Re: Why I Do Not Support Emerging Artists

[rynling]

The other reasons why I've moved away from AO3 are:

- Now that recent updates to FFN have made the site almost unusable, I'm starting to see FFN comment culture crop up on AO3. This involves things like random people roleplaying in the comments and users requesting "kudos for kudos" interactions, offering to leave kudos on a story they haven't read if the author will leave kudos on their stories in unrelated fandoms. It's a mess.

- I'm also starting to see a lot of bot-generated spam comments. There's no way to block users on AO3, so you have to report each comment individually as you wait for the beleaguered volunteer staff to delete the account.

- The content warnings that people put on their stories make me unpleasantly self-conscious about what is considered "problematic" these days. Like, one 40yo (but probably immortal) character can seduce another 40yo (and also probably immortal) character into a poorly planned sexual encounter whose fallout will haunt both of them for the rest of their (probably immortal) lives, but there apparently needs to be a serious content warning if one of them takes so much as a single sip of brandy before or after sex. This sort of thing started to affect my writing, and I didn't like that.

- Too much time spent in Zoom meetings has made me want to limit the downtime I spend looking at screens.

- I am very very very lazy.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

The content warnings that people put on their stories made me unpleasantly self-conscious about what is considered "problematic" these days.

SAME. Especially with newer fandoms, I see these odd approaches to tagging and what are considered worthy of a warning, much like the example you gave. I know I have a fic I'm working on that's mostly smut with some plot and all the feels and I'm not planning on sharing it on Tumblr, because I don't want to deal with the younger crowd in the fandom clutching their pearls over two characters with no age gap having consensual sex in a dream.

I don't know. The whole "you're a pedophile if you interact with young fans/media that's meant for young fans" mindset is just.... DO THESE PEOPLE NOT REALIZE GROWN ASS ADULTS MADE THE THING THEY LIKE????

[lassarina]

They absolutely don't, and it's infuriating.

[runicmagitek]

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[rynling]

Sometimes I wonder about this.

Like, younger members of fandom communities understand that older people make the things they like, but they only see "older people" in the capacity of caregivers. So, if an older person has made something, then they must have made it specifically for the purpose of providing guidance and instruction to young people.

If something was made for the purpose of self-expression, then it's the sort of thing that you have to read in English class, and thus something written by a dead person and not applicable to living writers and artists. No one creates anything purely for self expression, not if they're still alive.

Meanwhile, if something seems to have been made primarily to provide entertainment, then it was probably created by a corporation instead of by individual people working together with a shared vision.

This is where you get the sort of thinking that Hayao Miyazaki made all his movies all by himself with his own two hands for the sole purpose of Serving The Children, but something like Steven Universe or Voltron is a product of Corporate Greed and can only be course-corrected by taking the "radical action" of making YouTube videos listing the addresses of the creators and threatening harm to them and their families.

Although, to be fair, media production is complicated, and nuance seems to be lost on many adults as well. To give an example, I remember way back in (2013??? maybe) there being serious drama over queer-baiting in BBC Sherlock. What the two openly gay directors were saying at the time is that they were interested in exploring the ambiguities in the identities and relationships of the characters, and that they had no intention of structuring the show like a conventional romance, and meanwhile people in their thirties and forties were building entire websites on Wordpress and using their legal names to attack meta essay and fanfic writers for what they saw as homophobia when they reflected these ambiguities onto their fanwork.

Idk, media consumption can be activism to a certain extent, but I think we collectively lost ourselves somewhere along the line. I want to blame Twitter for making anger over fictional characters seem as legitimate as anger over real-world injustice, but I also look back at the people clutching their pearls over those stupid Twilight novels and wonder if their performative concern over "abuse relationships" didn't set an unfortunate precedent.

Wow, I.... did not intend to write this much, sorry. I guess I have some feelings. Anyway, I think you probably understand better than most people how this sort of conversation can look completely different once you start seeing it from the perspective of a producer instead of a consumer.

[lassarina]

Those are all really good points! It's easy to say like, the kids do not understand that adults make things, but I think the part about adults as caregivers in particular gets at the underlying problem. I do not have children; barring some hideous catastrophe afflicting my in-laws (gods forbid) I will not raise any at any point in my life. That is a deliberate choice. I do not want to be responsible for the well-being of other humans in that way. And so in that sense, teens demanding that I conform my spaces that I've worked my entire adult life to find, build, and maintain, to their needs--it really touches off my temper. I am not responsible for their care and it seems to me that the persons who are have not equipped them to understand how to deal with scary, sad, or hurtful things they find in the wild. What will happen when they go to college? On the one hand it's not my problem but on the other I Have to live in the society they will be contributing to building, so, it really is my problem.

(I also think the entire....everything of people trying to find and use wallet names for the purpose of attacking someone over fiction is a can of worms I am not remotely prepared to deal with, but it horrifies me and is part of why I am chary about a lot of details and do make reasonable efforts to not link who I am as a professional to who I am on the Internet, because my boss does not need to know what kind of fic I write and given I'm pretty sure my existence violates a lot of purity police laws, whew.)

I guess tl;dr there's a lot of expectation of hand-holding that makes me angry and uncomfortable and therefore makes me not want to do anything fandom-related outside the circles I have already formed. I'm missing out on some cool people I'm sure, but also I get to avoid having to directly deal with a lot of the anti nonsense.