#if we put ourselves out there enough

[spookyboywhump]

How would you recommend someone who's been here awhile as a whump blogger get more... engagement? I will post ask games and get virtually no ask or such. :( when I first started I had crazy engagement but now it's just gone. Makes me feel a little bad like I did something wrong? Aaa I'm sorry xx

Ahahaa anon this is an interesting ask to get at an interesting time. I’m going to do my best to help and give advice with what I’ve been wanting to try out as this is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately as well. I’m going to put this below a cut as I often feel. Weird talking about things regarding engagement and I understand some people don’t like those conversations but y know it is what it is

Let me start off with, I’m sure you didn’t do anything wrong friend! I have noticed engagement has gone down a lot lately, not just in myself but in blogs that I follow that were VERY active and got lots of engagement back when they first started posting, and while they’re still very active and absolutely fantastic and talented writers, they still aren’t getting the attention they used to. I want to add a quick disclaimer that I understand engagement and attention is not everything, that we are supposed to create for ourselves, we are not simply content machines here to please an audience but also. When you go from having constant engagement with your work to what feels like none, it does feel a little discouraging, if not a lot discouraging and leave you wondering what changed. I think that’s normal. While we should create with ourselves in mind, it’s also just human nature to want to connect and interact with others who also enjoy our creations!

Onto the next thing, I have a few theories as to why engagement in general may have gone down. Obviously, I don’t know who you are or what your specific situation is so these may not apply! But they are things I think about when I think about this

Personally, I joined as a whump blog in 2019 and gained a bit of a following RIGHT before Covid lockdowns. Around this time a lot of people were home, a lot of people had way more time to write, to read, to interact with each other, I recall this time as being very active for everybody, between the Whump community online and whump discord servers, nobody had anywhere to go or anything else to do so we were all online indulging in what may have been a new hobby and new and exciting space for some people.

Following that, Covid lockdowns ended. People went back to work, back to school, and suddenly a lot of us just. Can’t be as active as we used to. This community seems to be full of neurodivergent people, I imagine a lot of us are struggling to balance school/work, household responsibilities, and our hobbies and things like writing or keeping up with our favorite series may fall to the side unfortunately. People graduated high school, started college, started jobs, these will take up a lot of time so I’m not really surprised to see a decrease in general activity.

So just like those things mean a lot less people are likely to be active as much as they used to, it may also mean you aren’t as active as you used to be. Again, I don’t know your situation personally, but I went back to work in February of 2021 and since then I have written. Less and less. It’s actually kind of depressing when I see time stamps on things and realize how little I wrote at all in 2022 because work was such a drain on me and even now, I struggle to have the time, energy, and inspiration all at the same time to write when I have other things that need to be done as well. My own engagement has gone down significantly since when I first started, so I understand exactly what your talking about, I post about my oc’s constantly but I struggle to really write and it’s very rare to get asks about them the way that I used to (that’s not to say it never happens and I love seeing the ones I do get in my inbox but I have noticed a change that I don’t think is exactly significant to just myself)

(Split this up cuz it was too long for one lmao) I mostly assume it’s due to less people being active as per the reasons mentioned above, there are names I used to see often that have since disappeared and I think about often, but also I know it’s partly on me because I just. Don’t write as much as I used to. People engaged when I had writing for them to engage with. I don’t have that very often any more so they don’t have anything to work with. That’s understandable. I often find myself getting in a mood where I’ve convinced myself everyone has lost interest and if I’m being completely honest that poll I posted was to see if something I was wondering about was correct because I have always noticed a slight uptick in asks or requests regarding one OC but unfortunately I still write primarily for myself and that one OC just. Isn’t the one I want to focus on all the time and I worried I was failing a lot of people by focusing on what I liked.

Anyways that’s all to say. I understand what you mean and this has also been on my mind a lot lately. But I’ve also been thinking about what to do about it.

For one thing, for the same reasons I don’t write as much as I used to, I also don’t read as much as I used to, I miss connecting with other people over THEIR work as well. That doesn’t always mean they’ll be into my stuff, they don’t have to be! I love that they’re creating at all and I want to enjoy it and engage with them over their creations as well! Of course I understand we shouldn’t be interacting just in the hopes it’ll draw attention to ourselves, but it’s also the natural outcome of things. If we aren’t able to reach out to others, they likely won’t reach out to us or look into what we’re doing. There’s quite a few of us, it’s easy to miss some really awesome blogs and really awesome work just because we end up in our own little circles.

Posting your writing or art or whatever it may be regularly, especially being sure to put it in the Whump community tags allows for more people to keep up with it or new people to find and support you and potentially garner new interest if you feel like people have lost interest in what you make. Personally, my goal with doing whumptober is to start writing and posting somewhat regularly again, in a way that more and new people may see it. This is also something I need to fix up but having a good master list is great for people who are new and want to catch up!

And not to sound like hopelessly optimistic but like. Don’t give up. And focus on creating with yourself in mind. You didn’t do something wrong, things have just changed, I forgot to mention this above as it just came to me but I remembered tumblr started doing that thing where you need an account to send anon asks which will have axed a lot of people who were lurking without an account and didn’t want to make one. I know it feels disheartening and discouraging because we want people to enjoy our work but the only way to get that is to keep working. Your work still has value even if people aren’t engaging the way they used to and I’m sure that it’s great! The people who love it the same as you do will find it I’m sure, and I’m wishing you the best of luck!

[dingoskidneys]

How much of the self is present in the ancestor?

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

just finished el mundo gira and i thought it was like. comically bad. sorry to any el mundo gira stans, but tomorrow's writeup will have some hater energy.

[bunnihearted]

5 million male chicks per year are brutally murdered right after birth bc they're "worthless" to the egg industry yet im supposed to believe that humans arent inherently evil lmao shut the fuck up

[ssreeder]

Hey!! I just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work <3<3

I had been a little down when it came to creating more content or being involved in Zukka side of the fandom but seeing your update reminded me to just have fun. And okay this is going to sound bad but I swear I mean this as a compliment; I thought I was wasting my time working for months and years on the stuff I made, but then I realized your fic series brings me so much joy and I'd never, ever judge you for the amount of effort you put into your writing. Seeing it's actually inspiring, to see that someone holds that much passion and creativity and you are sharing it all for FREE. That a person could take all this time to intricately weave together a story, create memorable OCs, breathe new life and make the ATLA world so much bigger than it ever was in canon.

So thanks for accidentally giving me a kick in the butt to stop being judgy about my own work and making me realize you and every fan creator is AWESOME.

I hope you have a wonderful day, your writing is a blessing.

awwww I wanted to say thank you for sending me this ask! I know it’s not easy to put yourself out there, even on anon, so I think it’s cool you felt confident enough to come here and tell me about how you’re feeling.

I don;t think what you’re saying is bad at all haha, because honestly, I feel the same way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered why the fuck am I still doing this? What’s the point? Do people even still care? What if it’s not good enough? What if people discover I have no fucking idea what I’m doing? Why am i spending so much of my time and effort doing this?? I mean… the self doubt is super real, and shiiiiiit let me discover one person that feeds into my self doubt and I’m full on spiraling haha. (Be nice to creators damn it! we are doing our damn best lol)

I’m really glad you think my fic is awesome, and if it weren’t people like you reminding me, I probably would have given up a long time ago haha. I do give my fic a lot of effort, and I hope you continue to give your creations the same amount of love and effort! I’m sure you’re amazing, and seriously don’t give up! I care about your creations and if I don’t get to stop neither do you! WOHOOO!!

Thanks for the ask anon sorry it took me so long to answer

[bluesey-182]

the vet today really tried to talk me into paying $600 for the same service they provided for my mom and her dog a few months ago for under $100

[countess-of-edessa]

“are the girls going to help you make pierogis?” well no one else is fucking gonna are they? no one else in this house has functional fucking hands apparently

[notahorseindisguise]

oh camus.......its getting hard for me to keep pushing this fucking boulder..............

[v-arbellanaris]

so fuckin late i just found out abt the matt healy nonsense and im fuckin disassociating bro x

[ferociouslycreativemystery]

Me: I'm fine about my autism now btw, like I've come to terms with my fixated interests, limited tolerances and social inabilities. The alienation it brings is not ideal but it's just a reality I've gotta deal with now that I know it's just a part of who I am. I mean, it's not like an awkward conversation is gonna ruin anyone's life, is it? We'll both move on from it eventually. This is fine!

Also me: physically unable to watch beyond the first word of the first question of The Assembly because oh my god what if someone says something awkward or controversial or someone can't make themselves understood people are gonna get mad and scream about it online and I will freeze up and be stuck in the backlash forever I don't know how to handle conflict AT ALL let's just hide in the corner behind the sofa instead wait what if I became a hermit actually yeah yeah yeah that sounds good let's do that

[kiseiakhun]

Sometimes I wonder how much crossover there actually is between ADHD and autism, vs... if you have ADHD there's a higher chance you have SOME degree of autism, and vice versa. How much of it is inherent to the diagnosis vs subclinical comorbidity

[sqebu]

I kind of want to compile 2D rep of Indigenous/Indigenous-coded women and review them all. There are a good amount I know myself, but maybe I could put out a post. Perhaps do up a spreadsheet.

[indigo]

living with other people really fucking sucks sometimes

[mejomonster]

i’m not good with words so i probably won’t describe it right. but the black/white mentality online sometimes of things with any flaws being ‘pure evil/need to be destroyed’ and expecting the alternative to be whatever arbitrary things the person decided are ‘perfectly healthy’... does not do anyone good.

i mean yes, we could go into it being an extension of purity culture, of conservatism mindset etc but like. at an even more basic level, especially because online spaces have a lot of younger people:

its really bad to view YOURSELF that way. and when you’re viewing even things way outside you that way, you might be viewing yourself that way. that relationship in X novel is bad because person 1 didn’t communicate right away, and even if they learn and improve through the novel you’ve already decided they’re “too flawed”, or maybe the person 1 never fully improves since its a novel and ‘awful’ to ‘moderately decent at relationships’ is the arc instead of moderately decent to ‘perfect.��� 

But my point is, about yourself: no one is perfect. You will NEVER be perfect. Please don’t hold yourself to the expectation you MUST BE PERFECT and anything less makes you pure evil/irredeemable/awful and unworthy of being treated fairly. The best anyone can do in this life, is try their best, notice when they do happen to mess up or someone lets them know they have, and practice trying to do better next time. You can improve yourself for a lifetime, for decades go to therapy and do all the right exercises and work on yourself every time you slip up even a little AND give yourself breaks so you don’t work yourself to death being overly critical of yourself nonstop... and still by your death you won’t be perfect. 

When I see people get very intensely angry about fiction being imperfect, about wanting it ‘perfect,’ it makes me worry maybe they can’t take and accept their own imperfections. That they see themselves as pure good or evil too, and either naively think of themselves as “perfect” which leads to ignoring when you do actually harm others or yourself (which will happen sometimes), or think of themselves already as irredeemably bad and never able to fix it (since any imperfection even if working on it is “not good enough” according to such a thought process). And that’s an awful way to live. You need to be able to care for yourself NOW, think you’re worthy of respect and fairness NOW, think others critiques of you can be put to constructive use so you can grow, think of yourself as the sum of all the years of growing and improving you ALREADY DID and how that’s a wonderful amazing thing you’ve accomplished! 

This purity culture idea just seems like its very prone to making the people sucked into it self hate because humans just never can be fully perfect, or sucked into never improving and growing and rejecting times they maybe should for their own wellbeing because admitting they have any flaws makes them forever ‘awful.’ That’s not true. You’re not inherently bad, period. You’re not bad for having flaws, you’re normal and human and alive. It’s okay to have flaws, its okay to gradually work on them because humans can only improve so much at a time, its okay to realize 2 decades later that oh you still have this negative thing you do and then maybe work on it then. The reality is we will never be perfect, we will still find our share of some kinds of flaws when we’re very old and about to die, and we need to be able to accept ourselves and appreciate the progress we constantly make and recognize we are valuable and inherently okay as people even when there are still flaws or new flaws come up. 

[onepiexe]

today was soooo

[whumpfish]

You are so right, OP. I have been going absolutely out of my mind seeing the rampant ableism that has invaded my community. I was quiet at first. A lot of us were. A lot of us didn't rock the boat because a lot of us are disabled and life has taught us that rocking the boat gets you thrown out of it, and this has been our last refuge.

Recently I've started going off in the notes, making polite suggestions in posts. Losing my temper sometimes but never rocking the boat too hard. And when I do speak I see things like "glad someone put this into words." Because we oldbies are used to being shouted down and talked over. We're literally here because we go through it every day irl. Some of us built a bamboo raft and quietly cut the line--and I do not blame those who did, it's fucking pavlovian at this point--and the rest have been biting our tongues when the tongues that need to get bitten aren't ours.

But you're right. Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. I'm an historian. I know better than most what comes of peace treaties built on tolerance turning into policies of appeasement. I am done being fair to unfair voices. My responses will be posts and reblogs, my notes simply author's notes.

Thank you, OP, for putting this into words.