#but I've been getting really burnt out doing just fanworks

[cerealforkart]

A first pass at some character designs because I’ve started working on a Thing!

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia! Hope you don't mind if I ask you a question... Both of the fandom I'm in I've been in for awhile and I love them but I've gotten kind of burnt out on them... I used to write fics and be really involved but I can't anymore because the fandom have started to make me hate everything about it, especially my fave ships :( I want to get involved again but I'm scared and don't know how... What did you do to help comfortable to stay writing again for rotg?

Hiya anon!

You might not like my response, so I’m going to give you two responses lol.

Response one:

I dealt with toxic shit in the RotG fandom by leaving the RotG fandom. I finished out my stories (at the time finishing ISWF was really hard, and there was covert harrassment in the tags re: what I wrote), and I unfollowed most people connected to the fandom or who were reblogging stuff to do with the fandom, and I stopped reading fanfiction connected to it, and I took like...god, about a year and a half off.

In that time I wrote two RotG stories without re-engaging with the source material or reading any RotG fics. I didn’t tag surf, I didn’t discuss meta with anyone else, and I usually knocked back requests to engage in the fandom again. The only RotG thing I’d engage on, was SAL. 

I didn’t do it to cope with the fandom, I did it because I was thoroughly over the fandom and its bullshit. There were a lot of folks at the time who wrote the majority of the early, popular fics who actually all checked out at that time (or over the following six months), and almost no one has come back. The drama was just too blech, and even a year and a half ago / two years ago, people talked about like...how ‘dead’ the fandom was. People moved onto other things.

So, this is probably not what you were expecting. As a coping mechanism, if I based any advice off that, it would be ‘leave the fandom and stop writing your fic until you want to write it again.’

When I came back to RotG it was because I really wanted to, but in order to avoid drama, I still don’t follow many RotG blogs and I don’t tag surf except on the rare occasion.

Response two:

So let me talk about another fandom that I came to mostly despise and yet still wanted to keep writing a really long fic. And that’s the Dragon Age fandom. *takes a deep breath, sighs it out.*

When I started writing Stuck on the Puzzle I began to follow fandom blogs and meta blogs and I think all in all I was following about 20. Dragon Age, at least when I was writing SotP was filled with tons of callout posts - often very aggressive and based on dogpiling and outrage culture. No one was free from this, regardless of what they were doing, and the character I was writing (Cullen Rutherford) drew a great deal of ire from people I respected. I didn’t like blind Cullen love, which often meant I was dealing with blind Cullen hatred. Or alternatively fans who sought to ‘prove’ that they could be Cullen critical to the popular, dogpiling crew of the time.

The push to guilt-trip readers for not commenting has a huge piece of heartwood in this fandom too. So there was just aggression everywhere. The readers weren’t good enough. The writers weren’t good enough or writing the right themes or doing them well enough. (It’s incredibly crushing, btw to keep writing in this environment). If writers quit it was the reader’s fault, or Tumblr’s fault. If readers quit it was the fault of the writers, or Tumblr. Basically everything was always someone else’s fault and people didn’t really own their shit. This was the place where I got introduced to like, preliminary purity and anti culture before the words ‘purity’ and ‘anti’ became words.

So here’s what I did:

- I unfollowed everyone except about 2 people in the DA fandom on Tumblr. Yes, this meant dropping a lot of people, even people I really liked. If they supported the drama, they were out. - I stopped tag surfing everything except my incredibly rarepair. - I went back through my DA tag and specifically looked at artwork and all the things I’d come to love that inspired me to write the thing in the first place. - I re-engaged with the source material.

In other words, I dropped out of fandom while still producing a fanwork. It was the best thing I decided to do. It was never really the meta and shit that inspired me the most anyway. It was always the source material and my interacting with that. And it was maybe a few pieces of fanart. Otherwise, everything came from my brain anyway, and I didn’t need anything else. I certainly didn’t need the drama, and getting the occasional awesome piece of fanart floating across my dash wasn’t worth everything else happening.

And those two/three people I kept around still posted awesome fanart and stuff from time to time anyway. Also they’re awesome people.

But yeah, I never stayed comfortable writing for RotG. In fact, for a while, I hated it. I’d been really hurt by certain things within the fandom, and the drama hit too close to home, and I decided it wasn’t worth it. It’s fine to do that by the way, you’ll find another fandom eventually (I found many), and if you’re meant to find your way back to the fandom, you will.

If you really want to stay in the fandom though, I do recommend some pretty drastic actions to stay in it. Fandom drives a lot of fanwork/content producers away sometimes.

Also, additionally, it’s just normal to kind of not want anything to do with a ship or a fandom for a while? Even if you love it? Burn out is normal, and may just signify that you need something from a fandom that your current fandom / ships aren’t giving you. Being in that space between one fandom and another kind of sucks, but it may be worth using this time to like...explore other things you love, watch some new shows and movies, read some new books, and remember the joy of what it is to engage in the source material in the first place. I wish you luck!