#as much as i loooove cute packaging it's just trash and i cant bring myself to make more trash than i need to

[ot3]

it's just weird to me because the sentiment around like professionally printed (which to be very clear is not the same as professionally published) anthology style fanzines is that they're somehow like. brutal capitalism come to infringe upon the sacred art of zinemaking. but these are also people who would simultaneously claim that they support artists getting fairly compensated for their work. but historically most zines of this type have been charity projects, and for the ones that arent charity projects i guarantee you pretty much nobody is making money even close to the number of hours they put in, especially not the moderation teams. it's strange. like nobody is getting rich off of this except grifters who steal shit and i think if every type of Web Community that had grifters in it got a bad reputation we wouldn't have any web communities left.

imo there is one very big thing that needs to be talked about wrt these kinds of zines and it's the way a lot of them rely on like, dirt cheap overseas manufacturing to produce their merchandise and you have no idea how those people are being treated. like idk i think it's insanely difficult to get a lot of types of merch made without going through these channels and im not expecting independent artists to be able to opt their work out of the exploitative systems of capitalism any more than anyone else can. but i think it's worth acknowledging