Yeah. I think being mindful of framing and how it affects other fans' willingness to engage & how welcome they feel in a fandom space is always a good thing to consider. No one gets hurt with reasonable, straightforward statements like "I'm not into RPF" or "I generally don't read non-con in fic." And we're probably not hurting anyone by mocking the bad dye jobs on Guardian.
But the kind of negative statements that try to make sweeping, insulting conclusions about the opposition will quickly turn a small fandom space into a place where people feel attacked for subjective preferences. You can't know how grateful I was when you posted your epic novel/drama Guardian fusion, because for the longest time, a really commonly held opinion was that people who fused novel/drama were too dumb to understand that the book and drama are different if they thought those two disparate worlds could be reconciled. And I think that was just the result of a bunch of people who disliked mixing the two canons whose voices drowned out a minority who would have wanted to explore those concepts - not absolute fact.
And I think that's what it comes down to in the end. There's a kind of toxic and public negativity that's almost aimed at driving away content someone doesn't like to see, by making people too self-conscious to respond and by making it seem like opinion A is the only correct opinion. And we should be mindful that we're not doing that, even during venting.
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 02:32 am (UTC)But the kind of negative statements that try to make sweeping, insulting conclusions about the opposition will quickly turn a small fandom space into a place where people feel attacked for subjective preferences. You can't know how grateful I was when you posted your epic novel/drama Guardian fusion, because for the longest time, a really commonly held opinion was that people who fused novel/drama were too dumb to understand that the book and drama are different if they thought those two disparate worlds could be reconciled. And I think that was just the result of a bunch of people who disliked mixing the two canons whose voices drowned out a minority who would have wanted to explore those concepts - not absolute fact.
And I think that's what it comes down to in the end. There's a kind of toxic and public negativity that's almost aimed at driving away content someone doesn't like to see, by making people too self-conscious to respond and by making it seem like opinion A is the only correct opinion. And we should be mindful that we're not doing that, even during venting.