Beyond Selidor

Y E S! A thousand times yes! It's so much more productive to create something you actually enjoy than spending your energy being a negative person. And if you must be very angry about fandom things, creating out of spite exists and it's also more helpful than complaining all the time.

The thing that baffles me is that I don't understand what the complainers hope to achieve. If they're annoyed that more people are interested in Ship X or Character A than their preferred Ship Y or Character B, endlessly complaining and insulting Ship X or Character A isn't going to persuade me to check out their preferred ship or character — it's going to discourage me from engaging and encourage me to avoid the ship/character's fans!

Especially when that turns to calling people out left and right for not engaging at the same level. Fandom is an escape to a lot of people and not treating it as a form of activism doesn't mean one's a bad person and/or not advocating for change in their personal and real lives.

I also sometimes feel that calling out fans for alleged lack of ideological purity is a way to do 'activism' without risk: it doens't (often) involve confronting the far-right, it doesn't involve people with real political or societal power, it doesn't involve the effort required to get involved in local politics or activism, or even doing something like writing letters to politicians. It's just shouting at other fans on the internet. That's why it feels like displacement to me: the person doesn't want to pick a fight with the far right, so instead they yell at someone about their 'bad' ships and feel like they've done something useful. I have a small amount of sympathy with this: I'm not keen to get on the radar of violent far-right extremists either. But there are many other ways to make a change in the world, yet somehow none of these seem attractive to the fandom activists.