what I was talking abt earlier. we have fully looped back around and away from feminism, societally, whereas before it was very Feminism 101 to acknowledge that many parts of existing as a woman in a misogynistic society are painful and upsetting. not that being a woman is Inherently Negative in a bubble. but that living on this earth, in the conditions we're living in, is hostile to women. and that gender is a performance. that many of the Staples Of Femininity as accepted by society are things that you have to create and perform and mold artificially and aren't inherent, that COMPLAINING about day to day difficulties of existing as a woman is something that you're allowed to do. acknowledging these basic, again, feminism 101 things, that something tied to womanhood is more time consuming or more expensive or more dangerous Because Of The Problems. does not CREATE the problems. that when women complain about having to perform femininity, they are not, in fact, oppressing themselves. the call does not come from inside the fucking house. saying that you HAVE suffered does not fucking equate that you believe you SHOULD have suffered.

like I could talk about this for hours. how braindead and one-dimensional the Takes are getting. "being a woman is looking in the mirror and going fuck yeah i'm a woman" damn. I guess any negative experiences you have by living in a misogynistic world... are your fault if you are anything but positive? "you don't actually want liberation" we've fully gone back to telling feminists "you WANT to be oppressed" when anything negative about our society is pointed out. it's not real until I say it out loud, I guess, and then I'm actually the one who caused it. if anybody expresses any unhappiness with how they're treated or the status quo or the language and culture surrounding womanhood and femininity. they've created it, right that second. they invented it just now. it wasn't a problem before somebody complained, right? also trans women aren't braindead zombies who just follow the flow of whatever cis women around them say. I am pretty fucking sure they are very much aware of pain, and are MORE than aware of the swirling torrent of misogyny and standards of femininity than anybody else. actually. and I am pretty sure someone complaining on tumblr that being a woman means always putting on a performance is going to make someone change their mind about transitioning. also "performing femininity" as a necessity to being treated well as a woman is not fucking NEWS to your Local Trans Woman. I AM PRETTY SURE SHE GETS THE CONCEPT. using trans women as a scapegoat for this braindead perspective on gender politics is spineless, meritless, and pathetic.

sometimes i forget that i had a unique experience in that i had to have intrusive thoughts explained to me at a very young age bc i had them so severe, so i’ve always known about them and understood how they work, and then i get get surprised by how many people actually have no idea what intrusive thoughts are 😭

It is crazy how much skinny able-bodied white ppl don't see anyone outside of themselves as human and will only prop up different kinds of ppl (fat, disabled, poc, ect ect) to either act as a free pass to be bigoted 'but they think its funny too' type of thing, or to make themselves look better by pretending to care about whatever demographic those ppl belong to. But since they don't actually see those ppl as humans and only use them as a toy, the second they get bored they find any excuse to throw them away

Like so many white grifters started talking about Palestine as a free ego boost and proping up motaz and bisan. But now that they're getting bored they're starting to look for way to un-hitch themselves from that movement and catch their next grift without ppl pointing out that it's fucked up that they never really cared about a literal genocide and only saw it as a chance to make themselves look better.

And now they're using the fact that a Sudanese person criticized something motaz said (rightfully so) as that free pass to say they refuse to care about Palestine anymore and are offloading the blame of that onto black ppl when really nobody told them to be dehumanizing grifters. They did that all on their own :/

i think if he did have a tiktok it would be one of those like. soundless ones where he does the most random thing like. melding or pottery where only his hands + the object show

see i see this but i also think even then he wouldnt post them...i just think the idea of him. making an account. choosing a bio and pfp. taking a video. choosing a thumbnail. choosing a caption. uploading it. i just think at some point there his general disposition that is so diametrically opposed to the entire concept of tiktok + social media in general would intervene and stop that from happening there is just no part of that that would appeal to him i feel

there’s been ‘audiobooks aren’t reading’ discourse on booktok lately (embarrassing), and in the margins of that - and also on here recently - I keep seeing this idea that reading ‘too much’ or too fast’ is bad............genuinely, who cares? how is that anyone’s business?

‘people are focusing on numbers instead of reading quality books just to post about it on social media!!!!’ do you actually know that? if an individual realises themselves that they’re doing that, and thinks it is bad....they can stop. if you are not that person how would you know?

similarly it goes hand in hand with this vitriol against skim reading - oh no! someone is reading fast and not taking in every single word! sometimes they miss things! clearly this is because they’re obsessed with showing off how many books they read in a year and they’re not comprehending anything in the books. Not, i don’t know, they’re a bookseller and it’s literally their job to know about as many different books in all sorts of genres as they can. or, maybe they just want to have a broad understanding of lots of books even if they’re not obsessed with all of them! maybe they like listening to things in the background while they work. stop treating every single book as if it’s the pinnacle of literacy that deserves your utmost attention!!! like if you can understand people can watch random movies or tv shows for fun, or in the background while they’re focusing on other things....you can understand people do that with some books too right? and it doesn’t inherently mean they do that with every book they read?

it seems to be this mindset that skim reading is like......a binary thing that you do or don’t do. Not something you can choose to do on certain books, certain chapters, certain paragraphs, and also vary the speed of your reading.. I skim read books sometimes because I know they’re not personally for me but I want to finish them so I can form a full opinion of them, or be able to recommend them to someone I know might like it. I am an illustrator and listen to audiobooks all day while I work and use the library so it’s no cost of time or money to do this a lot. and if I’m skim reading a book and then I realise I am actually loving it...get this.....I can start reading it slower. I can even read it again. 

in conclusion it’s truly so embarrassing to watch people arguing about how other people consume media?

i love the internal monologue culture of tumblr

Tiktok is waking up to the fact that all this stuff about Paige’s sexuality and Azzi and just her privacy in general is WEIRD and literally bless it. I can’t imagine how strange it must be to see such wild claims about yourself at such a huge level. When I played basketball, there became this narrative about me that I wasn’t girly, that I was too masculine, and I just HAD to be a lesbian. As someone who was going through an identity crisis, it made me really uncomfortable and pushed me even more into confusion about my identity so I can’t even imagine how Paige feels to see practically the entire app of tiktok saying the same thing. It’s okay to post your silly little TikTok’s and tiktok edits and playfully flirt and add the silly captions because she’s said she enjoys it, but the other stuff??? It’s gotta stop NOWWWWW. Invading her privacy, spreading shit about her and Azzi and just being plain weird…we gotta nip it in the bud fr. Not to mention that even her brother said during a live (allegedly) that her and Azzi were literally just friends, so if that’s what’s being said then that’s what it is. They’ve stopped posting each other frequently and it’s prob because y’all won’t be normal about them, whether it’s something going on or not; adding onto that but it’s not our business to figure out the nature of their bond/relationship. Some ppl have friendships that we’ll never understand and it’s not for us to understand. Any alleged videos shouldn’t keep getting spread, especially when there’s no context, yall just spreading shit for the hell of it atp. Azzi and Paige have been friends since they were like 14 and watching y’all pick apart their entire relationship is so strange. Let’s just get all this together now, because some stuff is being brought to twitter and whatnot and it’s just all so weird.

some ppl in fan spaces r so weird about classism like ‘oh if ur a real fan then u have xyz’ ‘i have every piece of merch released since i was born and pay thousands of dollars to fly across the world to follow these events’ ok . i love that people are so appreciative of the people who create content whether that be book songs videos movies whatever that they find passion in essentially collecting their releases but my issue is. why are you shitting on people who can’t afford it . it’s something i’ve seen a lot on tiktok and twitter and it’s great that people are able to have these experiences but . you’re also not a better person or ‘a bigger fan’ because of your wealth . and it’s really shitty to view people who don’t have time money means for travel etc as below you in fan spaces because they’re not performing as a fan in the same way you do . idk it’s not a competition it just pisses me off how ppl perceive different fan experiences

Hey so idk if you would know this but where did the term canyon in reference to Izzy fans come from? I feel like I just started seeing it like three days ago but everyone seems to already know what it means

lol so disclaimer that this ask has been in my inbox since september 23rd and alsoooo i might not be the best person to ask bc i am belothed by many who consider themselves part of the izzy canyon (which is their right). so if you asked an izzy fan about this you would probably get a different answer. also from what i can tell the term originated on twitter and i don’t go there.

the tl;dr that i heard secondhand from someone who identifies as izzy canyon is that at some point last year (summer or fall-ish i think) a lot of izzy fans were blocking so many people who didn’t like izzy that a lot of them ended up being unaware of general fandom trends and it became a running joke among them that izzy fans were isolated from the rest of the fandom in an "izzy canyon." and then allegedly the term expanded to just mean "if ur not a dick abt ppl liking izzy u can be in the canyon." THAT BEING SAID there are other ppl who had a very different experience with how "the canyon" originated and what kind of fan space it tends to be.

(slightly longer explanation below)

the thing with The Canyon is that to understand its origin and also why some fans have a problem with it, you gotta know two things:

there are annoying puriteen anti types on the internet who think liking certain characters make you a bad person. from what i can tell theyre mostly on twitter and tiktok. these people are annoying but also in my experience they're usually pretty easy to block and ignore.

the popularity of izzy hands is disproportionate to his narrative role in the show, and the popular fanon interpretation of izzy hands casts him not only as a principal character but as a much more sympathetic, righteous character than he is in canon. THIS DOES NOT MEAN I THINK ANYONE IS A BAD PERSON FOR LIKING IZZY. this DOES mean that i think ppl who think ed is izzy's domestic abuser are wrong. and also this is part of an age old fandom trend of fandom favoring a masc white guy who is often a side character and also often an antagonist.

so from what i can tell. in the early days of the ofmd fandom (spring-summer 2022) there was a lot of #1 going around on twitter, screaming about how if you liked izzy hands then you're a racist abuse apologist or something. at one point a throwaway account tweeted a callout for a popular izzy fan and said "we know they live in this area and work for this company, so these are the locations where they might work. everyone should call these numbers and tell their job to fire them. also we're gonna target these izzy fans next" and like, obviously this account was pretty quickly taken down. but it was a pretty scary thing and left a lot of izzy fans pretty paranoid, hence the blocking everyone who didnt like izzy.

(there was also a "izzy hater group chat" twitter account that was literally just a small group of mostly minors posting memes and also abt izzy that got accused of being connected to that whole mess. but afaict those guys have nothing to do with harassment of izzy fans they just dont like izzy)

so the thing is now that all of that has been used to justify shutting down any type of conversation about #2, or writing off anyone who posts meta about izzy that isnt like, "he works so hard and is so unappreciated despite everything he's done for ed" as an "izzy anti." analyzing izzy critically and posting this in the #izzy hands tag on tumblr is likened to genuine harassment.

oh lol and speaking of harrasment: there was also a problem with ppl on tumblr getting anon hate, and izzy fans will tell you that the anon came from an izzy hater who was targeting izzy fans bc the anon messages use "izzy critical rhetoric." however as someone who has posted "izzy critical" metas or whatever, i have actually gotten the same harassing messages accusing me of being an izzy stan and a racist abuse apologist. that's not what a targeted harassment campaign looks like. that's all been less of a problem ever since tumblr made it so you need to be logged in to an account to send anonymous messages.

anyway my stance on all of this:

i don't hate anyone for liking izzy. i am critical of certain comments/behaviors i often see from ppl who identify as izzy fans, but izzy fans are rarely the only ones who have this problem. from what i've seen tho, a lot of it comes from izzy fans.

before i ever saw even a hint of harassment against izzy fans, i saw izzy fans coming onto my posts and to posts by fans of color trying to argue that these posts were contributing to their harassment. from my perspective, it looked a lot like fans of a white character were trying to shut down conversations abt their favorite guy, especially when those conversations were being had by fans of color. i was very skeptical and oftentimes pretty dismissive abt the existence of this harassment.

since then tho ive done a pretty deep dive into the anon harassment on tumblr, and also looked at takes from different perspectives on the whole thing, and my conclusion is that there is harassment of izzy fans, however it is on the same base-level shittiness that most people experience from just... being on the internet. death threats and insults and slurs are literally just part of being on the internet. and yes, it SUCKS and it's wrong and nobody should have to put up with it, but izzy fans are not victims of specific targeted harassment. theyre victims of being on the internet and having to put up with general internet shittiness. and im sympathetic to that up until ppl start using "ive been harassed for being an izzy fan" as an excuse to be incredibly nasty (check out this tumblr acct for examples of what i mean lol). the ofmd fandom is annoying and parts of it are toxic but like, by no means is this the most toxic fandom to ever exist. we're not at "undertale fan giving out cookies with needles in them at a convention" levels just yet.

finally, tangentially related: i am inherently wary of fandom sub-groups that like, name themselves?? in my experience, the more people make being a Type Of Fan part of their identity the more it tends to lead to problems. this goes for fans who label themselves "antis" or "anti-antis" or whatever the fuck. i've personally been called an "izzy anti," an "izzy hater," and an "izzy critical fan" but like, i dont really call myself that?? it just seems weird to me idk. it gets to be very "us vs them" on default with little nuance and ive never found this kind of thing to be like, productive in fandom spaces. but that's just me.

Bruh what is it with genshin shippers on twitter and tiktok being so obsessed with each other???????I swear if you’d look up content about a ship on either platform, you’ll find content on shippers just bashing other ships or putting idiotic ‘ittosara/ayathoma/eimiko/etc stans dni’ disclaimers in their bio……

Holy hell, why is it so difficult for them to mind their own business and not ruin the peace within the fandom????? (This isn’t a post against shippers btw, so those of you who get irritated with ppl having fun with romantic character pairings or whine about how ‘ships ruin everything’, this post isn’t for you)

And omg they can’t even mind their own business when a post about a ship they don’t like comes on their fyp. If it’s a pairing you don’t like, then just scroll???? Why are you taking time out to add your unwanted opinion in a space that is clearly not for you? It’s a different case if the post is bashing your ship and you comment to defend it, but most cases aren’t like that. And I swear sometimes they give the most backhanded comments to fan artists who draw ship content online

‘I don’t ship this but it’s cute 😊’ like you can compliment their art WITHOUT bringing up your personal likes/dislikes cuz they work hard on their drawings only to see comments that visibly are unappreciative of the content they enjoy….

And Ppl create the most unnecessary posts ever on their ‘takes’ on certain ships all the time. ‘My opinions on ships tw:opinion🤭’ like bro please grow up. Just cuz ur doing and saying these things online doesn’t mean that it won’t have the same affect as it would in person.

If you were to go around giving out opinions publicly without any consideration to the time and place, then you’re gonna be bashed or disliked at most. Social cues are important both irl and online. And if y’all are gonna make posts about each other’s ships then at least have the decency to use the fucking tags to ensure that ppl who like those pairings don’t have to see your complaints about them…..

I’m so confused and irritated with all the shippers drama. It’s annoying that y’all can’t treat each other with respect or practice basic etiquette online cuz then shippers’ drama affects the entire community.

I like shipping; but it’s not fun when the fandom is constantly at each other’s throats on which ship is ‘valid’ or ‘problematic’…..

This is separate from people making Noah’s coming out all about byler, without ever separating Noah from Will, because yes that’s weird. But also entirely expected, like that’s as fandom behavior as it gets.

But for the sake of making a point here, what’s the main argument people use for why byler won’t happen?

It’s that the Duffers are just two straight old white dudes and the actors playing the characters are two straight white dudes. And because of that they’re probably all homophobic so it’ll never happen and if anything the opposite, most messed up ending, is more likely.

Heteronormativity and the assumptions that everyone is definitively straight, until they explicitly say otherwise, is something homophobes depend on.

Now all the people with ignorant arguments like that can do after this news, is bitch about how no one cares that he’s gay and it’s not even a big deal… a concept Noah literally references in his TikTok.

Even though I think straight ppl mean well when they say who cares, they’re ignoring the fact that straightness is the default expectation in our society. And this puts a lot a weight on queer people’s shoulders their entire lives, to essentially live a lie until they finally get the courage to come out.

Noah admitted that it took him 18 years to come out to his family and friends bc he was too scared to.

The reality is straight ppl mostly don’t want to talk/think about it and that’s why they get upset with too much discussion about the possibility in terms of byler and Stranger Things in general.

Unfortunately for all the practicing homophobes in the fandom, they’re going to get a big lesson on heteronormativity and the reality that literally anyone could be/not be gay.

Your best friend. Your brother. Your mom. Your gramma… You.

And that’s what scares ppl who’ve been internalizing homophobia their whole lives. They don’t want to talk/think about it for a reason. And it has nothing to do with actual other queer people just existing, it’s what they’re scared it could or could not mean for them. And they are making a vow to themselves to never find out.

And it’s because they know how gay people are treated and they don’t want to be the butt of jokes like that. They want to belong with people that are ‘normal’ or the default in society. And so hearing those same homophobes try to downplay and discredit Noah for coming out, it’s honestly just sad. The cycle of homophobia/internalized homophobia is so fucking depressing and it affects all of us.

Idec about specific ships at this point, it’s sad that a lot of men/boys in our society still see being gay as a negative thing, something they have to distance themselves from. And by being homophobic, they feel like they’re successful in achieving that distance.

And as much as homophobes piss me off every now and then online and in real life… I know why they’re doing it. Because they’ve been rewarded for it all their lives. They’ve been told doing the opposite made them different.

People forget (or are just unaware I guess) that Noah literally clapped back at byler fans on Twitter post-s2, saying, “why can’t boys just be friends anymore??”… yeah he literally made a textbook Reddit argument… though he has since deleted it…

And so I do hope that future generations of boys and girls are going to feel more comfortable accepting themselves, making it easier for us to be willing to look inward and not be scared and to eventually maybe get to a point where we don’t even have to come out as queer, we can just love who we love and it just is.

But that’s just not reality at this time.

And so yes I’m relieved that Noah himself was comfortable enough to share this with the world and didn’t spend anymore time hiding his sexuality, assuming he wanted to be out!

Hey Ella. I thought I'd come to you with this because you always give off a kind and sympathetic nature so at the very least I won't be treated like a shitty person for what I want to say.

I'm really struggling with Harry atm and it's actually kinda devastating because I never saw this happening. There is so much around Harry that I vehemently dislike, from the people around him to aspects of his public image and narrative. I was so good at separating all that from Harry himself but lately I've been feeling my bitterness bleeding onto Harry. I've seen this happen so much. People who were originally fans getting annoyed at small things and that growing bigger into bitterness and hate. I don't want to be one of these people.

What is making this worse is that I as a person do not place a high value on things like career and ambition. Not in my own life and not in others. So it's getting hard for me to relate and support Harry in his ambition as to me there are infinitely more important things in life. This wasn't a major factor before because his fame and success wasn't at the level it is now.

I honestly don't know what I'm trying to do with this message. I guess I would just appreciate some perspective if you're willing because I genuinely do not want to start resenting Harry. Honestly just typing this is making me tear up.

hi kind anon, i think you're dealing with a pretty common problem in the fandom these days. it's tough to feel like you don't relate to someone you really always felt comfort with. maybe a first step is to take a breather from the fandom as well as gp/main media talk about harry. no twitter (and i'm not saying this bc i have a weird biased thing against twitter. it's a place where opinions are thrown around like it's something ppl have been begging for, like it's fact, and it's really hard to keep reading opinions and debates without getting influenced), no harry content on instagram, no tiktok. i am not interested in anything others have to say about him, and i actively shield myself from it. i don't watch videos others have made with commentary, i don't read articles, i don't even read discourse on here usually. i think the habit of picking everything apart, of making sure you focus on the negative to properly enjoy the positive, is unhealthy, or at least for me. i know myself enough to not fall into blindness or naivety when it comes to what's wrong with enormous success and the industry. i just don't feel the need to get into it every time harry achieves something.

when it comes to harry's ambition and success, i just know (from what he's shown over the years, but the full extent we never will) how much it means to him. i think it's also a mix of actually wanting to be big for him and getting as high as he can to prove that he can to everyone who told him he couldn't. i don't relate to it either, and i don't think it's cool to have all those riches, but i still cry with harry when he cries of joy at his madison sq garden banner. i'm okay living with that nuance without always debating it. i love his music, i love his artistic vision, i love his lyrics, i love the way he carries himself. i also know i don't know him, that i never will, and that there are things he does and says i don't agree with. i have the exact same thing with some of my lifelong best friends, as they have with me. i'm okay with that. happy, even, of how unique and imperfect we all are

what i do, and what keeps me so in love with harry beyond the noise of the gp and the fandom, is focus on what makes me love him. remember that this is an interest, something that makes you happy, and not your object of study, or your career in politics. enjoy it all for you, enjoy it offline as well. and then, i guess, if that doesn't do the trick, a few steps away from harry and all that surrounds him might be necessary to let go of the bitterness. bc you can also just stop liking something, and that's also okay

Heyo! Any advice on struggling to get your art seen in the world? I feel like no matter how much I post, or what I post, people never see it or seem to like it. I love art and am pursuing it as a career (hence why Im getting a degree in it currently lmao) but its kind of disheartening to work really hard on something, post it, and no one sees it.

oh, man. i'm afraid for this one i don't feel like i have a lot of solid advice. having a large-ish following online feels like something that kind of just, like, Happened to me, mostly on accident/in ways outside of my control, and even if i had some ideas on how to potentially replicate those gains i don't think they'd work consistently. (also, a lot of my large jumps in follower count came from mental health related work going viral bc it's #relatable; this is something i have complicated feelings about and it's absolutely not a viable, like, "strategy" or something that i would recommend, in the way that ppl can say like, "fanart gets attention!" or stuff like that.)

so, i don't have advice for how to actually GET those eyes on your art; i can maybe help with making ppl more likely to STAY once they do find you, and how to build a following that will actually help you maintain a living from your work -- bc i have TONS of peers w a following a fraction of the size of mine who get more jobs than me, are doing cooler/more "professional" stuff than me, etc! (heads up that most of my experience is on twitter; i know less than nothing about places like instagram + tiktok, and while tumblr functions very differently from twitter i feel like i handle things mostly the same here, aside from doing less personal posting/being less talkative and not 'networking' or following many people).

SCROLLING BACK UP TO ADD A SPOILER ALERT: AS ALWAYS I HAVE SAID "HAHA IDK I DON'T REALLY HAVE ANY ADVICE" AND THEN PROCEEDED TO TYPE A FULL ESSAY. IF YOU ARE ON DESKTOP YOU CAN HIT THE 'J' KEY TO SKIP THIS POST. IF YOU'RE ON MOBILE, I'M SORRY

a very important thing, especially professionally: it HAS to be easy to see what you do. (this is easier here on tumblr, where u can have a designated art tag etc, than on twitter, which is an awful website that sucks. <- guy who makes all his money on twitter) this means, like -- if i see something from you and get curious and click your profile, it should only take one more click to quickly see at least SOME of your art. on a professional account, it's probably best for your icon to be your own work, something snappy and memorable and eye-catching that reads well at a small size; people shouldn't have to dig for 20 minutes before they can start browsing your art. on twitter, this means TRY not to gunk up your media tab with a ton of reaction images/screencaps of your gacha pulls/etc; on here, it means make your art tag easy to find; on any website, a portfolio link, prominently displayed, is the best bet. (i am still working on that one myself lmao and i've been working professionally full time for a few years now so like, there are outliers and wiggle room on all of this).

next! it's great when your audience finds you, but you have to find them, too. find artists who do similar stuff to you and get into their stuff -- sincerely, not just as "networking." (like only do this with ppl whose stuff you actually think is cool, not just trying to get in mutuals with everyone you see in hopes of a bump, obviously.) get interested in other indie artists, find the people who are working/publishing in the spaces that are exciting and aspirational for you, and support them! i don't want it to sound cynical when i say there's a kind of give-and-take built into this; the point is not "well, if i reblog/retweet a bunch of YOUR stuff, maybe you'll feel obligated to boost mine in return," but that when you find other artists/creatives who are on the same wavelength as you, you will naturally stumble into pools of people who want to support art like yours, and you and your newfound peers will help each other when you hype each other's stuff up and direct followers to each other! (again re: things going differently on dif websites: this is twitter-specific for me, bc i use my tumblr as a gallery/portfolio. that doesn't mean it doesn't happen here tho! it can and does happen everywhere!)

it is really not a competition. i know that SOMETIMES it is in like, a really nitty-gritty numbers sense; people only have so much money to spare, they will make choices about whose patreon they can afford/what comic to buy/etc, that's true. but to me that's not competition. people who are sincerely into your stuff will hang on until they can afford it; maybe that means someone follows you for two whole years before the planets align and they have the budget/opportunity to commission you. by hanging out in similar circles you are not taking potential business or opportunities away from anyone else, nor are you risking leading your own audience to Someone They'll Like Better; you're just offering more options, and the internet is VAST and endless, and EVENTUALLY people will show up who are into YOUR STUFF, SPECIFICALLY. helping each other is never going to stifle or delay that!!

and my final chunk of advice is the one i give constantly that everyone is probably super sick of hearing but i just seriously seriously believe in it, even tho i know it's slow to pay off and hard to follow: keep doing exactly what you want to. keep doing it!!! you have to!!! yes, i mean the stuff that's getting like, 2 likes and 0 reblogs! the stuff that 'nobody likes!'

earlier i mentioned i have gotten big follower bumps from like adhd comics and stuff like that going viral. the thing is that, from a professional standpoint: my follower count has like, more than quintupled from where it was at a few years ago; my patreon income has absolutely NOT quintupled lmfao. it has less than doubled, over that same period of like... i wanna say over 4 years. that's still good, i'm grateful for it, and i owe a lot of it to the sheer numbers game (the more ppl see ur work, the more likely it is you'll reach someone who decides to support you), but there is absolutely not an actual direct correlation between numbers and career success/stability.

where there IS a direct correlation is between "people who give a shit about the art i really truly love making" and "people who like my art enough to support me professionally." HUGE chunks of the followers i get any time something goes viral slough off over time; there's nothing wrong with that, they just follow me bc something was funny/interesting and end up realizing my work's not actually their thing. but the ppl who follow me bc they're into all the stuff i post most consistently, the stuff i care about and am passionate about, stick around. and i would not have found them if i wasn't posting the shit i care about!

out there there are people who will be 100% crazy about the stuff that is 100% what you want to make. it's like actually statistically impossible for there not to be. the more niche your thing is, the longer it will take to find them, but they absolutely exist. but if you give up before you find them -- if you start saying, "well, i'll put in 50% of this idea that i love, but the other 50% is too weird and nobody's gonna like it and it'll flop" -- well, in that case, you can only ever find the ppl who are 50% into what you do. don't fuck yourself like that!! you cannot deny yourself the possibility (the INEVITABILITY!!! IMO!!!!!) of finding the people who will 100% get what you're doing.

so: on a pragmatic level, i'm sure there will be ppl who disagree with me on this, and who think it's absolutely mandatory to do fanart as a crowd draw or learn about algorithms and posting times and get on tiktok and do the visibility grind and everything and that it's stupid and irresponsible to tell people not to. i'm sure it's also easy to point out that i'm speaking from a place where i now have more eyes on my stuff than i know what to fucking do with so maybe i'm just totally out of touch and being naive or something. but for me the most important part of doing art now, ESPECIALLY as a career, is to keep loving it and to believe in what i'm doing and to build an audience that cares about the same things i do. and i think it is really really vital to make that your top priority. bc if you don't, then even if you DO crack the code to suddenly getting tons of notes on everything etc -- will you even keep wanting to do it?

this job is hard. it's lonely, in my experience; i spend so much time sitting in front of my computer alone. it's unstable, which is stressful and can be frightening. it's emotionally taxing, for me, because art is so important to me that it's hard to set boundaries and separate my identity from it and actually treat it like a job. it has taken me a long time to find success doing this; maybe i could have gotten there faster if i had tried to find ways to draw an audience specifically, but i think if i had somehow managed to get a big patreon following/tons of commissioners/etc by doing something formulaic or doing stuff that specifically gets tons of attention, but isn't what's natural for me -- i don't think i would have lasted very long that way. this is already hard and complicated enough; i don't think it's sustainable to give up any unnecessary ground on doing exactly what you're passionate about, bc at least in my case, that's mandatory for this even being a livable career for me. i would burn out and decide to do something else very quickly if the only way to succeed was to chase numbers/engagement.

doing it this way is very slow. if i hadn't been able to lean on family/my wife while starting up, i would have had to have a day job for much longer (like, years, probably) while saving up and preparing to go full time; for as long as you struggle to get traction, it may mean going full time has to be on the backburner. but the thing is that there's nothing wrong with that, it's the reality for the vast majority of us (from what i've seen) -- and you'll eventually build a career that can last way longer, i think.

okay oh my god i'm done. sorry about that. like i said this job is pretty lonely and i sit here all day and think about this stuff and then generally do not talk about it with anyone until somebody asks me about it and then i repeat myself at length again. like i did here. anyway have a good night sincerely and i hope some part of this was helpful!!!

lol this is probably so corny but I've gen been sm happier since moving to tumblr.

Like I was never really on twt(I have an account but I only use it to look at drm private tweets) but I was on tik tok and lemme just say it was miserable. the only dteam stuff I ever really saw was occasionally fan art and edits and the comments were always awful. There were a few fan accounts they usually only ever post discourse which is fine but like they allow very little nuance(twt is the same and I've come to the conclusion that its a time/character limit issue but yk) and all in all it sucked.

idk tumblr is just more peaceful. and I love that I just post and not have to worry about getting insane amounts of hate or smth. and like I don't think I could ever truly post my crazyisms the way I can here(if I ever called drm my puppy coded softy alpha baby on tik tok I'd probably get doxxed and gunned down) (and god forbid they heard about the dnf mpreg truthing)

also the ppl here just seem sm nicer here. Like everyone I've met so far has been so sweet and I love hearing everyone's thoughts and being able to express a different opinion without the next response being my address(this part is /hj, the rest is /srs)

-baby fever anon

I’m so happy you are enjoying it here :) I think a lot of people would agree with you that this place is leagues better than Twitter or even TikTok!

Hi! I hope this isn't too out of left field, but you're one of the fandom creators I've followed the longest (since SGA's heyday,) and one whose work I really enjoy/respect. It seems like fandom as community is kind of... dying? In favour of cash/influence motivated content creation? Do you have any tips on how to contribute to/preserve the community aspects (aside from the brigades/crusades against "insert problematic content here" that seems to band ppl together) of fandom? So much of it seems to just be throwing comments into the ether, and I'm not sure how to contribute.

I've been thinking about this ask for a while, but I don't think I'm any further along towards giving a good answer now than I was a week ago when you sent it.

There are so many aspects to answering this -- not just answering it but answering it as me. I will always be of fandom; I've spent roughly thirty of my forty-three years in fandom. But I haven't had a single specific fandom for a couple of years now. The last time I posted any fanfic of meaningful length was 2020; I've done shortfics since, but mainly for fundraisers and to prompts, and in the meantime worked on my own stuff. Generally, between about fourteen and thirty, I would find a specific canon, write for it for about two years, and then move on to a new canon. Marvel was an exception in that I think I was in it for about eight years, roughly 2012-2020; Good Omens was too in that I left the fandom and came back to it, something I've never done, but even then I wrote a couple of fics in 2020 and not really anything since.

Additionally, I'm, you know, here on Tumblr, I'm not really anywhere else. Fandom is so massive and our experience of it so subjective that it's difficult to say "where" fandom is; it was on livejournal and moved to tumblr but I think realistically since that move it has fractured significantly, to the point where it is spread across tumblr, twitter, tiktok, discord, and dreamwidth. I am on one of those. :D And nobody really knows what percentage of fandom is where. It goes back to the problem of how to define fandom and how to track a generally self-reporting, semi-closed community.

There is, I think, a growing movement to monetize hobbies in general, and separate from that to Create Content rather than just Post Shit. And social media platforms, for the most part, are designed to push specific content, so those capable of "gaming" the algorithm tend to rise to the top and be most visible, and that's a very homogenized set of data, generally speaking. It is the new Mainstream Culture.

But there are two problems with this new mainstream culture: first, it's insanely fragmented compared to ten or twenty years ago. It is possible to put your content out in front of literal millions of people on YouTube and still not be a cultural phenomenon in the way that a TV show with the same viewership would have been on network television in the 1990s, because you're just one of a million options. I knew who all six Friends were even when I didn't watch Friends, but I don't know who the top influencers on YouTube are, because there's like thirty thousand of them and they're all super niche and none of them appeal to my interests, and unlike in the 1990s when I had five TV channels, I have all of the internet I can look at instead.

I say this is a problem, but in many respects it's not -- at least it means alternate viewpoints that don't need to care about network executives or ad revenue are getting out there....somewhere. It's merely a problem in that we can no longer really establish a firm idea of where we are, culturally.

The second problem is more germane to us: fandom has always been a counterculture. Fandom is tightly engaged with disrupting the narrative of dominant culture, with telling the stories that dominant culture won't using the products of that culture to do so. Most countercultures eventually either die out or become mainstream, but fandom has proved slippery in that sense because it is always in reaction to established culture. When part of fandom becomes mainstream, the rest shrugs and moves on. The first time we've really seen that shift is in the monetization of things like gaming and nerd culture, which is a pretty recent phenomenon.

But I don't know what the extent is. I would imagine these days it's harder to find the real weird gritty countercultural stuff, because the "friendly" neutered nerd content gets pushed to the top, but I feel like once you've got an in, you can find the rest of it. So I don't know if it's that fandom is dying, it's just being split into two halves: the very visible dominant-culture-friendly stuff and the less marketable and thus harder-to-find countercultural stuff. And in any case I'm not super qualified to talk about that split because I don't honestly see it that often. I know it's there, but I'm at a remove from it because of my particular status in fandom as a long-term, well-known fan with a relatively large following. (Relative to the norm. Relative to like, anyone on tiktok, I'm nobody.) So my vision of fandom is eternally skewed by the fact that I'm the Spiders Georg of fandom.

So I don't really have any answers because I don't even properly have my arms around the problem. I'm not sure anyone does, or knows the size or severity of it, whether it's a non-issue or a major one. I'm not sure anyone can. Fandom is huge and weird and invisible and hard to predict. And that's okay; part of what makes us fandom is our ability to adapt and integrate and make things our own, so we just...keep doing that in the best way we're able, I think, and trust the rest will figure itself out and present itself to us as either a fun new opportunity or a problem to be solved.

Over the years I have seen many fandoms and fans of all kinds, but yes, in fact lately the AM fandom is really becoming something unmanageable for anyone even for those who perhaps follow the band for the music without wanting to know anything about the gossip. I think this is also partly the fault of Tiktok which has led many young people to want to follow the band and therefore to become attached to certain characters without knowing what they have done in the past, they want to throw shit at people they didn't know until two years ago like Miles for example and blaming him for everything is saying disgusting things towards him that really, just reading it brings tears to my eyes. I don't know what will happen as soon as the tour ends, I hope things calm down even if it's hard for me given Amanda and Matt's attitude in the last few days

yes to all of this! the only times that i've searched for gossip were when i already heard a lot of rumours against my will and i wanted to see if they were true (other people should do this too instead of immediately believing/disbelieving something they've read on the internet...). other than that, the moment i open any social media, it's all there without me having to press a single button, and i'm sure that lots of other people have it the same way.

i do think too that tiktok might have something to do with it. i wasn't this deep in the fandom until only like three years ago, so i don't know what the situation was with younger fans before that. i also said a lot of stupid shit on the internet when i was really young, so i can't expect much from the young fans, especially the ones who have no idea about how problematic LV is and love her to bits. the extremely sad thing is that i've seen SO many people who do know a thing or two, and they still think that she's done nothing wrong (like ppl saying that she's a 'queen' for being the one alex cheated with, that she should be proud of it and brag about it, or the ones that congratulate her and say that they would've done even worse things just to get in alex's pants - just some vomit-inducing stuff)

the thing with miles makes me the saddest, i feel you anon. there are loads of people out there who spread false information and call him things that he's not - but what's even worse than this is there are people who have no idea about these things, and still hate on him and make fun of him for absolutely no reason. like he said, we have to accept the fact that this is the way it always will be; i can't even get mad anymore when interviewers constantly bring up alex/tlsp when talking to him. i don't think it will ever change. let's all learn from LV and do the opposite of what she does - when we see people talking shit, we should just click that block/mute button and go about our day without paying attention to it and posting on our stories about it (if i were to sit down and argue with every person on twitter who says something bad about him, i'd do that 24/7). miles' fans are the sweetest people out there (like artist like fan) and we should focus on not ruining the pure and good vibes that miles transmits to us via his IG (reason why i don't tag these posts with his name). if he can take some minutes out of his life (almost) every day to post cute things for us, we should also send him back positive things - out of tens of fake people in am's circle, he continues to be the only genuine, honest, and pure-hearted person - let's not take it for granted.

i imagine that after the tour ends all we'll have will be L&A's stories, specifically LV's stories where she'll position her phone so that we'll be able to see alex's elbow and lose our minds over it; and similar shenanigans. i am not looking forward to it. this community will be rotten for as long as those two will be present in the boys' lives (i wish it wouldn't be true, but everything has been going downhill since 2018/2019)