( No Title )
You cannot produce fiction, art, or any kind of media and make it public unless you are prepared for it to gain a fandom, and unless you are prepared for what it having a fandom will mean.
When you make your creations public, you are opening them up to public reaction.
You cannot control the reaction your audience has to your art.
When you share your work with the world you have to be ready to lose the completeness of your ownership of it.
People will always create fandoms for media they enjoy.
That means if you are a creator and you share your creations publicly on a wide scale you need to be prepared for:
- critical reactions,
- harsh and negative reviews,
- fanfiction,
- fanart,
- horny fanfiction,
- horny fanart,
- and for people to wildly misunderstand your intentions with your work.
Honestly, I don’t understand how there aren’t more creators who openly welcome this shit. Obviously you can be uncomfortable or even upset with some of this, and there’s nothing wrong with you if you have to block out parts of the fandom for your own mental health, but speaking as an artist myself, if I found out my thing I worked hard on suddenly blew up and had people writing gross fanfiction about it, I’d be fucking HONORED!!! Because it means my thing was so inspiring, it got people writing wild crazy things about it!!! 🎉🎉🎉
There’s obviously also the aspect of negative reviews actually driving engagement for your thing and making people who will like it more likely to find it, as well as alternate interpretations that may miss the point of the story you wrote but still have their own merit as art. Not to mention the effect negative reviews can have on you being able to develop your skills, but that’s less of a benefit depending on how much you agree with your critics. I know I like hearing honest opinions on my art even when I disagree with them, but hey, that’s just me.
Art is designed to be shared. Not always, private and unknown artists are just as valuable as anyone else, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with making art for your eyes only, but I find that artists (including myself!) are the most eager to share the fruits of their labor with other people, whether that be a song, a poem, a cover, a painting, a scarf, a stuffed animal, a comic or graphic novel, a rocking chair, an illustration, original characters, a sculpture, and even entire shows, movies, books, and games! Corporate bigwigs want to gatekeep art, but artists don’t! If we all had a good stable UBI, I guarantee that vast swathes of artists would gladly and happily make art for free! And I know that because of how many rich kids choose to go into art as a career! People are made for art! We are compelled to make art the same way bees are compelled to make honey! It’s just in our nature!
If you do choose to share your art and people manage to find it, it can have a far reaching echo across society across multiple generations! It inspires more art! It’s a never-ending chain reaction that started with early humans getting so smart and so good at surviving that they grew bored with the extra time and began to make things just for fun! How cool is that!? How awesome is it that we can just keep inspiring each other to make even more art forever!? How amazing is it that we never stop creating!? Does that not fill you with a sense of awe and reverence and inspiration for people!? Does that not make you so fucking excited about the art we will see in the future that may even be inspired by you!?
Sorry to go off on your post, op. I was just feeling a lot of feelings from this and wanted to share. 💙💕 Thanks for reading! 👍
Discussion ¬