I was watching RotG and suddenly I could only see the meme with the increasingly large dominos. With the small domino being 'Pia watching RotG' and the big domino being 'Efnisien, Gary, Anton, Temsen, Gwyn and Augus all starring in the same a/b/o fic'. Does RotG hold a special place for you, thinking of all the stories you've written since?
Hmm,
Yes and no? There's an even smaller domino you're not seeing which is that I had written original characters and stories before this, and Augus in particular was based off an original character I'd written before (and not published) so like, Rise of the Guardians didn't *invent* him, I did, years before I ever watched the movie. But there's also dominoes that drove me out of the fandom, and it was my bitterness re: the fandom that prompted the writing of original fic in the first place.
So let me tell you a story, anon. If you don't want to know how toxic the RotG fandom could be, I recommend you just walk away now and know that no, actually, RotG doesn't have a special place in my heart, knowing I wrote original fic to initially escape the way some small pockets of that fandom treated me. Otherwise I would have written RotG fiction for far far longer, because as the old-timers will remember, I actually had a couple of longfic ideas lined up to go immediately after SAL that I abandoned because of well...everything.
I actually spent a while after finishing SAL kind of hating Rise of the Guardians because of some nasty drama and meanness/spite towards me, particularly in the last few chapters, and it took about 2-3 years before I could even consider watching the movie again or write for the fandom again. And then by the time I'd come back, all of my original stuff was established, and I felt a lot more comfortable, and a lot more 'fuck the haters' with some of the stuff I had previously had to deal with.
(Fandom wank beneath the cut, lol)
For example (self-harm and suicide mention) one person would specifically post graphic horrible self-harm photos complete with blood tagged into the RotG and blackice tag/s specifically to coincide with my chapter releases towards the end of SAL - and she was a BNF in the fandom in her own way, so *everyone* kind of knew who she was and what she was doing - and she blamed me and my story for the self-harm, and so I had people coming to me going 'do you realise what this story is doing to this person, don't you even care.' And of course I felt horribly guilty and distressed, but I was also at this point around 7/8 chapters from finishing the story, wanting to give everyone a happy ending, and after posting the last chapter I broke down and cried because I was just so relieved that I didn't have to be tormented by this specific person anymore or see these images as a survivor of suicide attempts and self-harm myself.
But also just crying out of sheer distress because of how horrible those last few weeks were, because like, if it wasn't for the readers I would have walked away due to the pressure and bullying and coercion to get out of the fandom just because I had a story that some folks enjoyed reading. That was a level of targeted hate I'd never encountered before, and have never encountered since.
Around that time a couple of small hate groups started up about me, and I would get messages like 'you realise there are hate groups about you, right?' and I'd be like 'please don't tell me about this, people can hate me, leave them alone.' Then there was the time I just got - over around 10 days - about 100+ messages telling me to kill myself because of SAL and how 'horrible' it was re: it's 'really dark themes' which I find hilarious now, but back then, was actually really stressful when it coincided with someone literally *harming themselves* or posting old self-harm photos on days I posted a chapter, talking about how the reason she was doing it was because she hated that my story was so popular when it didn't deserve to be.
Like, no, I did not have a special relationship with Rise of the Guardians by then, or the fandom. I hated it. It's why I stopped writing for it when previously I literally had so many ideas I wanted to write for Jack/Pitch. For years after that. I would remember the good memories I'd made with SAL, but a lot of readers followed me into original works. And otherwise, all I remembered was being forced to see those photos and this person's tags if I went into the tags to look for fanart to share and promote. I'd made some very good friends (some very best friends, actually), and some of us got the hell out of that fandom as fast as we possibly could to escape these people.
So like, I would love to say that like, I feel nothing but fond memories thinking of the influence Rise of the Guardians has had on me, but no fandom that I've ever been in has ever had this kind of level of underground viciousness that developed as the story gained momentum.
When I wrote The Golden Age that Never Was I was truly detached from the fandom and the movie. I was writing based on my memories and feelings of the characters. I didn't look in the tags like I used to, and instead looked for when I was mentioned directly. I had a spike of anxiety every time I got an anon message while writing it, and I had to like...avoid fics and a bunch of other stuff to get through it.
I have watched Rise of the Guardians since and I do really enjoy it, but...I don't see the dominoes the same way you do anon, probably because of the way it all happened in my head, though I do think putting original writing on AO3 happened partly because I was in a hurry to get out of the RotG fandom. So in a way RotG is connected to that, but like, only because I was fleeing and abandoning all of my Pitch/Jack ideas as I went (to the point where people remembered them and still asked me about them years later and I was like 'haha oh no sorry I'm not writing those oh well maybe one day!')
Chances are high I actually wouldn't have written original fiction if my love for Rise of the Guardians had still stayed strong. I was ready to write two very specific longfics, and had done worldbuilding for both, and was talking openly about them, but towards the end of SAL I bolted from the fandom as fast as I could. The hate I got from specific corners of the RotG fandom is one of the reasons I started writing Game Theory before SAL was even finished - to cope with how I felt about the end of SAL and the hatred I was getting there. When some of those folks said 'omg I'll never read a story about Augus' I was literally like 'oh thank fuck, I'm going to be left alone now.'
Like...I got diagnosed with Fibromyalgia like 6 months after that, I cracked teeth because of how stressed I was, and I still have crowns in my mouth and teeth removed because of that whole period. I was sleeping an average of 3 hours a night.
...I feel a very special fondness for the people who supported me at the time, especially my good friend Silvia, who is still my beta and friend today. She is responsible for far more of the dominoes that have led to this moment than Rise of the Guardians could ever directly be. And I am extraordinarily grateful for the readers who have found my stuff since. Now the majority of readers of my original stuff have never actually seen Rise of the Guardians or read my RotG fics, and like, actually sometimes that's really nice, if a bit weird.
I have never, in my life, encountered a fandom that could get as toxic as pockets of Rise of the Guardians got, and I'm including Dragon Age: Inquisition in that, which had literal blocklists of asexual people, so you know I mean business! But as a final point, I do want to say the majority of people there were amazing, absolutely amazing, this is truly a case of a few bad apples spoiling the whole experience, and I'm still to this day gutted it happened like that, and have zero surprise a lot of people left the fandom all at once, at the same time, because of it.
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