#insertdisc5

And Ocean's reasonable, kind, non-maintagged critiques are absolutely not even close to being the same as that, but it's possible that Adrienne was in a bad enough headspace that it, to her, felt the same at the time.

That's not an excuse or an expectation that anyone who was alienated and hurt should be expected to forgive her. Regardless of why she blocked Ocean, a lot of fans of color have been really hurt and no reasoning is going to change that. But I do think it's always worth considering why people do the things they do, that it's inherently good or at least harmless so long as it doesn't turn into making excuses.

I really hope Adrienne apologizes to Ocean and does the work to make things right when they return, at least as much as it can be made right at this point. I can't imagine what Ocean is going through right now, it must be terrible to be treated this way by someone you've been a fan of for so long. And I'm sure that many people have been horrible to him in their attempts to defend their favorite creator. Anyone who cares about id5's mental health better care just as much about how this hurt Ocean. Xe has been so kind and patient and even if xe wasn't, xe still wouldn't have deserved any of this. And anyone being nasty or speculating that he may have done something to id5 should be ashamed.

I think Adrienne needs to change the way they interact with the fanbase. I don't think it's healthy to have no real boundaries between creator and fans. It's good for creators to take feedback and criticism, but humans aren't really meant to have 24/7 access to what thousands of people think of them. Sometimes a person won't be in the right headspace for engaging with even the best faith criticism and it's good to have a way to avoid it until they're ready to face it head on.

(obviously this doesn't apply to things like pointing out an ongoing issue with whitewashed merch or correcting misinformation on a post, when that's something that the creator really should deal with, especially if it's already been brought up and ignored, and if that's the main or only reason Ocean got blocked, that's really bad and most of this post doesn't apply. I'm choosing to take Adrienne at her word that Ocean bringing up the whitewashing wasn't the reason for xer block.)

And similarly, fans like Ocean need to be able to speak openly about the issues they have with a work, especially when it comes to things like racism, without the risk of being blocked by the creator. That's not fair, nobody should have to shower a creation in exclusively praise to avoid being ostracized. Especially not fans of color who are pointing out real issues with a work or fandom.

I spent several years in the magnus archives fandom, and since the creator of that is on Tumblr as well, it's common for fans to tag their posts with "do not archive" specifically for stuff they don't want the creator to see. I wonder if it would be worth having something like that as well with the isat fandom, even just something like "isat crit" or the like. It's not the responsibility of the fans to shelter a creator, but that tag in tma is specifically for the benefit of the fans, to give them peace of mind that they can talk and post openly without having to worry how the creator may react.

I hope on Adrienne's side they can take a step back from everything related to the fandom until she can figure out how to interact with it in a way that's better for everyone. Filtering usernames would've been a much better choice compared to blocking. This never had to happen if she'd thought things through instead of jumping to the nuclear option, and it could've saved a lot of people from a lot of pain.