passion and popularity
<snippin myself>if i’m completely honest, what i’m seeing right now is a lot of thinly-veiled ‘why can’t i be as popular as other people’.
Here’s the thing. I’ve been involved in fandom for a very, very long time. I’ve seen fandoms come and go, big ones, small ones. TV shows, games, you name it. And I can’t speak for anlamasanda, but what I was talking about was not specific people in DA/Bioware fandom, this is about patterns of people, generally widely-read people but not always, telling folks that their feelings are invalid/don’t matter or that those feelings necessarily mean that they’re doing things wrong. And I’m sorry, I’ve seen that kind of thing happen way too often over the years to chalk it up as a fluke or a coincidence.
Well, maybe they don’t matter in the scheme of things: no one is obligated to read or like anyone else’s work by any means. Fandom ain’t a group therapy session. But I’m really struggling to understand why there always seems to be this kind of pushback when people express insecurities. I’m not talking about the brats on FF.net that throw tantrums and threaten to stop/delete WIPs unless they get x number of reviews. I’m talking about people saying things like, “I wish people read my stuff, it’s kind of shitty and demoralizing when they don’t.” And eventually, inevitably, it ends up at what I bolded: y’all just jealous.
I feel like we’re talking at cross-purposes here because people keep trying to force this into an either/or box. Really, it’s not! This is not a dualistic concept. I’m really not grokking how “it hurts sometimes to not be appreciated” gets heard as, “the only reason I create anything is for pageviews and comments”. Or how “I wish people read my stuff” turns into “I wish I was as popular as $BNF”. I seriously don’t understand these leaps. Because I’ve never, ever written solely for pageviews. If I did, I wouldn’t still be writing fic for fandoms that are basically dead/tiny/non-existent. Hell, the one fic that I’m most “known” for and people have shown interest in is a Warcraft WIP that I know is going to piss a fair chunk of people off eventually because of a pairing that’s going to turn up in later chapters, but it’s not stopping me from going there. But at the same time, having and talking about insecurities doesn’t mean that you’re a bad fan or a bad artist and you have no business in fandom because you’re obviously too thin-skinned, yadda yadda. You try not to let it fuck with your head too much, but sometimes you can’t help it for whatever reasons, and that’s okay too. That’s all I’m saying, here. That people have a right to their feelings as long as they’re not bigoted/ism-based feelings and that there’s enough room in the sandbox for everyone.
we’re not at cross-purposes here. i said in some earlier reblog (during the complaining-on-the-internet clusterfuck that is my tumblr on laundry day) that i’m completely sympathetic to caring about acknowledgment, because i care myself. i watch notes and hits and comments and compare myself mostly to my own work but sometimes to others. i’m not claiming there’s anything wrong with that, and i apologize if it ever came off that way.
however, the reason at least today that some of these voicings of insecurity sound suspiciously like jealousy is because they’re mired in stuff like this: “What chaps my ass about this entire argument is I only ever see people being chastised for caring about this kind of thing by people who get a ton of hits/are BNFs/borderline BNFs.”
now, i know you probably didn’t mean that as an insult, but considering it was one response removed from someone who had done exactly that, and considering the entirety of your post which dismissed that person’s potential background to instead define her by her implied popularity, it came off that way.
voicing your opinion and your insecurities is one thing; doing it at the expense of others is another, and people are probably going to draw negative assumptions about your intent.
It’s cool, and I think I see where the conversation got off the rails now. Very, very rarely do I talk about specific people when meta topics like this come up. I tend not to think that way, tbh, unless one specific individual is being a repeat offender with shitty behavior, and I sincerely do apologize if it came across like I was bashing or dismissing a specific person. I’m always thinking about larger patterns in how people treat each other in fandom, and this discussion was feeling very uncomfortably like it was fitting into a larger pattern that I’ve seen and experienced in a lot of different fandoms. That’s what was setting me off, I promise. I was a BNF in a smallish fandom back when dialup dinosaurs roamed the Prodigy earth and I know it’s really not as big a deal as people make it out to be, how popularity doesn’t necessarily translate into quality and vice-versa, and it’s a silly thing to strive for, etc. It just bugs me when some people (speaking generally here!) mistakenly think that having a bigger audience than someone else gives them the right to tell people how to feel about their work/process/fandom participation. I really was just talking in generalities and not trying to call anyone specifically out, and apparently I did a piss poor job of conveying that in my irritation. :( So I’m sorry for that.
