#also i just finished rdr1 and you can find me crying at the tissue isle

[storytellering]

It's very interesting to see how what platform you're on informs the fandom experience you get, and how certain fandoms seem to basically insulate themselves on one platform. Part of why it's been so hard to not rely on twitter primarily is that that's where the dmc (and specifically spardacest) fandom is, for the most part - you'll get some traction elsewhere too, sure, but if you REALLY wanna engage with the community, twitter's the place to be. (and I'm not talking about it for clout or numbers' sake - I'm talking about like. Purely the feeling of finding more people who like what you like, people you can talk to, get inspired by, have fun with - if your fandom is just you, your one friend and two non-english speaking artists who stopped posting 5 years ago... well, you can still have fun, but it can feel pretty isolating, too) With red dead, I came into it a bit resigned already because the reason i checked it out in the first place is that my boyfriend's best friend got him into it earlier this year, and he's been in my ear about it since (if he's reading this: ily and i say that lovingly lol), and I finally caved to see what the buzz was all about - but that friend, despite being a very successful artist on twitter, ended up discouraged by how crickets it seemed over there - like it was really just the two of them and a couple more friends interacting, and I just assumed that's the landscape I'd be setting foot into, so I was very ready to just be making art, as usual, because for me it's a primal need, just for me and my boyfriend and a couple of our friends, and if people outside that ended up enjoying it it would probably be just a happy fluke. But I feel like I ended up receiving quite a warm welcome here and over on bsky! I've been digging deep into tags and it seems a lot more alive here than twitter, haha. I'm still really only expecting to put out stuff for a couple people at most, but I'm happy to be proven wrong :)