SenLinYu

--

Becoming a BNF is not a transformation sequence but with more sexy evil makeover.

You "become" a BNF at the point that enough randos decide that enough of their friends know your name for you to qualify.

Being in the public eye is awful, and the fandom version has little upside. Why would most people want to be a BNF? And if they perceive that they've become one, why wouldn't they run away?

The real explanation is more likely that the type of person who usually sticks around in the public eye is an egomaniac plastering over their yawning chasm of self esteem issues with perpetual rage highs and the attention of strangers.

Or maybe they're alarmed at how everyone else sane has abandoned The Youth to the tender mercies of radfem "fetishization" discourse and anti-queer ahistoricism. I'm more active here than ever, and it's primarily because people send me a lot of direct questions and requests for help and because I keep feeling like someone who doesn't have values I find actively harmful and loathsome ought to stick around in public.

Extreme neediness or a savior complex: take your pick. Everybody else finds some friends and slinks off into a corner as fast as they can.

Of course it’s not going to be the case for everyone in the history of fandom, but I know that I made a deliberate decision to be less universally friendly and polite when I realised that... a lot of people were aware of me - a lot more than I was aware of - and a lot of those people thought I knew them, too. Back when I was new in my current fandom, I’d start conversations with everyone, respond to DMs, make effort to be nice and friendly and polite and helpful, you know, normal “trying to join a community and make friends” things.

But after a few years and a couple things that accidentally got me a lot of attention in the “public eye” of fandom, I started getting messages from people who thought of me as a familiar figure in their life, and that was... weird. To me, but apparently not to them. And after a few flabbergasting and unpleasant experiences, I decided not to encourage it.

So “being a BNF” leads to situations like:

Early days of fandom, CoolFicWriter I’ve interacted with a few times positively is posting on tumblr about something I’m super interested in and think is super cool. I reblog it, they don’t react so I message them directly, because I think we’re casual good acquaintances and I’m really excited about their post. They don’t respond. I don’t really get it, try again, eventually figure that oh, I must have misread the vibe, okay, maybe we’re not friends... I’ll leave them alone... oh I hope I wasn’t creepy... Awkward but reasonable behaviour in my mind, just living my fandom life and trying to make friends. Later I find out that CoolFicWriter is not, as I thought, about my age, but a minor. They think of me as A BNF Adult With Social Influence and Problematic Tastes and from their experience I was being pushy and invasive, and they’ve warned all their minor friends that I’m a predator who harrassed a minor in DMs out of nowhere. Which is indeed what happened because I wasn’t aware of our respective ages and perceived status. Classic horrible story about an asshole BNF weirdo.

JohnSmith has been in discord servers and twitch chats for ages, sees me around often and always says hi to me by name. They think of me as a friend. They send me a casual DM one day to continue a conversation from chat and I don’t respond, or respond coldly. JohnSmith might think “wow, what, rude, this BNF is so stuck-up and rude in private, so double-faced and mean!”. On the other side, my experience was: “who the hell is this person DMing me out of nowhere and being overfamiliar, I don’t recognise them?? who is this, are they part of the people who have been horrible to me? They’re creepy and I’m uncomfortable, and I don’t want to make them think we’re friends because I’ve already had 3+ bad experiences after making the effort of being extra friendly to people I didn’t actually know well.” (This is compounded by people who go by very common nicknames and different usernames across platforms -- you recognise my unique username everywhere I pop up, but I don’t recognise or remember you in a crowded chat!)

JaneDoe sees me respond to comments and asks all the time. Something happens to her today at school and she thinks “what would approachable BNF do?” and messages me asking about it. I usually respond to my friends and acquaintances but I don’t know her, and I haven’t been in high school in 10+ years, don’t have any experience with what she’s talking about because we’re not even from the same country, and I don’t have spoons today. I don’t respond and move on with my life. JaneDoe is hurt and thinks wow, this BNF is a stuck-up bitch, she was just trying to interact and I couldn’t spare a moment to be polite and respond?

Kitty2005 who is an anti, or a minor, or a victim of trauma, or simply has squicks, has been following me for ages and thinks of me as a reassuring reasonable longtime member of a community they feel safe in. I suddenly post about anti/AO3/purity wank stuff/something else that really hurts them, and they feel personally betrayed and like they have lost a pillar of support, perhaps even like I have been gaslighting or grooming them, because they trusted me and thought I shared their opinion, and they now don’t know whether they can trust adults anymore -- even though I never directly interacted with them and am not aware of their existence.

HashtagActivist is very concerned about something that’s happening, whether the latest really important IRL current events or super silly and niche fandom wank. They check my social media to see what I, known and wise BNF who also cares about important human rights topics, have to say about it, but I haven’t posted anything about it. If I’m fully silent, that looks sus and like admission of guilt? If I’m fucking around blogging about other things, that seems tone-deaf and disrespectful. So weird! What lack of basic kindness and empathy, so irresponsible. From my side, I just haven’t heard about the thing, or I don’t know enough about it to talk about it, or I think no one needs to hear my white person opinion, or I’m fucking tired because this is the same shit that’s been happening for the 15 years I’ve been on the Internet, or it’s about the USA and I’m tired of US-centrism, or talking/thinking about it is too upsetting for me for personal reasons, or I’m just offline spending the day doing stuff in real life because I’m a person, or I think this thing that matters a lot to you is silly and not important because I’m twice your age.

I’m a person and I have moods and bad days and excentricities and personal tastes and personal history and experiences and weird kinks and inside jokes with friends like everyone else, so I might say or do weird things on my personal blog, because I never signed up to be a public figure and I don’t care what random people think about me. This results in you seeing someone “behave weirdly”, even though you think they should be mindful, on my best behaviour at all times, careful about the message they send to the people who look up to them, etc. How selfish, how lacking in kindness and basic empathy. I’m an adult and not thinking about the young people following me and seeing a bad role model, I’m not showing a good image of fandom or to the fanbase, I’m not taking responsibility for being (apparently) somewhat famous. But I’m just a person living my life and fucking around on my personal accounts, not a celebrity with a PR person handling my official social media.

Touching back on the original ask about the inevitable villainization of the BNF, there's a line in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo that feels particularly apt for a space like fandom. It goes, "Praise is just like an addiction. The more you get it, the more of it you need just to stay even.”

People are extremely good at normalizing almost anything. Praise which previously was worth the world to a person, when given over and over for long enough, eventually just becomes "tuesday." At which point it needs to be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, etc to recreate that initial effect. It takes a degree of detachment on the part of a BNF to realize that their self-esteem, mental health, and praise addiction is not the burden of their readership when they've been using it as a crutch, and are now reaching a point where the exponential growth of their success has tapered off (and/or the fandom has collectively decided they've achieved a degree of success that now qualifies them for criticism).

That dynamic combined with the social nitpicking that generally accompanies social media visibility, tends to mean that many BNF's get trapped there, unable to leave because they need the praise to stay even, while also developing a sense of resentment towards the fandom collectively for being held to an unbelievable expectation of producing high calibre creative work while maintaining a degree of friendliness, engagement, responsiveness, and unproblematic-ness with thousands upon thousands of people based on their specific standards and personal sense of their parasocial relationship with the BNF. Generally it hits a breaking point where that BNF either leaves, reaches villain status, or is forced to largely detach from the fandom and exist and behave as a sort of entity rather than a person.

Additionally, if a BNF is new to popularity, especially online, they generally don't realize until too late that fans and friends are not the same things (especially because early on in fandom, fans and friends can be the same things). Fans can feel like friends on steroids, but often times those fans will enable new BNF's in ways that are self-destructive for them in the long run.

https://tianmani.lofter.com/post/1d192d7b_1cd1a08a0