Read on Twitter
hot fandom take of the day: whatever your fanwork of choice may be, you have to do it for you first. fandom should bring you joy! when your primary engagement becomes exhausting, negative, or feels like an obligation, maybe it's time to step back and reassess.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about Fandom Twitter - it's a weirdly personal and accessible space, where the primary mode of engagement is essentially yelling into the void at each other. There's a lot of pressure to be active and keep up with the hottest, newest content.
For me personally, Fandom Twitter exacerbates a lot of my own anxieties about rejection and being liked and accepted - but that doesn't mean any one of the people I follow is entitled to my friendship, my praise, or my trust. And the same goes for people who follow me.
It's so easy to get impressions of people and their life and start thinking of your followers - even mutuals - as your friends. But at the end of the day yelling about something you love does not always a relationship make. And I say this as someone with irl friends FROM TWITTER.
Basing your worth or value in a fandom space on the hope that X Big Name Fan will notice and praise your work is just such a lose-lose situation every time. It's not fair to you or them.
Twitter, especially fandom spaces on Twitter, can make that a really difficult thing to parse. It's not my favorite space. It's weird and hard feeling like you're surrounded by conversations that focus on small groups of people or like you've missed an inside joke.
It can be a very, very easy slide from "nobody liked my tweet" to "everyone hates me". But you have to remember that what you're seeing on your timeline every day is someone else's curated space. And for for lack of a better phrase, Twitter has shit boundaries.
Are there times that fan engagement should maybe just be kept to a group chat? Sure. But I don't think there's a current digital community space that accommodates small AND large fan group engagement simultaneously, and Twitter makes that absolutely impossible.
Building fandom relationships takes WORK. Sometimes they happen fast and naturally, and sometimes it takes a lot of collaboration and energy. Popularity is often a mix of time, experience, and luck. People want and need different things out of fandom, and nothing is guaranteed!
This is all just to say: tweet kindly but hit that mute button often, create what brings you joy but respect people's boundaries, and think hard about what you want and need out of a fandom space. Curate your trash can.
