snowflake 2k26 #12

[queenslayerbee]

Challenge #12
Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

A lot of My Fandom People are disseminated in other sites, most prominently tumblr and discord. Though I do try to get them into dreamwidth, trust me xD. The environment here is one I prefer, frankly: it's slower, and feels calmer, less prone to the kind of drama that plagues those others. In some cases we follow and talk to each other across all platforms, taking advantage of the benefits of each (curse discord as I might in many areas, in terms of direct messages, it's definitely the best one, for example).

I don't think of myself as a gregarious person; I get exhausted quickly by large crowds, especially. In fandom it's much of the same: I feel more comfortable in small fandoms, and whenever I join a larger one, I set to find a small corner of it where I'm in my element. 

My preferences often make this easier, because they're rarely in alignment with fandom majorities. Thanks to that I've found My People in numerous corners, from the chill group I gathered while The 100 (a large, wank-prone fandom) was airing, to the buddies I've made in the DC fandom (Even Worse xD), to the ones I met in the tiny environment of writeblr, when I was still around those parts, or that I'm meeting now with Pluribus, for example. My oldest fandom friends, I met in the Shadowhunters fandom, my first active one. A trainwreck, but again, I met a lot of people there that I'm still friends with today :D

In many cases we've followed each other through several fandoms, sometimes meeting, sometimes diverging for a while. Sometimes following each other beyond fandom, taking interests in each other's professional pursuits, in each other's personal lives. Some of the people I've met here know things about me that I wouldn't tell those I personally know off-line, and with their mere presence, support, and engagement, have helped me through Some Shit. 

I'll always be glad that I took the leap from lurker to active fandom participant (and creator). I genuinely don't know how I would've stayed sane through my early twenties without the people I met around here. Some of them, I no longer talk with; some just follow me on tumblr and we only sporadically like each other's posts. But others have become lasting friendships that sustain me to this day, And I'm extremely grateful for that!

Comments

[queenslayerbee]

I didn't finish the show (season 3b wasn't grabbing me), in the end, but I got a lot of it while I watched (including getting out of a writers block and publishing my first fics on ao3!). I did find a handful of good people in the fandom, some that I'm still mutuals and friends with, but I also saw a lot of the worst of it, especially with how big fandoms get when you happen to like an unpopular pairing or don't ship the popular one. In this case, I was really engaged with Isabelle and Raphael's dynamic, especially in s2, and I had issues with Malec as a couple despite liking both characters separately. The fandom at large wasn't kind about either thing lmao. It definitely became one of the reasons why I stick to small fandoms and selective corners in large ones (something quite useful as my current fandom is DC comics lol).

DW is a much calmer environment. I suppose going through the trouble of starting fandom wank on someone's personal blog requires a lot more effort here than in sites like tumblr, let alone discord servers xD. I appreciate it, and all the effort people go through in organising events to keep it active.

[kitarella_imagines]

If we get good stuff like writing, posting, friends etc. out of a show and fandom, that’s great, we don’t have to finish watching it. That’s the good thing about fandoms isn’t it? We can do exactly what we like, there’s no correct way to interact with them 😊 Fantastic that you published your first fics on AO3, that’s a big step!

I watched Shadowhunters til the end and enjoyed it, but it was a while ago now so I can’t remember what happened! Lol.

I didn’t write any fics for the show, I felt like all the storylines were covered in canon and I couldn’t see anything missing, so it sounds like I had a lucky escape because I didn’t interact with any of the fans. Why can’t people just let others like whichever pairings they want? We don’t have to like the popular ones. Some fans are so bossy.

I agree—smaller fandoms and selective corners suit me too. I much prefer writing a fic about an unusual pairing or filling in a plot hole rather than writing the millionth fic about the popular couple. I've written popular couples by accident sometimes! Which has been a shock because I got a sudden wave of attention 😅

You hit the nail on the head there—the structure of DW with personal blogs isn’t conducive to starting arguments, there’s no fast flowing newsfeed of drive-by insults to get everyone riled up and start a pile on. I think of DW as a series of homes. People come to visit me on my home journal page and I go out to visit them on theirs. It would be extremely weird to start insulting them at their home.

Although I don’t allow anonymous comments on my journal, I think that stops random people coming along to insult me. I tried Tumblr and it was just full of rude people so I left, and never tried Discord as I've heard bad things about that too.

Oh yes DW admins and members are brilliant and I feel like we are a small group of rebels fighting against the commercial billionaire sites trying to lure us in 🫤

Gosh that was a long reply, sorry, I do woffle sometimes!