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rrrawrf-writes · 4 years

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lordy lordy loo it’s been a hot minute since i’ve made an original post, i forgot where the button was

so. some of you may have seen the stuff running around about violetvineyard and mvcreates, some of you may not have. i’m just gonna lay out my experiences here, now that other people are talking about it and now that the server has been deleted. i’m gonna try to present a fair and nuanced version; i’m not gonna include screenshots (right now) bc i’m lazy, mostly.

there are several other people who are putting up way better breakdowns than i am. i just figured i might as well toss mine onto the pile bc why not? but if you’re hoping to hear from me a story about how i’ve been wronged, per se, you won’t find much of one, because i played mainly a spectator role, and never had much trouble there. i will have a vague, lukewarm defense of some of the people involved that other people may not agree with, but again, this is all just the whole VV deal from my point of view.

@nuwuhorizons (i haven’t said how dang much i lOVE your url) and @sapiencenotes have very good receipts and breakdowns. if you want a more in-depth (and dramatic, forgive me for using the word, i’m not trying to downplay this), check them out. @time-to-write-and-suffer also has some great stuff on their blog about all of this.

all righty. so. i joined VV not right at the beginning, but soon after it was started. there was an application process, i got accepted, i was looking for a community to help me start writing more. (it didn’t help, but that’s not their fault, that’s mine.) the person who owned the server was called mina, and on tumblr, mina’s url was mvcreates. mina is a nonbinary Muslim woman of color, a professional who i believe works at harvad and deals a lot with things like infectious diseases, iirc. she was doing a whole lot of work when the pandemic came around, and so the past few months wasn’t quite as active as she had been at the start, both on the server and tumblr.

the very first time mina came on my radar, before i joined vv, was because she had corrected someone’s typo on a post, and it stirred up a minor drama about “don’t give unsolicited criticism” and “is pointing out minor errors like that okay” and blahblahblah. i ran across that on a friend’s dash, and also ran across the promo for vv from that friend’s dash, as well, and joined bc y not.

everything was p cool for a while. it was nice to meet some new people and some of my mutuals on there. mina seemed like a fun person. she was about a year, year and a half, maybe, older than i am. the first things that kind of started rubbing me wrong at the start was how she would kind of dismiss suggestions for the server than i and a friend had, and how she kept bringing up her age - she would often say things like “well i wouldn’t do that but i’m an Old(TM) so maybe i just don’t get it” and i can’t really explain why that bothered me. i think it felt dismissive, like Younger Folks Don’t Know How Things Should Work. also, like. she kept bringing it up. as if it meant something, as if plenty of us on that server weren’t actually around her age. there was a convo on vaccinations where i wanted to make the point that a lot of anti-vaxxers should be educated instead of ridiculed and shamed, but i never really got to making that point bc she jumped in very sharply and explained that anti-vaxxers all come from a class of people who are generally educated. i didn’t bother saying anything else.

at the start, it was tiny little things like that. i chalked it up to her personality and mine just not quite matching up. i sat down a lot and examined my own internal biases, bc i knew something was bugging me, but i couldn’t tell if it was legitimate, or if i was jealous and petty, or if i was being discriminatory towards her identity. i still wonder that a lot; i want to be careful that i’m examining her actions here, and not the person who made those actions.

because the other thing that bothered me was that she was perfect at pretty much everything. she was a decent, if not good, writer, from what i read. i thought her “art”/edits were neat, even if sometimes i looked at them going “that just looks like an edit, not your own art, but u kno, edits are art too, so i’m not gonna say anything.” she had a lot of motivation, a lot of ambition. soon, this kind of transferred over into me feeling like she acted like she had to be perfect at everything. i think this is probably one of the more “lisa is just being petty” things, rather than a judgement on her character, but she seemed to flaunt her own skills and accomplishments a lot. not that no one is allowed to brag sometimes! but it was just another layer of “this bothers me.”

then there was the hero worship.

people in the server loved mina. i liked her. i had no problems with her, even if there were a few things i was a little “ehhhh” about. vv got pretty big, pretty quickly, and i assume there was a decent amount of turnover and people who just joined to lurk or sometimes share things in the promos channel or elsewhere. but the most active folks just. they adored mina with every fiber of their being. mina could do no wrong. no one ever called her out on anything; everything she did was hailed as fantastic and wonderful. and honestly, for the most part, it wasn’t like she was doing crappy stuff. some of the praise was well-deserved, imo, but it just bordered on embarrassing for some of these people, how much they just worshipped the ground she walked on.

and she didn’t really like, discourage it. like, at the start, i think i remember her being more modest, but in general, she just let it go, and so did i, bc like. i aint that kinda jerk.

the stated purpose of violetvineyard was to have a community that valued reciprocity. reciprocity was mina’s biggest thing. there was a channel for people to post their stuff on, so the rest of us could browse and read and reblog. i, admittedly, didn’t do as much of that as i wish i did, but part of it was because i do have a life outside of the internet, a memory and attention span the size of a gnat, and because like. 90% of the stuff that people put in the promos channel were things like edits, writeblr intros, wip intros, etc etc, when all i wanted was to just read some actual writing. but that’s neither here nor there. what got hilarious to me, though, was whenever mina’s fervent admirers would talk about how mina was, quote, a pillar of the community. how vv was doing something No Other Writeblr Group Had Done Before. how Important and Special this server was.

folks. i’ve been on here for several years now. we don’t have a community. we have a bunch of little cliques who reblog from their friends and complain about people not reblogging them. noah fence, but come on. vv got pretty dang big, but it was still a small corner of a small section of tumblr. like. sorry, all y’all, but them’s the breaks.

also, this was hilarious to me bc there are several big writeblrs who have been running around long before mina and vv showed up. yet, according to these people in the server, mina had Single-handedly Brought Hope To This Desolate Wasteland.

in the end, vv became just another little clique whose members reblogged from their friends. i don’t want to devalue the good that did come out of vv. a lot of the picture being painted rn was that the majority of the server were scary dog-piling people. the majority of the server were just writeblrs looking to promo their stuff and talk about their writing. unfortunately, few bad apples, bad rep, negatives outshine positives, etc etc. but i think it did do some good re: exposure for a few folks, even tho it didn’t turn into what it could have been.

another one of the things that was a minor irritant to me was that they eventually started archiving the vent channel, which was probably the most-used channel. that didn’t sit right to me, but as always, i was a coward had nothing to say about it, so i didn’t. the reason given was that there were often things in the vent channel that people might regret being there, so it was periodically archived and a fresh channel started.

so i’m rambling a lot about stuff that’s probably boring and inconsequential. that’s 90% of this whole vv thing, tho, you need to understand that.

the biggest thing that bothered me about mina, i think, came about from the constant hero worship from her adoring fans. and i know there’s a whole argument to be said about expecting labor from people with marginalized identities, which is an argument i agree with - don’t expect someone of a minority group to educate you or to face trauma or to shut down bigots, etc etc. but by now, mina had a lot of followers in general, and in specific, she had quite a few people who would defend her at every single perceived slight.

she made a lot of those fun writeblr reblog games, like “send me a fruit that says this about my writing.” those were cool, i’ll admit that. but she was super into “you have to send an ask to the person you reblog from, RECIPROCITY!!!!!!!!!!!” and seemed to struggle with the fact that sometimes, people don’t follow her established rules on her posts for these games. she’d complain about it every single time that happened in the vent channel, which, again, that’s fine? that’s what vents are for, it’s annoying to not get cool fun asks when you do these games, but also, that’s life for you. she could depend on her fans to send her plenty of asks, whereas the much smaller blogs who reblogged these games would probably get f-all, half the time. if you’ve gone through nuwuhorizons or one of the other blogs i mentioned earlier, you’ll have run across the incident where mina’s friends harrassed an 11 year old for not doing her ask game right.

an eleven year old.

and this is my biggest grief with mina. she only stopped her friends from dogpiling people... once? maybe twice? that i remember. and not only that, but there were SEVERAL occasions where she would get on the vent channel, complain about someone who had said something wrong on one of her posts (and sometimes, again, these were legitimate!), and then ask if someone in the server wanted to reply to them. reasons for such ranged from “i’m too busy rn” to “they would probably listen more to a white person than me.”

again. this, on occasion, is not necessarily a bad thing. we cannot expect labor and response from minorities. my issue was that she kept doing this. and sometimes it was fine, just someone who would drop a note on the post or send a polite anon. but this, to me, the whole asking someone else to fight your battles for you? that really bothered me. mina is a grown adult. either ignore it, like the rest of us chumps, or deal with it yourself. having friends support you is not a bad thing - if i was attacked on tumblr and my friends jumped in to defend me, i’m cool with that. but i wouldn’t ask them to, and then not do anything myself.

to me, this attitude just encourages dogpiling. this felt like she was taking advantage of the people admiring her so whole-heartedly, and using them to deal with minor grievances. (again, i don’t want to downplay some of the actual racism and xenophobia she experienced on this website, because there was some pretty sketchy stuff that did need someone else stepping in to object to. but then there was “ugh this person asked me what program i use to make my music and i don’t want to answer them bc that’s rude,” and stuff of that caliber. like, mina, you built yourself a pretty big following here on tumblr, you don’t get to complain when people are trying to ask you questions and engage with you when you set yourself up as a knowledgeable person on a subject.)

i’m going to mention @gingerly-writing because she already made a post on the subject, but there was an instance where we were in the vent channel and watched a lot of mina’s friends send anons and reblogs of a hurtful nature to one person. eventually, ginger stepped in to say “hey, i don’t think we need to keep doing this, they are a minor,” and after she did so, i also jumped in, saying something along the lines of, “yeah, i’ve seen this kind of stuff blow up in another server and end in a really regrettable situation where no one was happy, can we stop.” both ginger and i received a private message from the mods (individually) saying that we shouldn’t police the chat, etc etc. not during that message, but on the vent channel, another mod jumped in to say that the people dogpiling the blogger were also minors. as if that makes it okay, and isn’t actually extremely worrying in its own right.

after that, i pretty much took a stance of “all right then i just won’t say anything at all.” i stuck around vv because i hated myself actually really liked a few of the others in the server, including a couple of the mods who are actually really cool people, not all the vv mods are sketch, and because honestly? i lowkey knew that vv was going to crash and burn sometime, and i wanted to be there to watch what happened. due to the pandemic, and her line of work, mina became less active, and the whole server died down a bit.

then someone reblogged one of mina’s ‘art’ posts and accused her of tracing. mina’s admirers immediately jumped into action. nuwuhorizons has it pretty well documented on their blog. there was nothing in the server about it, except one of the others said “oh man i saw that and it pissed me off,” there was some minor chat, and then i woke up and wanted to know what had happened, and was told “don’t worry about it.”

so, naturally, bc the only thing i thirst for is water and Drama(TM), i went looking for it.

found it on some of mina’s friend’s blogs, where i found who had reblogged and said mina was tracing, and followed those reblog chains, where several of mina’s followers attacked the accuser and made fun of their name and age and defended mina, pulling out progress videos and stuff of mina’s work. the accuser was trans and still a teenager, even if technically an adult, so that made things a lot worse. mina eventually posted something explaining that she was pencil tracing and had a very cheery, false-positive tone to the whole thing.

things sorta ended at that, but then maybe the same day, or the day after, user hyba made that big ol post about the Big Scary Tumblr Mirror Website Copying All Your Good, Hard Work. mina and her friends jumped on this. they threw it in the server and talked about things like intellectual property rights and “i don’t like how this makes me feel :(” and from there, went in to how tumblr was a terrible garbage site and then mina and most of the mod team decided that it was time to pack up VV and leave tumblr completely.

pretty much everyone i know were mina’s besties have vanished off tumblr. mina made an announcement that VV was “migrating” off tumblr and discord(???) and dropped another application to join the great vv migration. i did not apply bc i just have too freaking much going on in my life and needed to get out of this for the sake of my own mental health. it was tempting as hell, tho, i will say that.

a couple things about this - at the time, mina is also having some pretty bad things going on in her family. she was very vague on the details, but i think that really contributed to wanting to leave; on top of the pandemic and everything else, she was probably heckin stressed. but also like. she never called out her followers for attacking her accuser. she never made any sort of post talking about it. she never told her friends on the server “hey don’t do that.” she never took accountability for it, or, honestly, for anything else she or her friends have done that didn’t feel too good. the mirror sites aren’t really a big deal.

after the server was archived, it was left up a couple days so everyone could grab contact info, etc. during this time, i was checking the ‘violetvineyard’ tag and saw someone post “what happened to mvcreates they haven’t answered my application to vv,’ and i responded with “oh, the server closed down bc of the copy cat sites.”

the same day, i got a tumblr DM from one of the former mods asking me not to give away any details about vv leaving tumblr. it was very politely worded and everything, but it was still just like

okay? vv is over? why are you asking me not to say anything. and it wasn’t like i was even spilling any hot goss, i was just repeating the excuse (and i do mean excuse) mina gave us.

anyway, that mod is off tumblr, too, as far as i know, or else they stealthin. which is fine, u do u, buddy.

uhh conclusion time, i guess? i have a few scattered screenshots of things, but i’m not posting em bc i’m lazy and also running late for a thing. but really, for me, i didn’t have a whole lot of beef with mina or pretty much any of the other folks on vv. i thought that mina and her friends were a bit too eager for blood, and that really bothered me. i’m annoyed they shut down vv completely, because it could actually have been something great. if mina wanted off writeblr, i wish she had given the whole network over to people interested in running it; instead, what was a good thing for a lot of people is now completely gone, with no existing framework for people to build on. sure, anyone can go make their own network/family for writeblr, but now it’s just going to splinter into a bunch of different, smaller groups, and we’re all back to square one.

but whatever. i didn’t get to see the server go down in flames, instead it just ended with a hasty retreat and a few whimpers, and quite honestly i wished my staying in had paid off.

i do want to reiterate - there were quite a few people in vv who i think are great, and this does include some of the mods themselves.

i’ve also gotten a couple messages from a few other folks who had been in vv who have their own real, real sketch stories, which are making me rethink how i feel about mina and her friends, and all the good credit i gave them. i just wanted to present this bc it’s my blog and i do what i want, fight me.

and if anyone wants to chat about vv, hit me up. i keep things as private as you want them to be, and i love love love talking about this nonsense. Give Me The Deets.

#violetvineyard #vv drama #long post #sorry not sorry #i just wanted to give a touch more balanced view on vv #i have a few other things i could talk about but none are really worth the effort

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angstymarshmallow · 6 years

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Fanfiction: a balancing act

I can’t remember the last time I’ve made a somewhat serious post explaining some of my thoughts...where I wasn’t being melodramatic about my own life or posting fanfiction. But this is it, a post simply sharing some thoughts I have.

Again, it’s my perspective and nothing I say is absolute truth. But posting this does sort of allow me to be at the mercy of the internet.

Every once in awhile a discussion with one or more of my fanfic writer pals comes up. Sometimes we talk about in length anything from the expectations followers have, how often we update but most importantly - the expectations as a fanfic writer you have for yourself.

Sometimes, that may mean going on semi-hiatus for weeks or months because of a lack of inspiration, motivation or just downright writer’s block that you can’t simply avoid. Other times, it means scheduling specific times of the week to release certain content. It really depends on the writer themselves.

However, I think the biggest thing I’ve come to realize - it’s like an epiphany really is how much I truly believe fanfiction life is a balancing act.

At one end, you as a writer are consistently trying to provide content. If you’re like me, that’s the bread and butter of your blog (minus the things you get attached to and post along the way) but generally speaking, that’s why people follow you. They like the pairings you write. They like your writing style. But on the other end, being an active fanfic writer in the community also means supporting other fanfic writers like yourself and other forms of media for the fandom you are in. Maybe it isn’t much of an obligation but rather an expectation on everyone’s parts.

In the beginning, I was very good at both of these things. It’s been about a year plus? Probably two years that I’ve been a fanfic writer. I used to constantly absorb fanfiction and reblog them with my thoughts on the accounts that I found fanfiction I thoroughly. And there was an expectation on my end - assuming/unassumingly so for people to do the same. It felt like the ‘right’ thing to do, or at least common courtesy. I began blogging more, reblogging more - writing more. Fanfictions are the only short stories I have ever created and finished. But at the same time, I was absorbing so much content at an alarming rate. I wasn’t doing as good of a job at work anymore, and my partner had some complaints about me spending time on my phone rather than with him. At that point, it was the awakening I needed.

And for the better part of last year and up until now, there’s been some disconnect. I don’t update as frequently as I used to (and part of that is because of real life; my job, person issues, my health etc) and the other half is my reaction to other fanfic writers on tumblr.

Let me explain. There’s a good amount of great writers; writers that know how to string words together in a way that looks effortless (at least from an outsider’s perspective), writers I haven’t even had the pleasures of reading yet. And then there are writers in general. Some that are very good at tailoring to the audience and popular ships; and others that don’t care for popularity and post what they care about. Basically, there’s tons of talent out there.

While scrolling on my dashboard, I saw a post recently indicating - writers that have gained a following no longer supports or reblog the posts of other writers (usually smaller or not as known writers of the fandom). This is where I think the biggest urge to kind of collect and write my thoughts in a post came. Reading this, although it wasn’t directed at me specifically, I felt guilty because - have I become such a person? Admittedly, the first thing that came to mind was yes. If I am to compare my earlier experience here to now - it does seem that way. I haven’t been nearly as active and as supportive as I used to be and I feel terrible about it.

But along with this realization also came the realization there’s a number of factors why and they aren’t not necessarily about writers themselves.

Ironically enough, the biggest problem I have is my self confidence or lack thereof. More often than not, people that have read my stuff, liked it and/or have left comments - usually have something thoughtful or sweet to say - which I LOVE and never take for granted. Regardless of how much other people may appreciate my stories, I still struggle with the same more or less thoughts I’ve had since almost the beginning of my fanfic writing. Is my writing good enough? Will it ever be good enough? Is my writing style the best it can be? Is it changing to become better and better? I find this especially true for pairings that aren’t quite as popular or mainstream.

Other writers: technically this should go under the same issue. I do have the tendency to compare other people to myself. At first, I told myself it didn’t matter how good someone else is, that shouldn’t diminish me in the slightest. I should be happy for them and wish them luck in all their future endeavors. As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of writers out there. Some of which has specific niches or books they prefer, while others cover a wider array of books and genres. But there’s also a good amount of writers out there with a lot more interesting plots and notes than my own work. Although, for popular pairings - I do receive a good amount of attention in my earlier experiences, it still doesn’t quench the fears I’ve always had. The worst part is I’ve now started a downward spiral of - I’m not good enough, why do I even try? It doesn’t matter because _ _ are soo much better at this than I am. It’s pitiful, and whiny and it doesn’t help anyone let alone myself. And thus, I begin reading less and less of other people’s fanfiction knowing that theirs are either (1) completely better than mine, and I cannot help but agonize and compare or (2), super popular with its own twists and turns and drama - things that don’t necessarily interest me. And the fact that they interest other people discourage me. Either way, as much as I want to support other people all the time - I’m also selfish enough to recognize I can’t always ignore the impact their work has on me.

Another problem is timing. Sometimes, my personal life is so hectic that I don’t have time to sit and read, or even when I do have time my mind is elsewhere and I can’t connect to a story the way it properly deserves. Other times, my personal life is so unbelievably shitty that I can’t even browse online and read anything because I’m too miserable..or too sad to. Or basically a bunch of other emotional or random things that get in the way and stops me from wanting to.

Hiatus. Sometimes I take small hiatuses from here depending on other things going on. This is kind of linked with my earlier point of timing, but it also has to do with the fandom itself. On a whole, what I’ve come to realize in fandoms in general - discourse and discussions are a natural occurrence. With as many people as there are in a fandom, I think it’s natural to have conflicting opinions and views. We grow up with different experiences, come from different backgrounds and walks of life thus naturally no two people will share the exact thoughts about well, anything. As similar or as different as that may be sometimes it often causes misinterpretations, generalizations, racism, homophobia and other matters that should shed light and educate when possible. Hate (anon hate?) are a negative part of that affects a fandom and its members inclusively. And one can’t talk about the positives without sometimes mentioning the negatives as well. Still outside of a community, it weighs on a person. Even inside the community it does as well. Like I said, we’re all different. A lot of the times though because I don’t actively engage, I don’t feel the weight of it as much as because I’m very used to not taking things personally, (I come from a very strong Caribbean background and that factors directly into some of this) I like remaining as objective as possible depending on the circumstances (something that school has long since drilled into me) and other times I’m eager for an open discussion and understand how that may affect my mental health. It is also good to note that having different opinions doesn’t make anybody more right or more wrong over someone else. There’s opinions and then there’s facts. And then there’s morals and ethical behavior. Basically, while being vague - I can admire some of the politics that comes along with it but remember in the beginning how I mentioned I use this as a way to escape? Yup, this sometimes goes at ends with that. Sometimes in an attempt to get away, I miss updates and stories from my favourite writers and thus continues the same cycle of balancing.

TLDR: I guess mostly, I believe fanfiction is a balancing act because of the silent demands and responsibilities that come along with it. I don’t think I come close to meeting most of these demands anymore, because of the examples I’ve listed above. I think I’ve written this as a way to - I don’t know? Relate to other people I guess, hoping my fanfic buddies and myself aren’t the only people who experience similar feelings when it comes to balancing fanfiction with...well everything else in life.

If you read this and actually got to the end, thank you for your time. Sometimes I end up in a tangent and it gets difficult to get back on track. In any case, thanks for listening to me rant.

#personal #sharing some thoughts #I had lots more to say but I think this is a good place to leave it on my blog #fanfiction #k's thoughts #fanfic life #my last post while I go write something happy #like griffin and mc fanfiction

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