#fandom spaces

You know the feeling when you made a friend from a completely different fandom and started teaching each other about the lore and canon until it begins to feel like having an international friend who shows you the culture and traditions of their country while you do the same with yours, and eventually it all ends with a promise that one day you will definitely visit each other’s countries a.k.a. play the game or watch the movie/series the other person’s fandom is from?

​Especially when they post something completely unrelated to the sport—like an engagement or a photo of their family—and people barge in with pure, unadulterated misery? Absolute not. KILL ME on the spot if I ever become that person.

​(To be clear: I am NOT talking about athletes who have done atrocious, morally corrupt, or illegal things. If someone is a garbage human being, go off. What I’m talking about is hating an athlete purely because they're a whiny, egotistical loser. As if your own favourites don't check every single one of those boxes. But let me not be a 'snowflakes' and call out the hypocrites who make harassing athletes and their fans their full-time personality traits.)

​I’m not trying to act like a saint here. I hate-watch games/races. I celebrate downfalls. But logging onto the internet every single day to religiously attack someone who doesn’t even know you exist—and attacking their fans just because they're their fans as if your life depends on it? That isn't normal. It's not even the usual internet sports debates anymore. A lot of people wish serious harm on these athletes, completely forgetting they're real people. Don't you think this is too much sports for the day? The week? The month? The year? A huge number of sports fans need serious help.

​The amount of time and emotional bandwidth people burn on this is sad. Imagine if that energy went into getting a job, building a skill, or literally doing anything else.

​Log off. Put the phone down. Touch grass. Wash that ass.

because if it goes like this they will start monitoring fandom spaces, which most celebs already feel entitled to. and that is against the whole trajectory of fandom. most people do it for fun. for the love of the game, for themselves. im scared that it's ruining fandom spaces. i think they can lurk every now and then but like.. the concept of getting noticed by people is so useless, it has been around since they found instagram probably but still..

But there is something that feels deeply frustrating/disrespectful to me about people who will make a whole AU series / fic for a piece of fan-media, only to go "oh hey this is neat actually i want this to be made with my own ORIGINAL characters now" and promptly file off the barcode and reskin all non-OCs with their OCs without like... Changing ANYTHING about the universe/plot/characters themselves.

The personalities are the same. The narrative themes and Big Important Scenes are the same, and oftentimes the dialogue doesn't change at all aside from replacing names for characters & locations---even the interactions between different, completely-new characters are all the exact same as before. Nothing changes except for the designs / the names being used. There's no interest in exploring the rest of the universe they've created, just telling the same story only "It's 100% My Intellectual Property This Time™️ so i can make XYZ (notoriety, a purchasable book/comic, merch, money, etc) from it"

And it's like... Oh. So this wasn't about love for the source media and/or its wider fandom at all, it's about... gaining popularity? Being THE creator of this story people are growing attached to despite the fact it came from fandom? And now that your work is gaining traction you want it to have nothing to do with the source that helped you come up with the idea in the first place.