#and i hate ppl who aren’t my best friends 😔

[stevebabey]

GUYS i am BACK in da CITY

[degenderates]

I can really see this fandom being so toxic. I’m super excited for shadow and bone and I’ll always interact w the fandom but even after blacklisting a million tags and blocking so many people I still see some negative content?? Ugh! And the ship war is insane ppl just can’t mind their own business can they

yeah 😔 i finally got around to blacklisting the anti tags after all this time so i can’t go into the anti tags and hate-read them (don’t worry though--i never comment on them--i just hate-read them) and stopping doing that has helped my mental health a lot, but it still pops up on my dash:/

I’m sort of scared for the fandom to grow bc there’s going to be an even larger anti fandom, mainly anti darklinas but also towards malinas...but ahhhh well what can we do? for some people, unfollowing/blocking helps a lot, and for some, it’s combating the antiism. honestly, whatever floats your boat. it’s kind of sad though because i wrote a paper about antis in this fandom a couple years ago, and that ideology has grown immensely even just since 2019. the amount that i saw then is laughable now. and from what i’ve heard, it barely existed in the days when tgt was being released.

and this isn’t necessarily directed toward you, anon, but to any darklina AND malina, or just darklina, shipper in general:

i think the best way to interact with the fandom at the moment is to create the content you want to see, block harassers, engage in discourse only if you want, and whatever you do, stay out of nets if you aren’t in them already. this one may be a controversial one, but being a darklina--or shipper of other “problematic 🤪” ships in tumblr net culture can be really tiring because a lot of people don’t have a filter and there’s not really a tagging system on discord. this isn’t even counting nets that outrightly ban darklinas, like gr*shaverseonl*ne. or events that ban people who create darker or what they deem to be “bad” (my case was student/teacher) content, like gv//bb.

even in the darklina server im in, there is a lot of mal negativity (it’s mostly kept to the appropriate channels though, so i’m glad for that). i’m in a lot of nets/servers, and i’m not gonna leave them because i have friends there, but if you’re not already attached to them and tired of seeing negativity, do yourself a favor and keep to tumblr and ao3. instagram and twitter are big nOPEs to me because they don’t have a tagging system, especially twitter, where i see a LOT of malinas and darklinas being almost as nasty and toxic as the antis. twitter is a hellhole.

it’s gonna be a rough ride. but if it comes to it, create content out of spite. :P