some electric holy yearning

so if you try to be a good internet citizen and just block and ignore them, at some point you will miss the memo on why everyone is really annoyed by specific headcanons. or even worse, you're a new fan of the thing and you don't know anyone's history.

like (to completely make up an example bc I don't want this to be about anything specific) maybe I like to headcanon a character as bisexual, bc as someone who is bisexual I think it's fun and sexy to be bi. and because I blocked them two years ago I don't know that Fandom Blowhard has been running around telling people they MUST headcanon character X as bisexual and anything else is WRONG because "one time she dated a man and now she dates women so she must be bisexual, it's like you didn't even watch the show oh my god people are so biphobic." and when people politely tried to tell this person why that's a shitty reason to insist a character is bisexual (comphet exists!), Fandom Blowhard wrote thousands of words doubling down and accusing everyone of having secret biphobic motives, hating character X, and being bullies.

and then either A) an old fan with a curated blocklist who has been kept blissfully unaware of sexuality discourse or B) a new fan pipes up to say "yeah I like to think of character X as bisexual!" and a bunch of people get really suspicious of them, or take what they're saying in bad faith, or outright get mad at them. which is! baffling and upsetting!

and A might be able to check in with fandom friends to figure out what the hell is going on, or just throw up their hands and leave the fandom. which is a huge shame because ideally polarization would not completely ruin the ability to talk about anything. but B is probably going to be approached by Fandom Blowhard who tells them "yeah this fandom has a HUGE biphobia problem, don't trust anyone" and then experience what is essentially a radicalization pipeline but about bi headcanons.

unfortunately as far as I know there are no effective solutions to this because it's an emergent behavior of large groups of people. there will always be Fandom Blowhards and people annoyed by fandom blowhards. the rest of us might just be stuck in the middle.

Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.

More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.