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A few fandom things
1. New Dungeon Crawler Carl book comes out in just a month! I'm wondering if I should reread the previous book before it drops, because these books have about a zillion characters and I'm confident that I have forgotten most of what happened in it.
2. The thing which happened to me on Tumblr today was so weird that I'm going to describe it under the cut even though I already complained privately to friends. (Murderbot fandom is so freakin' weird. Seriously.)
I got a DM last night from someone who sent me a screenshot of our signups in Space Swap, with their "DNW Gurathin" request right above my request for various Gurathin pairings, and a message that was basically "LOL isn't this funny?"
I mean .... not really?! Making it even more awkward, this is someone I've blocked on my main Tumblr for showing up in the tags to make gratuitously mean comments about Gurathin and Gurathin fans. I have them muted on AO3 for similar reasons. However, they're not blocked on my fic sideblog where they messaged me. We do not know each other.
I decided to just leave it alone. In the morning they had messaged me AGAIN with a message saying they hoped I found it as funny as they did. Like. Get some boundaries, dude. I was on the fence about just blocking them on the sideblog vs answering back, and by the time I got around to figuring it out, I discovered that they had *deleted their entire blog.*
WTF.
Bullet dodged, I guess!
(It's interesting to find out that if someone deletes, the message stays around as a sort of ghost message as long as you still have it as a little pop-up button in the bottom right corner of the screen. But you can't reply to it, it no longer shows up in your notifs, and presumably once you banish the pop-up, it'll be gone forever.)
3. Speaking of Space Swap, they are still looking for some pinch hitters!
2. The thing which happened to me on Tumblr today was so weird that I'm going to describe it under the cut even though I already complained privately to friends. (Murderbot fandom is so freakin' weird. Seriously.)
I got a DM last night from someone who sent me a screenshot of our signups in Space Swap, with their "DNW Gurathin" request right above my request for various Gurathin pairings, and a message that was basically "LOL isn't this funny?"
I mean .... not really?! Making it even more awkward, this is someone I've blocked on my main Tumblr for showing up in the tags to make gratuitously mean comments about Gurathin and Gurathin fans. I have them muted on AO3 for similar reasons. However, they're not blocked on my fic sideblog where they messaged me. We do not know each other.
I decided to just leave it alone. In the morning they had messaged me AGAIN with a message saying they hoped I found it as funny as they did. Like. Get some boundaries, dude. I was on the fence about just blocking them on the sideblog vs answering back, and by the time I got around to figuring it out, I discovered that they had *deleted their entire blog.*
WTF.
Bullet dodged, I guess!
(It's interesting to find out that if someone deletes, the message stays around as a sort of ghost message as long as you still have it as a little pop-up button in the bottom right corner of the screen. But you can't reply to it, it no longer shows up in your notifs, and presumably once you banish the pop-up, it'll be gone forever.)
3. Speaking of Space Swap, they are still looking for some pinch hitters!
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There’s a bunch of possible options for both what set them off and what they were looking for? and even they (possibly especially they) may not know exactly what they were trying to accomplish.
Weirdly enough the kind of negging you describe as the reason you blocked them can be an unhealthy bid for attention/interaction; with a lot of fucked up brains, the drive for the thing they want (attention, social interaction) gets tangled up with the need to predictably control that interaction even if that makes it Bad (negging like that often gets you a hard binary of either people piling in with you, or reacting in outrage).
My tentative guess is that this hasn’t been working for them in one way or another; that again for whatever reason (and it can be very random) you loom on their mental landscape of the fandom; and in the midst of whatever meltdown they were having they decided to do what felt like a less hostile bid for your attention (“hah hah isn’t it funny that we are side by side on the thing even tho we’re So Different”), and then this didn’t get them anything so they tried again but then the meltdown progressed.
There’s other possible exact sequences, including that they were trying to bait you but hit a bigger hornets nest somewhere else at the same time and that one got too hot for them, and so on. But I’ll still go with: this is someone who has been making pathological bids for attention all along, who just hit a A Big Meltdown last night for whatever reason that led to acting out and deleting their blog, and in all realistic ways you were a collateral sideline of that process.
(Still counts as a bullet dodged, as you have ZERO reason to need to interact with any of that, and it would be of zero benefit. They’ll either sort themselves out or they won’t, but that ain’t your job.)
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I did poke my head into the discord this morning to see if they flounced out of fandom completely and no, they're still around and behaving normally there, so they might've just decided that Tumblr wasn't worth their time. Which, like .... fair. xD
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Indeed.
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I don’t know. So weird.
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When I was brand-new in fandom (and on the internet), I made a few blunders reaching out to folks, trying to be friendly in mistaken ways... which is not to say this was that, but that, looking at the comments here, I was reminded of that time and those incidents.
These days, of course, I'm more likely to blunder from the other side, responding deeply fannishly to someone who doesn't realize what her words evoke.
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Oh, how odd. People are....a whole thing sometimes. I hope that person is fine, but also gets a better sense of when to just leave someone be.
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Gurathin raped Murderbot
Well that's one I actually haven't seen yet. xD Though maybe that's just because I've managed to block all of the wankiest people on Tumblr by now.
But yeah, I feel like the anti-Gurathin people are really butthurt about him existing at all and people having the temerity to write fic about him. Like filter the tag and move on!! (tbf, the hardcore Gurathin/Murderbot fans can be pretty annoying too. The whole fandom really is a giant wankfest a lot of the time.)
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I looked at AO3 and the main relationship in the book series is still ART and Murderbot (with many of them probably undertagging the / but whatever) by a very wide margin, and unsurprisingly the TV show does have Murderbot/Gurathin but that's because...ART is not yet in the TV show.
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And yeah, I have encountered all of this, although that level of unhingedness does sound like that person is not well! (Someone on Tumblr made a Gurathin-free edit of the show, which takes the cake for a special level of pettiness, I guess.) Even apart from Gurathin, I had already osmosed that there was a lot of identity wank pre-TV show, which .... was not wrong.
On AO3 for the book fandom, it's still MB & ART, or MB/ART, and MB & Mensah as the dominant relationships by a mile. MB/Gurathin is actually a bit overrepresented there because a) people keep tagging their fic with both the show and books, and b) there have been some very active drabble events in MB/Gurathin fandom that really boosted the numbers on that ship with a lot of short fic. So on top of people acting like Gurathin is the worst thing imaginable, it's not even like he's in that much fic, relatively speaking. If I don't filter for Gurathin, a ton of the fic is still about the other characters - there's a hugely active part of the fandom that is really all about the bots (MB, ART, Three, etc) that's just doing its own thing, still lots of Mensah fic, etc.
It's definitely true that MB/Gurathin has been very active since the show came out, and I get the annoyance of watching your fandom get taken over by a ship you don't like, but just use tag exclude like the rest of us, jeez. (Agent Carter fandom was insanely polarized between the Peggy/Daniel and Peggy/Angie shippers, but it was so easy to avoid the pairing you didn't want! The most insidious case I've personally encountered of "what is this unwanted item doing in my nice little fandom" was when people started putting Tony Stark in all the Guardians of the Galaxy fanfic, which inevitably descended into Team Cap-bashing, but I made myself a nice little custom bookmarklet to exclude the particular combination of tags that tended to result in this, and boom, I'm back to my peaceful Tony-free existence, lol. I mean, I really like Tony, but not *there*.)
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Ah yes, double tagging, the worst. I wish there was a way to make that less of a thing. I didn't know there were lots of drabbles either, nice that there have been events.
Weirdly I find even "make an X free cut" to still be better than whatever this person was on. At least they put effort into a thing that people can watch if they just don't like X, lol. I'd say it counts slightly as a fanwork. The bar is sooo low.
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(I don't really think I've seen the reverse situation much; it's mainly fic that is DEFINITELY ship fic by any stretch of the imagination tagged with & simply because they're not doing the deed conventionally. I've read & fic in which they're having kinky BDSM sex. I've read & fic in which they're married!)
I kinda live in fear of other small book fandoms getting big like this. I know it's just filter and block...but some of the hot takes are just, whew, we don't have time to unpack all that.
I know. tbh I feel for bookverse fans who suddenly had their quiet fandom place blow up with tons of new fans and new ships and people tagging things in weird ways and so forth. I'd feel sorrier for them if the fandom hadn't been kinda wanky from the beginning as far as I can tell. (I recently saw a post on Tumblr explaining that there isn't a whole lot of Mensah/MB shipping because there WAS early on and most of those people were harassed out of fandom over the simple act of shipping at all, before the ART/MB and, later, Gurathin/MB camps made the shipping component of the fandom too big to chase out. So apparently it's always been a bit of a wankhole, but still, I can only imagine the frustration of watching a relatively small fandom blow up like that.)
"May you become popular" is definitely a curse to wish upon a small fandom.