#a lot of the posts are gonna be untagged cuz if reblogged them before

[bambmazing]

Im about to be sooo obnoxious about my fave book series now that im caught up to the most recent book

[clotpolesonly]

I feel you re: fandom exhaustion. Have you tried unfollowing/blocking people with takes you don’t like? I’ve found that fandom a much more relaxing place once I started not letting the stressful stuff cross my dash in the first place. Sometimes it meant unfollowing someone who posted a bunch of other stuff I actually liked, but if it meant not going into a comment-reading spiral every time they shared stuff I disagreed with, I thought it was totally worth it.

(even if they were only sharing something so they could rebut or disagree with it; like yeah I like that they’re on my side but if they’re going to keep dragging untagged takes I dislike or discourse onto my dash, I would still give them the block/unfollow because intentionally or not they were still causing me stress)

oh i've unfollowed LOTS of people. i've unfollowed enough people that i'm starting to run out of the content i want on my dash, cuz it's hard to find the good stuff without the bad and even blogs that i thought were innocuous occasionally end up slipping shit onto my dash. i've only actually blocked a handful of people (the ones that are Like That™ enough not to leave well enough alone), and i've also blacklisted those names so posts that have additions from them or even reference to them are no longer shown on my dash (though i do see "hidden for X", which often lets me know the person who reblogged it follows them, which is a red flag all on its own a lot of the time🙃)

and discord is its own mess. i get 95% of my social interaction from my discord fandom servers, and i love them to death, honestly i do, i've lived in those for YEARS and been happy to do so. but, again.......it all felt a lot less stressful in years past. it's the hazard of large servers that you're guaranteed to have conflicting opinions in there, and in most regards that's one of the things that i absolutely love about it. discussing things from various angles, getting different viewpoints, having actual conversations about the show(s) that i love are what make fandom worth it. but conflicting over the same things over and over again, seeing the same cold takes that i would usually just unfollow someone for on tumblr and not really being able to do anything about it or escape it (can't blacklist words/terms on discord like on tumblr, you just have to wholesale block individuals, which i can't really do because i moderate several servers and mods can't just ignore things 😅 in their servers), is turning out to be very grating nowadays in ways that it didn't used to be, even if it's only a fraction of the actual activity. even just the passive aggressive mention of some of these topics is enough to make me feel like shit for the rest of the day.

same with fic. i've hardly read any fanfiction at all in MONTHS, not because i don't love the characters anymore, but because there's no way to tell what take the author is gonna have or what fanon characterization they're gonna lean into, and getting halfway through a fic before being hit with That Stuff™ kinda makes me wanna cry by now. the subtle stuff never gets tagged for, but it sure as fuck can still ruin my week. it's safer to just not bother. and that SUCKS.

my anxiety has been SKY HIGH lately, and i can't tell if it's because i'm already super anxious for outside reasons and that's making the fandom stuff worse, or if the fandom reasons are making me super anxious on their own and making the outside stuff worse. it all feeds into each other and everything is just bad.

and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it besides, like. leaving. which i'm not gonna do. because i do love the show and i do love interacting with other fans of it and sharing ideas and jokes and spitballing story ideas. without all of that, what would i even do with myself??? as previously mentioned, this stuff is 95% of my social circle 😅 and i have nothing else to replace it with. unfortunately, TW still takes up the majority of my brain, and trying to cut that out would just make me isolated and even more miserable.

it just really really sucks that the fandom that used to feel like home.....doesn't anymore.