“You are responsible for the minors in your fandom!!!”
No, I’m fucking not. I’m not your parent. My past-times do not automatically sign me up to act in loco parentis. If you need someone else to monitor your own content consumption online, go get mommy and/or daddy to set up a content blocker on your computer.
Louder for the minors in the back, please.
What I’m responsible for in my fandom:
1. Making a good faith effort to include relevant and informative tags and labels on my creative works.
2. Making a good faith effort to use the “author chose not to warn” rating, a “contains potentially upsetting content” note, cuts or community ratings, or otherwise indicating that there might be untagged, triggering content if I’m not up to or don’t want to tag it.
3. Being a good fandom citizen; not sending death threats or hate, not bullying people, being kind and thoughtful to those I interact with, and leaving alone things that would prompt me to act otherwise.
4. Curating my own experience; not engaging with people or material that I know will be harmful or upsetting to me, disengaging when I realize that something is harmful or upsetting to me, and using tools such as blocklists and tag filters to hide content I don’t want to see.
5. Doing the opposite of whatever the fuck bullshit is going on in tiktok at all times.
Being a good fandom citizen; not sending death threats or hate,
not bullying people, being kind and thoughtful to those I interact with,
and leaving alone things that would prompt me to act otherwise.
It is simply JUST that easy. All the fandom shit exists because people choose to behave badly and it’s too often younger ones holding fandom spaces as societal influence & activism spaces instead of a HOBBY SPACES.
If you’re old enough to search out fandom content, you are old enough to curate your own experience. We didn’t have algorisms when I was younger and that’s what you had to do
Now you have a much easier time of avoiding what you don’t want to see. It is still up to YOU provided things are tagged properly.
If you walk into a tagged work and don’t like it, it’s on YOU.
