#i mean i'm older than the intended audience and it's hard to get invested between a romance between 15-year-olds

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

@spiderdreamer-blog said:

I liked the main trio at first when I thought the story was going somewhere, then it jumped into weird baby's-first-romance stuff that felt designed to get people to make gifsets, and Ezran was the perfect unchallenged moral center.

yeah, i mean early callum/rayla/ezran were fine. early on in like season 1, there’s a huge question mark of potential above their heads. you’re still kind of sketching the type of person they maybe are. why is callum so calm in the face of danger, thinking about cycles of violence even when an elf assassin has a knife to his neck? who is rayla, really? how has being raised an assassin affected her? and ezran is a cute kid, what challenges will he face as king?

anyways as the story went on the answers were “lmao.” they stayed in that potential stage and kind of got worse. meanwhile soren and claudia were faced with pretty serious dilemmas and really tangibly changed throughout the series in a way none of the main 3 have. when the side characters are faced with the big questions and the main characters aren’t allowed to have any feelings, you sort of end up with that.

but like. the baby’s-first-romance is a symptom that they don’t actually know what to do with the 3 mains. it was completely unplanned, and it really kind of shows. even though callum and rayla just.... didn’t really have that level of emotional connection, they sort of wrote it in because, uh, i guess girls and boys can’t be friends. and it wasn’t a small write-in, either. so much time is spent on this romance.

[comicaurora]

Posting things online is difficult and intimidating. I think about making and posting my own webcomic but the idea of a hostile or even just inconsiderate audience makes it hard. It can make it hard to post or even draw just regular art. I'm really grateful that you share your work because I get to read and enjoy it, it's a beautiful gift. If you don't mind, would you share some of your thoughts about putting your creations on the internet and how that's different/better than making things without posting them? I find myself puzzled on our modern world where people have access to so much art, and access to the people that create that art.

I don't remember if I've said before but god that username is hilarious

Ah man, it's tricky. I don't think anyone likes bad feedback, but for me at least, the desire to share art is pretty inextricable from the desire to make art most of the time. It's a similar hunger for me - the art demands to be made, and then it demands to be shared. Not all art, mind you - there's sketchbook pages that'll never see the light of day because I made them Just For Me - but when it comes to storytelling, I want to share. I'm not even the biggest fan of attention, really - I don't like people looking at me, I want them to look at what I'm doing or making or saying. The fact that it's me doing it feels largely incidental.

I think a lot of negative feedback feels so bad because it's like it's someone looking past your art and judging you instead, which is both broadly unpleasant and misses the point of creation. You just want someone to look at your art and instead they turn their critical assessment into a personal or parasocial judgment of you. Of course, the act of creation is a deeply personal one, often drawing on private or fraught parts of you in the process, so it does make sense that some criticism of the art hits closer to home than others. And it's also easy to take criticism of your work personally, even when it's just an assessment of the work. If there's a problem with the story, there must be a problem with me! If someone misinterpreted something, it means I failed! If there's a problem with my older work that I've since fixed in my newer work, the flaw is still indelibly present, staining my legacy!

Art is such a deeply personal process that I'm pretty sure it's impossible to fully extricate your emotional investment from your own work. But, of course, on the audience end of things, it's usually not that deep. "Huh, I didn't quite get that" is obviously not intended as "you knave………… you deceiver……… you have misled me with your calumny and lies……………… the internet must be told…………………" - at least not when it comes from, like, well-balanced people.

Art-making is a fundamentally deeply asymmetrical dynamic, but the easy access to creators that the internet provides can produce the illusion of symmetry and casual conversation. Personally I think it's very, very important to maintain a firm boundary between the fan space and the creator space. The work of art forms the wall between the fans and the creators. With very few exceptions, I don't let anybody see my unfinished work. No beta-readers - I can't even draw comfortably if there's someone behind me to see what I'm doing before it's ready. I don't tell people what they can and can't headcanon, but I also don't compromise my side of the process. What I say is canon is canon, what I say is happening is what's happening. It's my story. Once it's in fan hands they can do whatever they want with it - interpret it in wacky ways, headcanon, redesign, AU fanfic, whatever. None of that affects what I made.

When creating on the internet, I think that's the most important thing to hold onto for personal sanity. Ultimately you're making this art because you want this art to exist. The people who see it and engage with it as fans are going to have a version in their heads that is not the art you wanted to exist. That's fine. It's how this always works. It doesn't mean your version is bad and theirs is good, or that one of you is right and the other is wrong (except in the sense that, as the creator, your "interpretation" is the most "right" when "right" is measured as "closest to authorial intent.") It just means you're two different people and your minds don't work the same. Make the art that it's good for you to make, let people play with it if they want, and don't ever mix up which side of the fandom boundary you're on.