Man, The Longer I Spend In This Fandom, The More Uncomfortable I Get With Asking-for-boundaries Culture.

Man, the longer I spend in this fandom, the more uncomfortable I get with asking-for-boundaries culture. I was just rotating that last night and trying to figure out why people popping up in TTS makes me want to snatch my headphones off my ears and enter a monastery and never go on the internet again, and I think I identified part of it?

Part of why I get so uncomfortable, I think, is that it gives the impression that the creator is responsible for what the fandom creates? They’re the arbitrator of the fandom now. Like anything they don’t specifically call out is definitely okay to do and show on main, and anything they do say is okay is definitely okay to show them, instead of there being a creator-fandom divide, and people being able to think for themselves about things and going “okay, this fic involves a creator being tortured to the point of a psychological break, maybe that one is for the fandom and don’t show it to the creator”. People asking creators (who let me remind you are frequently not old enough to drink in the states and often barely old enough to vote) to weigh in on esotera instead of thinking for themselves about what is and isn’t for public consumption. 

And like in a particularly painful stream of my memory, Tubbo was being asked questions where he’d be a jerk if he said no (asking about fictives and people with delusions that they were him, so stuff outside of their control), so of course he said yes that was within his boundaries— but how pressured into that might he feel and how actually comfortable is he with that? No idea!? But people think it’s okay to show it to him now cause it’s “within his boundaries”. Or a different time people were asking questions with clear intent to trap him/get him to say that things weren’t okay (people tattling on cuddling art on twitter), and while he said that he was okay with anything that wasn’t NSFW, the person was clearly looking for a clip to use to tell people to stop, hoping that he’d be uncomfortable, and like. AHHHH. 

Like a, how is that actually respectful to the creator? And related to the “why are you bringing this to their attention they don’t need to know,” is it actually any of the creator’s business if someone’s writing agre vent fic for an audience of fifty subs on Ao3? Like just think for yourself about if that’s okay or not and if you come down on yes, tag it so that people don’t have to see it if they don’t want to, that seems to be FAR more sane than showing up in TTS asking someone who plays video games for a living how they feel about kidfic or gore art. 

AND that’s not even getting into the issue of people asking creators to weigh in on stuff they have no idea about— half these creators are moving in such different online circles that they still think Harry Potter is pog, why do you think they’re going to have a nuanced take on pronoun discourse or trans hcs or QPPs? 

Anyways AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH TTS is of the devil and we need to stop asking creators to cross over the fandom-creator boundary.