Sweet Summer Cephalopod

As mentioned, what (temporarily) drove us away was a combination of things. Between a new job for one of us, mental health issues that we will not go into, and, as of recent, a D&D campaign that we are extremely invested in, drawing Pokemon stuff just didn't really fit into the schedule anymore. However, I will not deny that a large reason for our distancing has been the consistent hate we've been getting for running this blog. When we made this blog the decision was made not to respond to any of the hate asks we got. There was no reason to - it would just sully the mood, and almost every hate comment was on anon anyway, so it wasn't even like we would be spreading awareness for the bad apples in the community. We chose to spread only the positive and simply privately remove the negative ones so as to keep our blog free of as much negativity as we could. But we did, in fact, receive a lot of hate comments. A lot of them were funny to the point where we did not at all feel slighted by them, but others were completely ridiculous. We have received genuine death threats over posting a Pokemon ship. I, the one writing this, am the primary individual in charge of the social side of this blog. My partner in crime makes the art, and I post it here on this blog to share with people, alongside doing all the other fun things that Tumblr people do like managing the ask box, responding to comments, etc. I've been on the internet for a very long time and have seen my fair share of hate comments. I am not bothered by it in the sense that it does not impact my mental health significantly. But that does not take away from the fact that it was tedious at best, and genuinely upsetting at worst. For the most part these asks involved heavily shaming the rarepair we make art of here, insisting that "canon ships" existed for these characters (Though I also feel the need to mention that many fans of said ships have also been very supportive of this blog, and thus I want to make sure that I am not shaming everybody involved in that much more positive side of the community. To those who supported us, or simply left us be despite your personal tastes, thank you.), or implying that we deserved significant physical harm for posting about these characters being romantically involved.

This amount of hate is, sadly, an extremely common issue that rare pair shippers face. I know of many blogs that, within just the short lifespan of this blog, have gone belly-side up because the amount of anonymous hate that would be thrown their way. When you post online, receiving hate is inevitable. There will always be those select few that find the need to share their opinions on everything without considering how it may make others feel. We expected this going in. And yet, it was still saddening to see the support greatly drowned out by hate comment after hate comment after hate comment. We don't share this to garner sympathy, but rather to spread awareness that this is an issue that many other people face too.