Hello, Alex! The Flesh here (no relation lol)
Iāve been looking through some of the stuff the fandom does and thinks in regards to TMA, andācall me a snooty bastard if you wishāI think theyāre missing out on a lot in relation to how they interact with the show.
The two episodes that come to mind are MAG102: Nesting Instinct and MAG103: Cruelty Free. I find that a non-insignificant number of people undermine the horror in these episodes. Specifically, they mock 102 for what they believe to be an absurd premise of a man falling in love with a beetle, and they refer to 103ās Monster Pig as cute, in some regard, for its proclamation of Dylan Anderson as āFriend.ā I could speak at length about how this completely overlooks the nuance of both episodes, but youād know better than I, and I wouldnāt want to embarrass myself popping the hood of a car you helped to design.
I suppose what Iām asking is, how do I avoid this tonal dissonance between work and fandom when doing my own projects? It has been a persistent worry of mine, that whatever I make shall be undermined by an innate desire in many fandoms to sympathize or soften, especially when such things are deleterious to full enjoyment of the work.
I cannot state enough that I do not aim to be pompous or establish that I am better than anyone. I am not. That is why Iām asking a superior artistāyouāfor advice.
Hey, I got bad news for you. You can't avoid tonal dissonance between a work and it's fandom. If you try you will likely sabotage the work and alienate the fandom. Examples: 1) Spoonfeed your audience their opinions in the work? Your work becomes didactic and alienating. 2) "Correct" audience opinions outside the work? At best you're ignored, at worst you're now perceived as an asshole. 3) Double down on the negatives to deliberately alienate audience sympathy? Your work just became edgelord nonsense. At the risk of going all Buddhist on you... Your discomfort will fade when you stop trying to control people. You cannot make people do what you want. You can only make the path you desire for them to take as easy as possible. If people are taking an unexpected path, ask them why because there is clearly a need your path isn't providing. Then you can either a) continue and modify your path to better meet that need b) accept that you cannot cater to that need and continue as you were, losing those people in the process c) quit the path. It's all valid, even option C. I know that's not a satisfying answer. I suspect you probably wanted some practical advice on steering audience reception via the execution of the work itself but this is, I think, a more helpful response. Accepting other people's readings without being consumed by them is profoundly difficult, especially when people are harmfully projecting themselves onto you and your work but its the best advice I've got. TLDR: You cannot control how people engage with your work. All you can do is make the work as well as you can, learn a lesson then make the next thing different. Sometimes the lesson is "make the desired reading more obvious" sometimes it's "some people will always be contrarian" and sometimes its even realising that you were saying something you weren't aware of at the time. Either way, you have something to work with next time and if you give it the consideration it deserves your work will improve over time.
