel as though they need permission or an invitation of some sort in order to contribute. That's why I always end my answers by asking people to share their thoughts. I want to make it explicitly clear that I want people to add things into the reblogs (which I can then share out for more people to see) and the replies (which people can at least read even if I can't reblog).

I have heard fans who are readers but don't write fic say that they think they can't get an AO3 account unless they plan to post something. This is incorrect, of course, but a lot of people make that assumption.

I think at least some people (I don't know what kind of percentage) assume that someone who is writing fic or posting art or making podfics and video edits etc. has some sort of expertise that "allows" them to post.

People with less confidence or with less practice etc. sometimes need an extra nudge before they realize that they're welcome to contribute too. If that's the case for you, please allow me to say:

You are welcome to post in your fandom, even if no one invites you to. Even if you think you're not good enough. Even if your idea isn't "popular."

Start a conversation. Share a thought. Talk to folks who reblog cool shit. Be a folk who reblogs cool shit. You don't have to do everything in order to do something.

make a rec list

make a "here's all the fics I've found in this fandom with this one trope/general vibe/very particular setup I just think is Neat" list

make a "welcome to the fandom, here's the fics that people will just assume you've read/know about to get you started" list

Create whumps lists

Create lists of shippy moments

Make screenshot collections

Record and post clips of your show to get more people into your fandom

Make incorrect quote memes

Make silly little TikTok-style edits of your favs

Make character playlists

Figure out the layout of buildings/cities

Recreate those building in the Sims or with an online floor planner or even just draw it out because holy hell writers will be so thankful for that

Make your blorbo in various video game character creations

Build a pokemon team for your blorbo

Make up silly headcanons! What does everyone do at the fair or the beach or during a fire drill?

Outline a fic idea you have — maybe you don’t have the time or energy or you just don’t feel confident enough to create it, but share it anyway!

Create outfits based on your blorbo’s design or outfits they would wear

Collect interviews with the author, producer, director, mangaka etc

Similarly, translate interviews

I remember someone in the haikyuu!! fandom kept a twt thread of every time two characters were in the same panel. Not sure what the tumblr equivalent would be. I guess just a regular old post with lots of additions? (Send help; i'm not sure why my brain is struggling so badly to translate twitter threads to tumblr posts)

Run a quote bot account: I'm not sure of the status of quote bots in a post twitter era, but those were quite fun. Again an example from the hq!! fandom, there was the hq!! bastille bot which would spit out a bastille lyric + a ship. The siken bot would spit out a line of poetry + a ship name. On tumblr maybe the equivalent would be a gimmick blog?

Run a ship/character week. I think these are probably the easiest kind of fandom event to run. it doesn't take more than one person, a blog, and rudimentary graphics skills.

Are socmed AUs still a thing?

Make gifs

Try to figure out the layers to a character's outfit and share your studies with the world. (I'm looking directly at you, Hoyoverse and all you're what-even-is-that how-do-they-even-put-that-on character design. beautiful, but confusing)

Update fandom wikis

Log fandom history on fanlore.org (another project run by the Organization for Transformative Works, aka the parent of ao3)

Some suggestions:

Transcribe episodes for film/audio canons

Podfic! We can always use more podfic, and most people's phones have a voice recorder.

Create bingo sheets (e.g. make a fanwork with five or more of these tropes for a bingo; read/reblog fanworks in five or more of these categories for a bingo)

Be a Your Blorbo expert consultant! If I'm writing about a character I don't have strong feelings about, but I know one of my friends is constantly reblogging and posting about them, even if it's all silly memes and "character <3"-type posting, I'll sometimes reach out to them for advice on if I'm getting Their Blorbo right. It's absolutely invaluable and I appreciate these people so much.

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

And my oldest child has entered online fandom.

Thankfully, my child and I don’t share fandoms (we both prefer it that way), but we did sit down to discuss how to maintain privacy and safety while also being friendly in online interactions. I taught my child about fandom red flags and green flags, from my experiences, and my child has since asked for my advice in terms of my child’s own fandom experiences and how to handle issues and concerns.

All that being said, I was surprised and confused when my child informed me that my child had not been leaving kudos or comments on AO3. Keep in mind, this child would read longfics for days, tell me how great the author’s writing captured the characters, etc.

“Why didn’t you kudos or comment if the fic was so good?” I asked.

While my child explained lack of ability to comment due to fic restrictions (my child has expressed not yet feeling ready to have an AO3 account even though my child is old enough and my husband and I would be fine with it), my child said kudos didn’t matter: “Who cares about one kudos?”

“The author cares. And, if the author for some reason doesn’t care, I know you care about doing the right thing. I think expressing appreciation for other people’s fanwork is the right thing to do. What do you think?”

My child went back and kudosed all stories read to that point.

when i was a tween who first found fandom in the late 90s/early 2000s, people didn't explicitly teach me how to interact with fandom. i lurked for a solid year before i signed up for my own account on the forum i'd found. (i can still remember how the adrenaline coursed through me as i signed up for my own account--i felt tingy and more than a little ill!)

by that time, i had a very good sense of social norms there. i still made a few mistakes, and the more established members smacked me down in a matter-of-fact but not unkind way. but i'd learned by watching. hell, by the time i started actively participating, i knew all the inside jokes!

as op mentioned, i don't think that people lurk anymore, and my theory is that the rise of social media/web 2.0 created a different approach to web communities.

today, every site is presumed to be for every person. the entire point of the really big social media sites is that everyone is on them. (this is one of the things i hate about them btw because it results in context collapse. i do not want to talk to my third-grade teacher, my favorite cousin, complete strangers, and my fandom friends in the same voice, but that's another issue).

whereas in web 1.0, the internet was riddled with niche sites/communities. you had to go out and find your place (and sometimes it took a while!). once you found it, you were invested in becoming a part of that specific community, so you did the research (lurking) to find out how people interacted, what all the unspoken norms were. by the time you picked your handle and made your account, you just knew stuff.

i'm sure this was not true of everyone, but it was true of far more people at the time. people looked before they leapt.

there are many, many reasons that i think that fandom has suffered from the web 2.0 environment. the fact that creators/writers/actors and fans are all on the same sites using the same tags for general publicity and for fannish nonsense is a huge problem. the way that sites are so big that people feel that their contributions (as with kudos above) don't matter is a direct result of the way social media undermines community and makes everything a performance of whatever your late-capitalist brand is. the fast pace of those sites makes people think that interacting with older posts is a bad idea. the lack of filters of the kind that we had on livejournal where you could determine who saw what or even just the way that forums often made you join before you could see content created walls within which communities could grow (think frost and walls making good neighbors).

i know we can't go back to the assumptions that operated before social media. we have to explore other options. i love when people make psas here telling people about fandom norms and history! i think it's the best thing! and maybe at this point that is the only way to handle it.

tumblr and ao3 are very weird sites in that they straddle the web 1.0 and web 2.0 kinds of internet.

from web 1.0 they get the lack of algorithms, the way you have to make choices about what you see, chronological arrangements, and (on ao3) lack of ads, etc. tumblr has a slightly slower pace than most social media; ao3 has a much slower one.

from web 2.0, though, you get scale, centralization (which is both ao3's greatest strength and greatest weakness), and the fact that it takes little effort to locate these sites--anyone, no matter their level of investment in fandom, can just stumble on them.

so you end up having a lot of people who are not actually fannishly inclined (aren't invested in a gift economy, don't really understand that fandom is supposed to be fun, don't really get the creative urge etc.) interacting with people who are fannishly inclined, and it causes some really problems. especially with younger people whose experience of the internet is as a venue to signify and perform certain kinds of morality/coolness/trendiness that are at odds with what fandom has always been about. basically: you have a bunch of normies clashing with a bunch of nerds. (obviously the normie/nerd divide is a spectrum and not a binary, so i'm overstating, but still.)

when you have people who are coming to fandom from different angles--some people who are coming to it as a provider of content just like all other media in their lives, especially elsewhere online; some people who are coming to it as a participatory hobby wherein we build community around shared affection for [thing]--there's going to be lots of clashes and weirdness.

i kind of think that fans need to go back to create set-apart spaces for fandom to happen. note that i am NOT talking about gatekeeping. everyone who treats others with respect would be welcome. but just having fenced-off areas that are explicitly for certain kinds of fandom interactions. where we can basically have our party away from the normies, but other nerds who are younger or just getting in touch with their nerdiness can find us.

More resident evil requiem sketches...more emily, leon and grace interactions

X

Requiem.