( No Title )
I keep thinking about that post about the woman who went to the Italian restaurant and got really annoyed at being given free garlic bread.
(In summary, if you didn’t see it: a group of friends went to an Italian restaurant. The owner greeted them with typical warm Italian hospitality. They got free garlic bread and free drinks. This one woman hated the whole experience, and found it pushy and inappropriate. All of her friends were baffled and so was most of tumblr.)
I think this tracks with a lot of experiences online and especially in interactions with strangers in fandom.
There are posts that go around every so often: is it OK to spam-reblog someone’s art? Is it creepy to comment on all of someone’s fic? Will people like it if I make art of their OC or their fanfic? Is it OK even to ask?
And the answer always comes back: yes, people love it when you spam-reblog their art, they love comments on their fic, they love it when people make art of something they created.
And the thing is that’s true… 99.9% of the time.
The reason people worry about this stuff in the first place is because there are people who complain about these things, who do find it pushy or creepy or whatever. They are a tiny minority but they’re out there. In some cases they have good reason, in some cases they’re just weird or misanthropic or whatever.
They are the people who don’t want free garlic bread. And just as nearly everyone else who goes to that restaurant doesn’t want the free garlic bread to stop because of that one woman who had a problem with it, nearly everyone participating in fandom online doesn’t want people to stop doing all those lovely things because of the small handful of people who’ve been grumpy about it.
Sometimes being nice will rub someone up the wrong way, and instinctively that makes us want to retreat back into our shells and stop interacting. Sometimes someone will say “stop reblogging all my art, you weirdo”. But that’s only a reason to interact differently with that one person, not with everyone. Some people just don’t like free garlic bread. But most people do.
Discussion ¬