Speaking of AO3 authors wanting more comments and/or perception biases (I assume, since these are a perennial discussion, that someone spoke of one of them recently XD), I was reading a new WIP fic for an ongoing tv show and the author was talking in their author’s note about how much engagement had gone down in the fandom for season 2 compared to season 1. By the time I got caught up in the story and left a comment, I noticed they had dozens of comments per chapter, way more than any of the season 1 fics I’d read, and I was like, huh. Then I clicked into their profile and saw their season 1 fic had *tens of thousands* of kudos and multiple thousands of comments, and all made sense. They stumbled into BNFdom or at least virality and thought that was more or less the default state. They’re going to be chasing that high forever, poor thing; those numbers come about via alchemy and mercury being in gatorade, more than anything else.
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I see a lot of odd comments about fandom from people who hit Harry Potter at just the right moment. They’re expecting to recreate that experience where you can write largely original fic about those kids from the other school or that random classmate who is little more than a name and form a whole fandom subsection around it. Sure, I’ve seen that other times, but it was always… like… Naruto fandom or something.
And then these poor people get into a normal fandom and it’s 99% a ship or two of leads and the overall size and duration of even that is limited. “Where did [that energy/side character stans/etc.] gooo?” they cry. But they didn’t go anywhere. This is just what fandoms more typically look like.
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