hmm! this is a great question and one I’m not 100% sure of how to answer, because for the most part I have had very positive fandom experiences. but when it comes to making your fandom experience as relaxed & fun as possible, here are my tips:
1) accept right now and forever that everyone does fandom differently, and everyone is in fandom for different reasons and to get different things out of it. it doesn’t matter if people don’t ship what you ship. it doesn’t matter if they write stories of which the summary makes you recoil in horror. they are not doing this at you. accept that you are going to do you, and everyone else is going to do themselves, and unless their shit spills over into your personal space (see point 3)) then there is literally no point in trying to control the fannish experience that anyone else is having. fandom’s a large space! there’s room for everyone!
so the thing to do is:
2) CURATE YOUR FANNISH EXPERIENCE. I’ve been doing this since ye olde days of livejournal and do it even more intensely now. essentially: find the people you like, and the parts of fandom you like, and carve out your own corners where you can hang with like-minded people. you don’t have to be right in the thick of it, reading everything, interacting with everything and everyone. you don’t have to track all the tags which are crammed full of stuff that annoys you. you can take it slowly, and be discerning.
if you want to read meta, find the people who write it and follow them. ditto art. learn to embrace ao3’s excellent search function, and to use a tumblr blacklist. if you want to read fic and are bemoaning the fact that none of it is quite what you want: write your own! enthuse about your ideas on tumblr! leave prompts on kinkmemes! befriend some writers! I have to admit I am still pretty lost when it comes making friends on tumblr because the etiquette is bizarre and variable, but hey: the messaging system exists, askboxes exist, comments on ao3 exist. sure, different people have different levels of openness to making new bosom friends, but nobody minds being engaged. we’re in fandom to be fannish, together.
3) if people are being jerks in your space, block ‘em. ignore ‘em. delete ‘em. I am not even remotely internet famous enough to be at risk of being deluged by trolls, but on the rare occasions that I’ve engaged in good faith and subsequently decided that I was being concern-trolled, I’ve noped cheerfully out of there. the few accusatory or unpleasant anon (because they’re always anon!) messages that have landed in my inbox, I’ve deleted without batting an eye. sometimes I share it with a friend via chat or email and we have a laugh about it, and that helps settle any residual hurt or irritation that I might feel. I’m a grown fucking woman. I keep a calm sympathetic face while being shouted at, cried on, confided in, manipulated, and projected onto, for a living. and I have zero qualms about policing the boundaries of the spaces I’ve carved out for myself–the fun, creative, relaxing, incredible places–in fandom.
4) manage your entitlement. just remind yourself every so often that nobody owes you the next chapter of that story, or the exact piece of art you want to see, or the paragraph-long comment, or the attention you crave, or the whole-hearted agreement you seek. remember that everyone has their own lives, and you’re never seeing the full picture.
be gracious. be kind.
try to resist the urge to snipe and snark and finger-point and complain in public; I enjoy a bit of fandom bitching as much as the next person, but I inflict it all on my friends, in chat.
5) the flipside of this is: show appreciation of the things you like. comment on that story. reblog that art with a furious tag spiral of capslock (creators LOVE tag spirals). put together a rec list–this is also a great way to show people what kind of things you like, so people who share your tastes know who to gravitate towards.
if you are frequently frustrated by a large portion of the fanbase, anon, then ask yourself: are you reading the comments? ie. are you making yourself engage with parts of fandom where people have THE WRONG OPINIONS and are writing your beloved characters THE WRONG WAY? if so: just scroll past. don’t read it. unless you really enjoy an argument, don’t feel obliged to reblog it with a detailed explanation of why they’re wrong: you’re gonna frustrate yourself and, yes, maybe end up looking like a jerk. just shrug and move on. maybe this isn’t the corner for you.
I have been following my own advice in this regard for almost 14 years. I’ve kept a handful of enduring and awesome friends from most of the major fandoms I’ve been part of, and I’m still making new ones, and I’ve (mostly) managed to avoid wank. I write what I like, and I read what I like, and I try to communicate generously and enthusiastically with people who are creating the things that I enjoy.
tl;dr – seek out the things that make you feel good, and follow them. weed out the things that make you feel bad, and ignore them. it’s fandom. it can be as serious or unserious as you like, but it IS supposed to be fun.
This is all such good advice!
Honestly this is good advice for your entire life, not just the fandom part.
Cosigned
Tag: this
i have yet to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by a judicious application of either fire or kittens
Don’t ever save anything for a special occasion. Being alive is the special occasion.
Author Unknown (via horrorshow)
rogue one did a lot of things i never thought they’d let a star wars movie do, in terms of: being a movie about Sacrifice and what that means and also
letting people into the club.
like, rogue one opens star wars to people in a way i wasn’t expecting. american voices and american accents are not nearly so prominent in this movie in way i’ve never seen before in a work of science fiction– diego luna and donnie yen and jiang wen all speak english and they also speak it with their accents and there’s something to that, that opens ownership and possession and interaction with this movie to people who don’t speak english natively.
and so much of the plot, the thrust, of this movie focuses on
fathers and daughters in a way that left me just breathless. motherhood is still essentially absent in this movie, but
opening star wars to women who feel themselves as daughters feels so big to me, as someone who loved and loves star wars with her dad, this was so validating.
and also: rogue one gives a view into the rebellion as a military network; cassian andor is a soldier and a spy and he knows soldiers and spies and he does things, terrible things, in the name of the rebellion, because war makes you do terrible, ugly, violent things in the name of things you believe in. there’s a very real weight to the violence that happens in rogue one that meant So much to me. living your politics means sacrifice in such a big way in rogue one, and it opens the narrative of loss in force awakens so much more clearly. leia and han falling apart makes so much more sense now
but just also
rogue one is a movie about hope. and i mean that, not in some corny cheesey way but in a Real! Tangible! way. and because rogue one is a movie about hope, it’s a movie about sacrifice.
just
it is an audacious, beautiful thing and
it is a thing about hope.
I also really appreciated the way in which the hope of Rogue One is not the shiny perfect starry kind of hope we get in certain other movies (and some other SW installments). there isn’t something wrong with that kind of hope, but I liked the grittiness to the hope of RO – the way in which it presents hope as difficult to have
hope isn’t always easy, and especially after the year we’ve had irl in 2016, I really appreciate the way that sacrifices (both big and small, life and death or not) and hope are intertwined at all levels in RO
in RO, sometimes hope is clinging to what you believe in despite the darkest nights or deepest self-loathing or in the face of everyone you know telling you that it’s over
hope is painful and hard and they don’t even know whether their hope was in vain or not
but it’s there – hope is always there, even in the shadows, despite all odds, despite the ugliness that surrounds it and coats it and distorts it
and I find that to be a really nice contrast to the familiar kinds of hope we see so often. hope is no more perfect than the characters who cling to it, but it persists nonetheless
You hear all these “you’re not a real fan unless” and it lists a hundred things, but I met a dude today who saw my Deadpool pin and asked what my favorite story arc was, and I explained that while I loved Deadpool, I was new to Marvel (I only really got into it a year and a half ago) and hadn’t been able to find a lot of the comics. Instead of making a face or a derogatory comment, he just offered to send me all the stuff he had. That is a true fan.
I told the guy at the comic shop when I went in for Black Widow that I’d seen a few Harley Quinn panels on Tumblr and thought it looked badass but didn’t know where to start because my entire involvement in DC fandom was watching the Batman cartoon as a kid. This guy sitting at one of the tables playing Yu-Gi-Oh, wearing a comic shirt and carrying a definitely-hardcore-fan amount of swag, spins around and goes “dude! You’ve never read DC? Check out the back issues wall. They’ve got all kinds of Harley Quinn.” He then proceeded to explain how “New 52″ was a spinoff, and had some split opinions in the fandom, but either continuity is good as long as you pick one and stay with it so you don’t get mixed on what’s going on.
True fans love to see other people loving the stuff they love.
See how easy it is to be “that cool person who helped me get into X” instead of “that asshole who made me feel bad for not knowing everything about X”?
IT’S NOT EVEN DIFFICULT TO NOT BE A SHITLORD. YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE. And you never had one.
YES! and this applies to all fandoms, want to be a “true fan”? SHARE your knowledge with others, instead of bragging about knowing certain things and scolding those who don’t know.
I’m breaking the point from my last reblog out into a separate post:
Dehumanization of marginalized peoples is not “an opinion,” it is terrorism.
Jews, black people, brown people, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ folks, disabled folks, etc. have no obligation to respect, educate, or otherwise coddle people who preach that we are not deserving of basic human rights.
Stop telling us to make nice with the fascist who want us dead and start supporting our right to be protected from fucking terrorists.
engentado
(noun) A Spanish untranslatable word, engentado is defined as literally feeling “peopled out,” and having the desire to have some alone time to get away from the world and recharge oneself. (via wordsnquotes)
You know who doesn’t get enough love? Ace boys. So here’s to the demi or grey-ace or ace boys. Here’s to the boys who get told by society that they should be all about sex but who don’t feel the same way. Here’s to the aro boys who get told they’re jerks for not wanting a relationship. It’s ok, you’re ok! You and your feelings are valid.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 