The Social Politics of Comment Culture

[rynling]

I had a strange experience recently, and it's making me feel weird.

There's a guy I recently blocked on Twitter and Tumblr for the normal reasons – he was bothering me and I wanted him to leave me alone. (I wrote about this a bit earlier.)

He sent me some emails in response, but I deleted them unread for, again, the normal reasons – he was bothering me and I didn't want to deal with him.

So then he starts leaving long comments on my fic on AO3.

I felt really attacked. They weren't mean comments, exactly, but...

...but they kind of were. There were a few things he said about my writing that could have been interpreted as positive if they had been coming from a friend but which felt extremely passive-aggressive when coming from someone whose goodwill I don't trust. Also, even if these comments had been entirely positive, it's still emotionally manipulative to try to use public compliments to demand the attention of someone who clearly doesn't want to interact with you.

Now here's the problem – there has always been anxiety at the back of my mind that I'm bothering people by leaving comments on their fic or reblogging their posts with commentary in the tags. It's one thing if I'm throwing love at a stranger, but things start to get awkward if a relationship forms and then becomes one sided. At what point does it become the more respectful and compassionate thing to do to just leave someone alone?

Anyway, I deleted the guy's comments on AO3 and sent him a very short email asking him to fuck off. Of course he sent several emails in response, which I deleted unread because I have no patience for what was undoubtedly sad puppy bullshit, but hopefully this will be the end of it.

Comments

[rynling]

I don't know about the one-sidedness, though. I've not really had that, to my knowledge.

So like, have you ever had a stranger go through the backlog of your fic and leave comments on stuff that's three or four years old? Because I do that to people sometimes, and I always feel like a bit of a creeper.

Then again, there's some feedback that's always lovely to get in your inbox and some that's not particularly welcome. Thankfully I don't get a lot of this, but it's always unpleasant when some rando shows up with uninvited concrit that totally misses the point of the story. For example, I once wrote a 20k-word fic about Super Mario Bros narrated primarily from Peach's perspective, which is that she's mostly just hanging out with Bowser until Mario suddenly shows up at the very end. Some rando left a comment to the effect of "no one cares about Peach, tell us more about Mario, it would make your writing stronger to show multiple perspectives." I don't actually dislike concrit, but I make a point of deleting that sort of garbage posthaste.

Anyway, I'm sorry to hear that you had a weird experience of your own. It's always so strange how we understand on an abstract, intellectual level that this sort of male-gendered behavior is not uncommon, but then when it actually happens to us we're like what the fuck dude, especially if it's coming from someone we know. Honestly, like,

[lassarina]

I've definitely had "ah, someone has Discovered My Archive of [x pairing] Fic and is leaving comments" and mostly it just makes me happy, because sometimes i forgot I had that and nice comments are always a pick me up!

.....ah, yes, that kind of concrit. I had that once on a Magna Carta fic where some dude (definitely a dude, signed with a dude name) got all up in my grill for writing a fic about a character I loved and he hated (female character, surprise!) and giving me shit for writing about a worthless character. Needless to say, I eyerolled into infinity.

and yes, that screencap, jesus.