Tumblr Fandom Strategy Guide
Mar. 25th, 2017 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThis is going to be a long post, so I should probably state my conclusion at the beginning. Here it is: Adult men can be real assholes sometimes. Not all men, of course – some of my best friends are men! – but there's a breed of Woke Liberal Male™ that requires special caution.
Okay, so the thing about rules is that it's cool to bend them, or break them, or change them, or move entirely outside of them, but first you need to know what they are. Personally I like knowing what the rules are so that I can operate within any given environment in an efficient and rational manner, which may or may not involve actually following the rules.
In the case of chaotic and constantly changing social contexts like Tumblr, it can take months or even years to learn the rules. I don't think I understand more than a tiny bit about how Tumblr works, but I've learned a few things in the past six years that I can use to make broad generalizations.
A friend of mine from college joined Tumblr a few months ago, and he is completely clueless regarding how the platform functions. He's clueless in the real world as well, but whatever, that's cool and we love him anyway. And it's fine if he wants to use Tumblr in his own way, because who cares, you know? The problem is that he's getting frustrated that he's not instantly internet famous. He recently asked me for advice, and like a moron I took him at his word and explained three basic rules concerning how Tumblr works.
This was a mistake. Since we were talking about Tumblr, I forgot a basic rule of the real world, which is that One Does Not Offer Advice About Rules To Adult Men.
The context of this particular exchange is my friend's post of a commission from one of my favorite Zelda fandom artists on Tumblr, who also draws Final Fantasy art and doesn't get near as much attention as she deserves for it. For this commission, my friend wanted Link and Cloud posing together in their canonical cross-dressing outfits, and I suggested this artist to him because I knew she would get a kick out of it. The end result was gorgeous, but the artist didn't reblog it (although she later posted her own version). His post (link) only got a total of six notes, so my friend started pestering me. This is what I told him...
First, you have to tag your post appropriately. If you don't use the standard fandom tags that people track, your post isn't going to show up in anyone's feed.
Second, you have to post the image as an image post. The images in text posts become noticeably distorted in reblog posts, meaning that the artist usually won't reblog them.
Third, you have to be aware of the current political climate on Tumblr, which is progressive leaning toward radical. What this means in practice is that you probably shouldn't make jokes in the caption of the image that can be interpreted as transphobic.
I pointed out that, since Link's Gerudo outfit already has strong Orientalist connotations to begin with, it needs to be treated carefully, and that a genderqueer-positive caption that says something like "Boys can sparkle too" would probably come off better than a joke about men in drag, especially since there's been a huge conversation about sensitive portrayals of nonbinary gender presentation on Tumblr during the past few months.
I gave concise summaries of these three suggestions, thinking that they were quick edits that could be easily implemented. Instead of thanking me, what my friend did was to attack me personally while challenging my suggestion that a number of people on Tumblr have found Link's Gerudo outfit to be problematic, so I had to answer his stupid questions about intersectionality while bearing the brunt of his anger. He finally came around, but it was not a pleasant process for me. He didn't want to debate the "rules" as I explained them; rather, he wanted to debate whether I was in a sufficient position of authority to explain the rules in the first place.
Anyway, instead of making the edits I suggested to the original post, he made a second post of the image with the tags I suggested and captioned it with "A friend with more experience on Tumblr pointed out that I was Tumblng all wrong. I took hr wrd fr it."
What a dick.
The second post (link) still got a ton of notes, though. It's nice that I was able to help enable greater circulation of the commission work of a talented artist, but it hurts that I got burned for it.
Okay, so the thing about rules is that it's cool to bend them, or break them, or change them, or move entirely outside of them, but first you need to know what they are. Personally I like knowing what the rules are so that I can operate within any given environment in an efficient and rational manner, which may or may not involve actually following the rules.
In the case of chaotic and constantly changing social contexts like Tumblr, it can take months or even years to learn the rules. I don't think I understand more than a tiny bit about how Tumblr works, but I've learned a few things in the past six years that I can use to make broad generalizations.
A friend of mine from college joined Tumblr a few months ago, and he is completely clueless regarding how the platform functions. He's clueless in the real world as well, but whatever, that's cool and we love him anyway. And it's fine if he wants to use Tumblr in his own way, because who cares, you know? The problem is that he's getting frustrated that he's not instantly internet famous. He recently asked me for advice, and like a moron I took him at his word and explained three basic rules concerning how Tumblr works.
This was a mistake. Since we were talking about Tumblr, I forgot a basic rule of the real world, which is that One Does Not Offer Advice About Rules To Adult Men.
The context of this particular exchange is my friend's post of a commission from one of my favorite Zelda fandom artists on Tumblr, who also draws Final Fantasy art and doesn't get near as much attention as she deserves for it. For this commission, my friend wanted Link and Cloud posing together in their canonical cross-dressing outfits, and I suggested this artist to him because I knew she would get a kick out of it. The end result was gorgeous, but the artist didn't reblog it (although she later posted her own version). His post (link) only got a total of six notes, so my friend started pestering me. This is what I told him...
First, you have to tag your post appropriately. If you don't use the standard fandom tags that people track, your post isn't going to show up in anyone's feed.
Second, you have to post the image as an image post. The images in text posts become noticeably distorted in reblog posts, meaning that the artist usually won't reblog them.
Third, you have to be aware of the current political climate on Tumblr, which is progressive leaning toward radical. What this means in practice is that you probably shouldn't make jokes in the caption of the image that can be interpreted as transphobic.
I pointed out that, since Link's Gerudo outfit already has strong Orientalist connotations to begin with, it needs to be treated carefully, and that a genderqueer-positive caption that says something like "Boys can sparkle too" would probably come off better than a joke about men in drag, especially since there's been a huge conversation about sensitive portrayals of nonbinary gender presentation on Tumblr during the past few months.
I gave concise summaries of these three suggestions, thinking that they were quick edits that could be easily implemented. Instead of thanking me, what my friend did was to attack me personally while challenging my suggestion that a number of people on Tumblr have found Link's Gerudo outfit to be problematic, so I had to answer his stupid questions about intersectionality while bearing the brunt of his anger. He finally came around, but it was not a pleasant process for me. He didn't want to debate the "rules" as I explained them; rather, he wanted to debate whether I was in a sufficient position of authority to explain the rules in the first place.
Anyway, instead of making the edits I suggested to the original post, he made a second post of the image with the tags I suggested and captioned it with "A friend with more experience on Tumblr pointed out that I was Tumblng all wrong. I took hr wrd fr it."
What a dick.
The second post (link) still got a ton of notes, though. It's nice that I was able to help enable greater circulation of the commission work of a talented artist, but it hurts that I got burned for it.
