The fact that looking into technical failures to understand the businesses we are patronizing (and let's be clear every bit of money sent DnP's way means you Are Doing Business With Them in the literal sense) is far from negativity aside... I don't think we should have a knee jerk reaction against anything negative being said as a rule, because that's how you end up platforming and pedestialising horrible things just because your favourite celebrity does them. Like, we need to bring back an understanding of when negativity is "uncalled for" (to do with things that are none of our business as consumers, audiences, and patrons, or otherwise to do with personal/harmless stuff) and when it isn't uncalled for, otherwise we create an expectation of just never being allowed to criticise anything, from the quality of the works presented to us, to quality of service with merch, to collabs with harmful partners, and eventually to misuse of a massive platform for nefarious ends.

Thankfully dnp have had way more integrity than most exploitative content creators out there. But that's certainly in part due to mutual respect between audience and creators and if we start hand wringing about small criticisms we will not be able to maintain that mutual respect and make ourselves easy to exploit.

Not to go on a big rant or anything, I just feel it should be stated that criticisms aren't always bad faith, and it's good that we have people in this fandom (like yourself ❤️) willing to hold some stuff to account where it's important+ where it concerns us directly

~ 🪴

"let's be clear every bit of money sent DnP's way means you Are Doing Business With Them in the literal sense" EXACTLY. and their business decisions affect us, unfortunately.

thank you so much for saying all of this, Hazel. phandom has a weird relationship with criticism. i experienced it more than once, unfortunately (did it teach me anything? no, i'm still here. rip to my mental health). for some reason a lot of people think that if you criticise what dnp do, you automatically criticise and dislike them as people. which couldn't be further from the truth. i try to criticise their work and actions related to their work, not them personally. the same goes for Matryn and his work. and if in the end something gets fixed or just a little bit better, i try to comment on that as well. i like seeing progress. like today with wad merch. i will update my post about irl merch, because i mentioned 9 months to gather the merch from all over the world. but Dan found other way, and that's great! only he confused us with "many weeks" and "i will try" before that.

i realise that maybe a breakdown post (or two) would be better than making 10 about basically the same thing. it's emotions. merch stuff is a rollercoaster. i haven't felt so many completely opposite emotions in a long time. and some of them are ending up on my blog in a form of criticism and yelling.