PSA: ABOUT MUTUALS
Recently, I’ve been receiving a lot of questions from followers asking what it means to be a mutual. In the roleplay community on Tumblr, mutual refers to two people who are following one another on their roleplay blogs. These people may have been following each other for months, or they may have just started following each other. Person A may have been following Person B for a while and Person B just followed Person A back today - you get the general idea.
That all being said, posts that a mun will throw up that say ‘mutuals like for a starter’ refer to these followers specifically. You can check to see if said mun is following you back by going to your followers section of your sidebar and typing in their url in ‘search your followers’ box on the page. It’ll tell you there if they’re following you back or not.
However, it is important to remember that in the spirit of selectivity, it’s nothing personal if a roleplayer isn’t following you back. For me personally, I don’t follow back a lot of people if I’m unfamiliar with the fandom or if I just don’t see a lot of interaction possibilities between my character and someone else’s character. Sometimes people’s writing styles won’t mesh, and other times it’s a situation where you’ve been following a roleplayer for months and haven’t interacted once, so you ultimately decide to break that mutual follow. It’s never anything personal and it should never be taken personally - so please, do not guilt roleplayers for not following you back.
If someone is selective, they’re selective - they have their reasons for it and those reasons should be respected. So please, always check before you ask for starters, and be understanding and respectful of other’s rules and wishes. It’ll save everyone some awkwardness and unneeded drama.
