#I'd hate to call it a 'reading comprehension problem' but this is tumblr after all...

[go-go-devil]

re:your tags on fanfic being treated as a market: ppl saying leaving comments is part of the attention economy just proves to me that tumblr bloggers are willfully ignoranr bc that is not what is meant by attention economy 😭 i hate it here

That specific post I was referencing was essentially the OP inventing their own problems by calling out those posts by fanfic authors who are frustrated with the lack of engagement between the authors and readers in modern fandom spaces. They essentially held the opinion that authors getting burnt out from writing due to a lack of seeing any engagement in their work means they've become addicted to the "attention economy" and are thus too entitled to something that readers don't actually "owe" them.

Basically just another post smugly talking down to strangers solely for the sake of it (i.e. tumblr users' favorite past-time), but it really is the epitome for how depressingly antagonistic the simple social spaces of fandom has become as of late.

Readers are making so little effort anymore to find and read fics that go outside of whatever is considered the most popular m/m (or on rarer occasions m/f) ships with no regard for any authors who dare to write ANYTHING that is slightly different from these accepted standards, let alone gen fics and rare pairs. That's not to say all fic authors are incapable of being assholes who also help perpetuate this awful mindset, I've unfortunately seen several myself. Yet to immediately assume that an author feeling extremely bummed out that their f/f or gen fics they worked so hard on are getting absolutely ZERO comments despite being viewed/kudos'ed by a handful of people are acting "entitled" is just plain cruel.

There's a reason why longfics have basically become exclusive only to "fandom approved" ships heavily focused on romance/smut in them. If I dared to write a 50-100K gen fic that focuses on worldbuilding and expanding platonic relationships it WILL be ignored by most people in the most of the fandoms I'm in solely because there's no shipping in the tags (Hylics had proven to be an extremely rare exception, which is why I primarily wrote fics only for that fandom).

That same post even had the gall to end by encouraging fic authors to look up their usernames on Google to find other people talking about their work elsewhere because apparently the OP found a mixtape or something someone made for one of their works. Good for them, but the vast majority of people aren't gonna fucking find that shit if the fandom's already ignoring them on AO3 and Tumblr!

Hell, I myself have objectively written some of the most popular Hylics fanfiction on the Internet, and I couldn't find shit when I googled my username outside of the artwork my friends/mutuals already showed me personally because people who love my work fucking tell me that they love it! That's the whole damn point of being in a social space!

I just don't get this stupid isolationist mindset at all! Nobody should force a reader to leave a comment if they don't want to, but for fucks sake how goddamn hard is it to just leave a single, solitary comment on a piece of writing YOU ALREADY LIKE to tell the author how much you LIKE IT????