i feel like i am the only one who understands Blackstar warrior cats. i feel it in my heart

I totally understand your point. I think as content creators there's a lot of unseen love and care that goes into gifsets that people forget about. But I think the problem is that Tumblr is a discourse site. The implication I'm reading is people not use tags for negative thoughts on chars. When people see a set, their thoughts go to the chars/their opinions. And the thing about compelling writing is that often those characters are divisive. People use tags for discourse/fandom/personal resonance

I'm not trying to be rude or anything here, btw. I'm genuinely just trying to figure out your side of things as you're obvs someone who does put a lot of love into it. Is there another way you think people could add these thoughts? Is it just not tag them onto gifsets? Have the discourse without the visual representations? I agree that it's pretty frustrating to see hate...but isn't having an avenue for negative discourse on chars (not just positive) important too? Just maybe not in tags?

I’m assuming this is from the same person so I combined it. If it’s not, I apologize! But it very much seems like it is.

I am not sure how many more ways I can say this, but I don’t really see how me saying simply, “Don’t reblog gifsets of shit you don’t like and then attack the person/character/ship/etc in the tags (or comments)” is somehow a controversial opinion, or an opinion that is hard to grasp. I am not the only content creator to speak about this, and I definitely won’t be the last.

There is nuance to this discussion here. The fact of the matter, is that I agree, compelling writing often gets a divisive response because it evokes something from us. Maybe you see a gifset of a divisive character, for instance, I will use Ross Geller. He is someone that people seem to have a VERY strong opinion about. And we should all be allowed to have our opinions. But there is a difference between stating your opinion in a respectful way that INVITES further discussion, or perhaps prompts a person reading the tag to re-evaluate, and a difference between saying “Man, Ross fucking sucks.” It comes down to manners and courtesy. Why would OP want to see that? OP just spent hours working on their set.

Yes, tumblr is a discourse website. But there are BETTER ways to get your point across, and better ways to have a discussion. You could literally make your own post about Ross. Or you could go into OP’s inbox and try to express yourself, in hopefully a respectful way. I am not condoning anon hate.

Hell, you could even screenshot the gifset (and maybe blur out the URL to be as respectful as possible) and post your thoughts about the set on your blog.

And that’s my point. There are better places to have discussions than on a gifset, but also, very rarely to people state their opinions in a way that facilitates discussion. It’s just hateful. Hate does not promote productive discussion, like it accomplishes absolutely nothing. I have discussions on my blog all the time. I write critical analyses all the time. We should, of course, be able to have negative discourse, but there is a fundamental difference between negative discourse and hate. I have posted several metas on here, and you know what people do? They like it, maybe reblog it, add to the discussion, or they come into my inbox and talk to me about it.

I’m not stifling people’s opinions, but rather, I am criticizing how they present their opinion, and if their opinion adds anything at all to what the OP has in their set. I did not ask for their hateful opinion, but rather, I saw it because I saw their hateful comments in the tags. And it feels shitty. The straw story was used to demonstrate an addition to a gifset that is unwarranted, hateful, and adds nothing meaningful to the conversation. But my post was also very specific to my experience in the Buffy fandom, which I pointed out in the post.

Now, it’s Friday night and I don’t see how else I can explain this. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If my point is still lost, I fold.