Conventional Wisdom Not Your Internet Monkey
Knee update for those of you who are following along. Better than yesterday which was much better from the day before where I couldn’t put much weight on it. Now it is slightly sore but I don’t feel like crying each time I have to walk across the room. This pain I can deal with and not feel overwhelmed.
Recently there has been a series of events that has led me to pull out something that Peter and I worked on 5 years ago entitled The Fan/Pro Bill of Rights . Which is a document covering what is expected of both the fan and the pro to make a convention more fun for both.
Leslie Jones was savaged after the new Ghostbusters movie came out and she stepped back for a bit. Her Rio Twitter feed was wonderful and I hope that she continues to interact on the Internet because she is a joyful soul.
Lauren Zuke who is an artist on Steven Universe is a lovely person. How do I know this? Because she was in the crowd for the Steven Universe concert and drew a lovely picture of Rose Quartz for Caroline. I watched her interact with fans including a couple who were really pushy. She has left twitter and some other social media sites due to intense harassment by people who claim to be fans of the show. To quote her “I decided I don’t want to be accessible to thousands of people who think because I work on a TV show that I owe them myself all the time,”
I remember what a show runner said after a fan came up and just yelled at him about something that had happened on the show that the fan didn’t like, “We write the show FOR the fans not WITH the fans.”
And I think that in a nutshell is where the disconnect seems to be. Fandom has taken this odd sense of entitlement that they are owed something because they watch a show or a film or read a comic or book.
To my mind the fan has already been ‘paid’ in the form of entertainment that has been produced.
But in this world of instant access to people that fans never had access to before, they seem to think that these things they love are made JUST for them and not all the other fans out there.
It can even get really nasty among the fans. I know of one suicide that succeeded and another that didn’t because of fans harassing other fans over minutia that they didn’t like. Slash fic they didn't like because it was not their OTP (one true pair). Art work that didn’t follow their beliefs about how they would like to see the characters go.
Interacting with the creators of the thing that one loves is a privilege not a right.
And they have the right not to interact if they don’t want to. Doesn’t make them evil or that they don’t care. It’s self preservation and, honestly, they have work to do to make the thing that fans claim to love so much.
I know it is a minority of fans and a majority are lovely people. I do think it is time for the majority to face up to the loud minority and tell them if they don’t have something nice to say, maybe they shouldn’t say anything.
Good manners need to invade the Internet and set up shop.
I am grateful for the fans who get how this works.
Recently there has been a series of events that has led me to pull out something that Peter and I worked on 5 years ago entitled The Fan/Pro Bill of Rights . Which is a document covering what is expected of both the fan and the pro to make a convention more fun for both.
Leslie Jones was savaged after the new Ghostbusters movie came out and she stepped back for a bit. Her Rio Twitter feed was wonderful and I hope that she continues to interact on the Internet because she is a joyful soul.
Lauren Zuke who is an artist on Steven Universe is a lovely person. How do I know this? Because she was in the crowd for the Steven Universe concert and drew a lovely picture of Rose Quartz for Caroline. I watched her interact with fans including a couple who were really pushy. She has left twitter and some other social media sites due to intense harassment by people who claim to be fans of the show. To quote her “I decided I don’t want to be accessible to thousands of people who think because I work on a TV show that I owe them myself all the time,”
I remember what a show runner said after a fan came up and just yelled at him about something that had happened on the show that the fan didn’t like, “We write the show FOR the fans not WITH the fans.”
And I think that in a nutshell is where the disconnect seems to be. Fandom has taken this odd sense of entitlement that they are owed something because they watch a show or a film or read a comic or book.
To my mind the fan has already been ‘paid’ in the form of entertainment that has been produced.
But in this world of instant access to people that fans never had access to before, they seem to think that these things they love are made JUST for them and not all the other fans out there.
It can even get really nasty among the fans. I know of one suicide that succeeded and another that didn’t because of fans harassing other fans over minutia that they didn’t like. Slash fic they didn't like because it was not their OTP (one true pair). Art work that didn’t follow their beliefs about how they would like to see the characters go.
Interacting with the creators of the thing that one loves is a privilege not a right.
And they have the right not to interact if they don’t want to. Doesn’t make them evil or that they don’t care. It’s self preservation and, honestly, they have work to do to make the thing that fans claim to love so much.
I know it is a minority of fans and a majority are lovely people. I do think it is time for the majority to face up to the loud minority and tell them if they don’t have something nice to say, maybe they shouldn’t say anything.
Good manners need to invade the Internet and set up shop.
I am grateful for the fans who get how this works.