lokincest:

Things I Wish I Knew Earlier In Fandom

But maybe these will help somebody now.

  • Most of your fandom experience is shaped by who you follow. Find a good group of people and stick with them.
  • Support your favs and a lot of them will become your friends, or at least be friendly back to you.
  • Just unfollow people who bring unwanted content or negativity onto your dash.
  • Block people who cause you stress. It’s not worth your time to focus on parts of fandom that don’t make you happy.
  • Blacklisting words/tags is a tool you are allowed to use as much as you need to.
  • Don’t feel like you have to pretend to like things that make you uncomfortable in order to fit in. Set healthy boundaries for yourself.
  • Never tag your hate. Never send hate anons to someone.
  • Content creators love getting comments, seeing people gush in the tags on reblogs, and getting fans in their inbox. It’s the best way to motivate them to keep making awesome stuff.
  • If there’s certain content you want to see but it doesn’t exist yet, then make it. Draw the thing, write that fic. If you can’t, then comission an artist or writer, or send someone a prompt if they’re open to it. If you can’t do that either, then write meta or headcanons about it. Put it into the world.
  • Create what you love. Do it for yourself first and foremost, and if even one other person likes it too, then that’s a bonus.

ruffaled:

muchymozzarella:

I met a fan artist from the Hobbit fandom who’s 40+ years old, who sent me a postcard a couple of years back for Christmas with her art on the card. 

When I was about 14, I once befriended, and lost contact with, a 40 year old woman with a full head of gray, curly hair, who was one of the best known Good Omens fan artists of the community. She had apparently been in and out of asylums for years, and I worried for the longest time. I even sent her an email when I was around 18, asking after her well-being. But then she resurfaced when I was 21, here on tumblr. It was one of the greatest and most memorable fandom experiences I’ve ever had. 

When I was 15 and using slurs I didn’t know were slurs, 30+ year old LGBTQ+ comics fans on scans_daily patiently but firmly corrected me. I felt mortified, but they never attacked me or treated me as anything other than a dumb kid who made a mistake. 

I have a long time friend of close to a decade, who was late twenties when I met her in the comics fandom, and I was a teen.

OLDER FANS ARE CRUCIAL TO THE SURVIVAL OF FANDOMS. Not ONLY because they’re literally the ones keeping fandom afloat (AO3 wasn’t created or maintained by kids, let’s just say), but because older fans generally don’t attack or bully or fuck up a fandom by being aggressive or volatile or overzealous, destroying any enjoyment of a medium. 

Single women, married women, LGBTQ+ fans, all in the range of 30-60 years old. I’ve met all sorts of older fans, from when I was 12 on deviantart to now, in my mid-twenties, and not a single one of them has ever hurt me or treated me like dirt. I’ve always felt safer with older fans than with younger ones, because of the people I’ve seen harass, accuse, doxx, bully, and generally engage in harmful behaviour in this fandom, they’ve largely been in the 13-21 age bracket. 

Obviously most young fans aren’t like that, but the toxicity is palpable regardless.

@younger fans, if somebody older in a fandom acts in a creepy way, then feel free to avoid them, block them, report them.

But this apparent DELUSION that younger fans have that older fans are “creepy” just for existing needs to be eradicated. Just. Stop. You do not deserve the fandoms they built, they maintained, they keep alive in themselves and all the younger fans they took care of, if you cannot RESPECT THEM. 

This x infinity.

littlesugarplumfairy:

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd, uneven time.”
 I feel that this quote sums up today pretty nicely. I woke up to a grey, misty morning where it was drizzling heavily with rain, so what did I do? Took a walk to the beach. Naturally. 
The summer may be lingering but there are definite hints of autumn in the air. I think when tourists flock down here to Cornwall, they cradle this vision of sunshine, ice cream and idyllic beaches, and at the first signs of a drop of rain, they despair and scurry back to the sanctuary of their cars. Personally, I love a ramble on the beach in the rain, it makes me happy. Autumn is my favourite season; the sight of the cliffs shrouded in mizzly mist, the hedgerows laden with blackberries and the churning steely sea is when I love this coastline best. I live for this type of weather, there’s a gothic quality about it. It feeds my soul and it makes me feel both alive and at peace at the same time.