As I was working this morning, I thought about the wave of hatred that has (again) hit the fandom in which I currently write (at the moment, HotD) in the last few hours, and not only I notice that the number of deactivated accounts is increasing, but also that those who, tired, decide (rightly) that they want to take a break are also increasing.
I wondered why there are people out there who thrive on discrediting, denigrating, bashing others, insisting so much with their nastiness that they are capable to make a person doubt themselves and/or think they have to justify themselves for something they did not do.
I have put myself in the shoes of someone who for months, or years, has invested her energies in something to the point of sharing fanart, floor plans and all the enthusiasm she can muster, only to find herself in need to justify her work to those who make dumb accusations. I wrote (and am really struggling to finish for various reasons) a 44-chapter long fic (not in HotD) that I have open on a Word file fourteen years ago: mine doesn't reach a million words, but 400k do, and for those 400k words I literally put my soul into it like all fanwriters do. Fourteen years of research, of words and phrases translated from other languages. Entire afternoons spent on google searching pages and pages for a detail mentioned maybe only once, trying to bridge linguistic differences, looking for idioms, idiomatic expressions, searching for events, recipes, documenting myself and discovering day after day something that the day before I might not have known. This is what writing is all about. Broadening the mind, trying to improve oneself, that's why I defined writing as something that nourishes. It should be something that unites, that improves not only you, but also others. Instead, when I go on tumblr, I happen to read (justified) outbursts from people who have to defend themselves against bullshit created just to hurt, and I am very sorry to discover that often that bullshit hits the mark and gets the desired result from the dungbags who write it. The advice is always the same: don't like a character, a topic, an OC? Free to do so, but scroll over without feeling entitled to throw shit on the author, and if you really feel the need to do so, put your face to it, take the fucking accountability for your words. I can't tell these people how to react to certain attacks because everyone reacts in their own way, but the only thing I can say is don't stop writing, do it because it wouldn't be right to stop for a bunch of assholes. Whatever you decide to do, whether to continue publishing or not, don't stop writing, don't give in to them.
