#fandom thing

masters of the air - john bucky egan

it's always sunny - charlie kelly

star wars - luke skywalker

the pacific - eugene sledge

top gun - tom iceman kazansky

x-files - dana scully

supernatural - dean winchester

star trek aos - james t. kirk

x-men - erik lehnsherr

hockey - matthew tkachuk (does this count? im gonna say it does)

Edit: (its now 12/10/23 and I see I never posted this lmao its just in my drafts. Which I have like fifty of 😅)

It’s hard to avoid the negativity. Mantras like “don’t like, don’t read” and “stay in your lane” are great, of course, but they only work if everyone follows the rule. Like the anon in Tsuki’s ask said, if you are online for more than a few minutes, if you dig even the slightest bit into the tags, you’ll see something you regret and not everyone has the strength or the support group to let it go or ignore it. It hurts to see people willfully misrepresenting your favorite character or your ship community. It’s hard not to take it personally. 

The advice to build your own community is also good, but I understand how difficult this is. Not everyone has the confidence to slide into another persons dms to start the process, and many long timers in the fandom are understandably cautious of befriending new people. It can take years to find people you can safely laugh and cry (and vent) with. Until you do, you are sort of adrift in the wider fandom with all its issues.

Regarding ship wars, I feel like here on tumblr they most often take the form of meta blogs that devote the majority of their time to denigrating other ship communities. While they may officially hold the attitude of “ship and let ship”, the number of disingenuous anons they answer and the sheer abundance of replies that focus on straw man arguments or else attempt to paint an entire rival community in a negative light is honestly astonishing.  

I don’t know what to say about those. Just. Yeah. It’s disgusting and dishonest.  I hate it too. Also I know as a meta blog I shouldn’t be casting stones. Glass houses and all that. But I’ve tried very hard not to do that. I’m obviously not perfect in this regard but I feel pretty confident that if you look at the 4356 anon asks I’ve answered, there are only a handful that could be considered casting shade on anyone. I get bait daily. It would be so easy to fall into that trap. But it’s such a shitty thing to do.

Tsuki’s reply to the anon was perfect of course and I could sympathize with her feelings. That need to be careful and constantly censor yourself is something I can relate to. There’s also the awareness that no matter how hard you try or how careful you are, someone somewhere (or maybe a lot of someones) are going to view you poorly because your ideas are inconvenient to them. 

I don’t have any solutions here. I just read that ask and wanted to let people who are hurting because of fandom negativity know that I see them and I’m sorry. It sucks. It’s exhausting. All those things. You aren’t crazy. You aren’t alone. You aren’t weak. You aren’t overly sensitive. You are human. 

Applying ideas from one fandom to another?  That’s intertextuality.  

Headcanons, self-inserts, role play, or connecting heavily to a character?  Just an extension of Reader Response Theory.  

Fixating on one specific aspect of the story, like setting, or wondering what would happen if that one aspect was different (i.e. an AU)?  That’s looking at text through different lenses and examining how things like history and location and world-building shape the narrative.