BlackHeart Biohazards

It’s been fascinating watching my fandom’s antis see the end result of their harassment and hatred. I’ve seen how, over the course of the past two years, everyone’s begun archive-locking their fics and often stopped allowing comments entirely. Recently, after a ton of harassment for the high crime of being Jewish, a major author in our tiny fandom took one commenter’s advice and just deleted all their fanfic, leaving a note up on their profile saying they weren’t fandom’s punching bag. Cue massive whining from antis who harass people just as badly but didn’t harass this one person, wondering why someone would do something so awful to them. There’s not an ounce of self-awareness. The fact that posting fic for this fandom always involves enduring someone else’s screeching has never crossed their minds as a factor for why people are leaving fandom, abandoning works or not posting anymore. They just keep playing the victim, even when a quick search around fandom shows they’ve chewed out authors for deviating from canon, not telling them enough of the plot’s answers right away, shipping bad things, not shipping things, shipping the correct thing but not getting to it fast enough, etc.I keep waiting for the self-awareness to kick in, for a moment to happen where it hits them that they’re the only common factor in all of this. I sit back hoping they’ll snap out of this before this tiny fandom dies out entirely. Because I love this fandom, I want us to be able to have fic for it and explore it creatively, but I’m not going to turn to authors and go, “Yeah, you owe it to us to put up with this bullshit!” when the reality is that authors don’t owe you anything. I miss the fics. I don’t miss them enough to try to convince anyone to stay on this sinking ship.I miss the pre-revival era when there weren’t antis in my fandom. We were having such a good time. None of this was going on back then, and while we had less fic total, we also had so little freaking out by others that it was easy to make fandom friends, chat in the comments with each other, etc. Now it’s all fucked and I don’t know if it’s possible to unfuck it.