#work+life

Doggust Day 11: English pointer. Work problems? Consider dog solution.

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.

Me at middle age: oh god we are all Skinner. A middle manager praying his wife doesn't leave and hating real estate prices and trying to keep his reports in line to do their freaking jobs, and no you can't expense rodeo tickets and tarot card readings, stop breaking your cell phones, who is this damn Russian following me around do I kiss him or kill him no wonder I am bald!