#you getting more kudos/comments/reviews/favorites isn't going to fix your wack ass energy and weird sense of entitlement???

[flowerslut]

random/general/personal fanfic rambling + whining beneath the cut ♡

sometimes I think to myself: "lmfao I have such a tiny audience!!" but not in a self-deprecating 'oh woe is me no one reads my stuff' way. more like a "hell yeah I can do and say whatever the fuck I want because no one is looking in this direction anyways" which is just.... so nice???? and not entirely true but true enough that twilight has been my most peaceful fandom experience in a long time (despite still being Hated by certain fandom niches lmfaoo 😘)

like I often forget that the twilight fic I write has the least amount of interaction overall in comparison to literally Every Other Fandom i've ever been in. which is SO funny. even my unfinished dbz fic from forever ago has more hits than most of my twilight fic combined (the curse of being a jalice girlie 💔) which is also lowkey nice as hell because I don't have bratty teenagers and weird middle aged men in my comments/reviews/ask box bitching that "SaSuke wOULD NEVER—" and I can live in relative peace now 😌

but then that post saying "post the difference in hits between your most and least viewed fics" gets put on my dash again and I spend at least 20 minutes each time looking for someone with a comparable difference (SOMEONE TO RELATE TO YOU KNOW?) and out of the 5 or 6 times I've done this I've found ONE person. ONE!!! which just reminds me of how often I forget that although I can be a rando who flies under the radar here in twilight I will Not Be Afforded that luxury when I eventually go back to n*ruto. just look at how comical it is to look at my goddamn ff stats page. and yes, these two are listed right next to each other bc it's an alphabetized list, which just further emphasizes the absurdity in my different fandom 'audiences':

(it goes 'Word Count' -> 'Chapters' -> 'Reviews' -> 'Hits')

so its a weird feeling to be in a more niche, smaller fandom (largely by choice) and then seeing people constantly bitch and fucking moan about how their content doesn't get the hits it used to. or how they wish their numbers were higher. and instead of being like "these are personal, internal issues I must work on" they're like "ITS NOT ABOUT NUMBERS ITS ABOUT RESPECT" while they're BITCHING about wanting their numbers higher????? like bitch make it make sense! just say you're vain and want more hits/kudos! this is the worst part of being a part of the larger tumblr fic writer community because it's so insufferable to see

like yknow those popular posts that go around saying "Ummmm it's an UNSPOKEN RULE and always HAS been to ALWAYS leave a kudos and ALWAYS leave a comment even if you didn't enjoy the fic 😌💅" it makes me want to laugh in their faces. because I don't know what delusional circles you run in to think you're entitled to what you deem is 'adequate attention'?

"but fic writers spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours on—" and no one is making them do that. fic writing is a hobby.

"it's discouraging to get no engagement on fic—" then reexamine why you're writing and maybe take a break from the internet

"some fic writers are trying to establish an audience so when they switch to ofic or traditional publishing it'll be easier—" if this is a strategic business choice then either get into a bigger ship or fandom (hp/marvel/etc) or change your strategy dude because this is not going to work the way you think it will

"seeing so few kudos/hits makes me want to delete everything some days—" again: reexamine why you write fic. if you're doing it for external validation then there's a bigger issue at play here. if no engagement affects your mental health you really need to take a step back

and I will always understand wanting acknowledgement for the hard work content creators do. it feels really nice to get a kind comment or a bunch of favorites/kudos/whatever. but the tumblr-popularized mindset of "your readers OWE you for what you've provided for them" has skewed so far off from the original "fandom is a community" and into a weird "fandom has a hierarchy that we are attempting to enforce" mindset and I can't fucking stand it dude!!!!!

I wouldn't consider myself a fandom veteran because there are so many people who have been around far longer than I and who have seen some worse shit than I have, but over the past ~17 years that I've spent in online fandom spaces (and ~15 as a fanfic writer) the worst part of creating in fandom isn't that "kids these days are soooo entitled" or "noBoDy kNowS HOw tO CoMmEnT ANYmoRE" its that capitalism has warped everyones fucking mindsets!! now that content creation can be monetized people are viewing the content they create as things they can charge this weird 'social currency' for if they can't exchange it for actual currency (which you can't with most fan content).

you don't get to demand that people owe you interaction for you providing a service that you were not required to provide anyways. this banker ass capitalistic republican ass energy makes me wanna scream. and like, if you DO do this (we've all read a fic on FF.net where an authors note says "no more chapters until I get at least 5 reviews!!") then stop trying to moralize it and pretend that people who DONT comment are not doing what is required of them. which, is nothing. nothing is required of them.

tldr; anyways I always feel weird about my experience in fandom and as a fanfic writer bc I don't know where my peers are who can relate to my strange experience but who also don't subscribe to this bullshit "readers OWE the writers" mindset that's becoming aggressively popularized. either encourage friendly engagement with people's content or shut up. no more of this bs "fic writers Deserve More because I'm mad my highly-niche 7k pwp only got 18 kudos" bullshit

okay love u all happy friday bye bye can't wait to work on prompts for u guys this weekend ♡♡♡♡♡